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Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: melarky on April 27, 2007, 12:49:46 pm

Title: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: melarky on April 27, 2007, 12:49:46 pm
I tried to search for this, but it doesn't look like the search is currently working.  I'm wondering if the double screen games (like punch-out and players choice) is emulated with mame?  I made a donkey kong cabinet from scratch a while back, and I was just wondering if it would be worth making a Punch-Out cabinet, or if the double screens aren't really emulated.

If it does work in mame, do you just need a special video card that will let you hook up 2 monitors?  How would that work?
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: 2600 on April 27, 2007, 01:01:47 pm
Soda Popsinski did exactly that.  Pretty nice, too.  Should be on the 1-3 pages of the Project Announcements

Someone else who I forget the name, but likes Ohio U a lot, made a dual screen cab as well.  His wasn't Punch-Out related.  Shouldn't be far off the 1st Project Announcements page either.

There are multiple ways of doing it depending on your requirements.
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: rockin_rick on April 27, 2007, 06:12:21 pm
I played Punch-out!! last night on my main workstation that has a dual monitor setup.  Works great.  IIRC, it needs a later verison of MAME.  I was using .112.

Rick
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: MaximRecoil on April 27, 2007, 08:16:13 pm
I tried to search for this, but it doesn't look like the search is currently working.  I'm wondering if the double screen games (like punch-out and players choice) is emulated with mame?  I made a donkey kong cabinet from scratch a while back, and I was just wondering if it would be worth making a Punch-Out cabinet, or if the double screens aren't really emulated.

If it does work in mame, do you just need a special video card that will let you hook up 2 monitors?  How would that work?

It is pretty easy to do it with a pair of PC monitors. I guess MAME officially supports it now, but even with older versions of MAME it could be done on certain dual head video cards through "vertical span" type options in your video card software.

I'm wondering if it is possible with a pair of standard resolution (CGA) arcade monitors. I would imagine that if you had a pair of old PCI video cards that can be convinced to do 15 kHz, and you used a version of MAME that supports the dual monitor thing; then that should work.

Now that the ArcadeVGA card from Ultimarc is available in PCI Express, I wonder if you could do it with two of those in a motherboard that has two PCIe video card slots, like the ones for SLI configurations and whatnot (you obviously wouldn't be using SLI mode).
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: SodaPopinksi on April 27, 2007, 08:27:29 pm
I think dual screen emulation in games have been officially supported since mame versions dating back to around June of last year, I don't know the list of games that are dual screen though, hehe I should really look into it since I made such a cab, but I have Punch-Out & Super Punchout and the Playchoice 10 games working dual screen so far.

 I think most decent dual head graphics card should output to 2 lcd's or crt monitors just fine, my older ATI Radeon 9600xt does this as does other Radeons and some Nvidia and I've also heard good things about Matrox cards too. I think the description of the graphics card will say dual monitor support, or dual-link dvi support, and have two dvi's or a dvi + vga on the back.

However, in my case I needed two graphics cards since I'm using a TV as primary and lcd monitor as secondary, and the quirky TV-Out feature of my 9600 sends the same signal to the lcd (set as a second monitor) as it does the primary tv and it was a weird frequency a monitor couldnt seem to handle.

Then after hooking up both screens and setting one to primary, one to secondary it was just a matter of making an INI folder in the main MAME directory and making a copies of my mame.ini ( learned this from HowardC) renamed to punchout.ini or whichever dual screen game and the numscreens value set to 2, so only those games utilize the 2nd monitor and everything else plays on the primary as normal.
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: Hoopz on April 27, 2007, 08:30:02 pm
Someone else who I forget the name, but likes Ohio U a lot, made a dual screen cab as well.  His wasn't Punch-Out related.  Shouldn't be far off the 1st Project Announcements page either.

Ohio State...McCoy would freak if he heard Ohio U.   ;)

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=50889.0

An outstanding project!
Title: Re: Double Screen (like Punch-Out) Emulation?
Post by: shorthair on April 27, 2007, 10:19:11 pm
Don't the play-choice basically waste a screen, or screen space, with information you don't really care about once the games starts (if ever)? The Mega-tech version of Sonic does this, too.