It always created that big surface I'm pretty sure, but just puts it inside the smaller window of it I guess. Actually in Linux at least it now even does the mame settings stuff the smaller screen size too, originally it didn't do that and you had large settings screens that could barely be used at all. Although I don't know if the Windows OSD somehow does things different there than SDL does, I was able to move all the frogger/galaxian hack stuff into the emu side so it is independent now of the OSD chosen. I stuffed it all in the resize size calculation functions in the emu/render.c file. So every calculation uses it, but in Windows it might have some other place I guess.
Yes, I've just tested frogger and is working great here, I've attached my logs...
I just tried frogger with dotclock set to 7.5 and same thing its off screen. I have attached logs again.
Also I found setting in mame.ini to disable nag screen.
Is there a way to block resolutions higher then 800x600 the same way you have minimum resolutions?
Or maybe come up with a way to remove resolutions from the registry like soft15khz does. I really dont need about 30-40 modes, this in turn can allow me to run Hyperspin.
Try frogger with the monitor type set to cga, instead of d9800. I get a feeling it's possibly a horizontal frequency range issue. Not all d9800 monitors are exactly the same tuning, basically Wells Gardner sets up the ranges in the factory and they can be off just slightly I guess. So I am thinking that yours can't handle the 18khz area very well, mine can't handle the 20khz area, so it's at least near and mine does a similar thing in the 20khz area yours is doing around 18khz. It's a guess at least, does pacman have issues there? Try to find any other games that trigger the issue and see in the verbose output if what the khz is for them. Definitely something I didn't fully expect, but the black hole area as I call it in the khz range may just be slightly different for every d9800. If your able, take the MonitorLimits lines for the d9800 (from the log outputs, there's 4-5 of them) and use the groovymame -monitor_specs0 (there's 0-6 possible ones, similar to how the -resolution0 cmd line options work) options to put each of the ranges in manually. Then you can change the ranges around, for the khz, and possibly move the 'blackhole' range.
15250.00-18000.00,40.00-80.00,2.187,4.688,6.719,0.190,0.191,1.018,0,0,288.0,448
18001.00-19000.00,40.00-80.00,2.187,4.688,6.719,0.140,0.191,0.950,0,0,288.0,448
20501.00-29000.00,40.00-80.00,2.910,3.000,4.440,0.451,0.164,1.048,0,0,480.0,768
29001.00-32000.00,40.00-80.00,0.636,3.813,1.906,0.318,0.064,1.048,0,0,576.0,768
32001.00-34000.00,40.00-80.00,0.636,3.813,1.906,0.020,0.106,0.607,0,0,576.0,768
34001.00-38000.00,40.00-80.00,1.000,3.200,2.200,0.020,0.106,0.607,0,0,600.0,768
Basically those are them above, try changing or removign the 18001.00 one, even then after that lowering the 15250.00-18000.00 one to use 15250.00-17000.00 in the line.
So in mame, you'd use...
-monitor_specs0 15250.00-17000.00,40.00-80.00,2.187,4.688,6.719,0.190,0.191,1.018,0,0,288.0,448 -monitor_specs1 20501.00-29000.00,40.00-80.00,2.910,3.000,4.440,0.451,0.164,1.048,0,0,480.0,768 -monitor_specs2 29001.00-32000.00,40.00-80.00,0.636,3.813,1.906,0.318,0.064,1.048,0,0,576.0,768 -monitor_specs3 32001.00-34000.00,40.00-80.00,0.636,3.813,1.906,0.020,0.106,0.607,0,0,576.0,768 -monitor_specs4 34001.00-38000.00,40.00-80.00,1.000,3.200,2.200,0.020,0.106,0.607,0,0,600.0,768
That command line, converting it to mame.ini syntax, might be interesting. Possibly you can squeeze down the range to only around 18khz and include 20khz there too, would be interesting to see exactly what your d9800 can do and compare it to mine. Mine can't go above 38khz without getting weird, maybe yours can go all the way to 40khz, and the range is about 2khz off of mine (and mine can go below 15khz, to 14.9 actually, but I don't do that since it just seems wrong, but I think it can handle it, like it's shifted down and yours might not be).