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Issue with Windows 7 and native resolutions.
krick:
I finally got everything hooked up tonight and I had about an hour to play with it.
My system specs...
ASUS P5KPL-CM Motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E5200 Wolfdale running at 3.5 GHz
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) memory
Intel X25-V 40GB SSD (boot drive)
Western Digital "Green" 500GB HD (data drive)
Windows 7 64-bit
Hantarex Polo 25 15KHz arcade monitor
I ran my windows desktop at 640x288 and I ran the latest groovymame with -cc to generate a default ini file.
Using the stock groovymame ini settings, I tried several games with varying results...
Defender - looked and sounded great. No problems at all.
SmashTV - looked good but sound skipped a bit in places
Pacman - the sound stuttered quite a bit and the image was way too "skinny", plus it looked bad. Pixels were missing or something.
The following are two pictures of pacman running on my cabinet. The first is a fairly old picture from back when I was running my original ArcadeVGA AGP (Radeon 7000 based). I was running stock command line mame with whatever the recommended ini file "tweaks" from Ultimarc were at the time. The second is a picture from tonight. I apologize about the quality, but think you can see the differences.
The first image is admittedly a little "squashed" vertically, but with the arcade vga, I always run with the vertical height a little squished so that vertical games don't draw off the screen at the top and bottom. (see my quote from Andy @ Ultimarc at the end of this post)
Ignore the colors on the second image. I was rotating my cab while it was on, which always makes the colors get groovy for a while.
The main problems in the second image are the overly skinny image and whole strips of pixels from the vertical parts of the maze are actually missing. The text on the intro screen looks pretty bad too.
Let me know if you want any specific diagnostic output from the command line. Also, let me know if you want me to run specific games to test anything.
http://www.ultimarc.com/monfaq.html
--- Quote ---Vertical games on a horizontal monitor.
Providing the monitor is capable of displaying the resolution (rotated) then we still have a good picture. Although the scan lines are in the wrong direction, there is still a 1 to 1 correlation with the game pixels. So we can get away with this cheat usually. If you set the resolution to be exactly that of the game, with the V and H swapped, then the game will fill the screen. Now this is not exactly what you want because it will look very strange. (great on a horizontal game though). You need to deliberately introduce side borders. Easy to do: you just run at a higher horizontal resolution. Galaga runs fine at 352x288 for example. If you calculate the aspect ratio of the original game, this is pretty much the rotated equivalent of it. Bear in mind, though, that arcade monitors are designed to display approx 240 visible lines and we are asking it to display 288 lines in this mode. This means that something has to go, and what goes are the top/bottom borders, which are normally off the screen. So the picture will be taller than a 240 line picture.
--- End quote ---
bitbytebit:
run groovymame like this and post the output.log ...
groovymame -verbose -md 4 pacman > output.log
That might help see exactly what is going on, I suspect it's using keepaspect there from the width not being the correct for the aspect. That often will cause the issues your seeing if the resolution is off far enough. The first pacman picture is quite wider than normal, but most pacman resolutions are actually now days and the original is quite more skinnier than people realize. Will be able to tell more though with the output log, thanks.
krick:
I've attached a zip file containing 4 files...
First is the output log from groovymame 142, along with the default ini file generated from groovymame -cc
groovy_output.log
groovymame.ini
Second is the output log from standard command line mame 142 along with a default mame ini file modified as instructed by Andy at Ultimarc.
ultimarc_settings_output.log
mame.ini
The reason that I ran the standard mame build was to see if I could recreate the results from my old cabinet setup. Pacman looked really good pixel-wise, but sadly, there were two glaring problems... first, the image took up nearly the full width of the monitor. Second, the bottom two inches or so were completely cut off. Even more concerning, the cut off image wasn't just off the monitor, it wasn't being displayed at all. No amount of monitor adjusting could get it to display because it was just gone. In my old setup, at first the image was off the top AND bottom of the screen equally. By adjusting the vertical height on my monitor to compress the image a little, I could see it all. It doesn't seem to work that way anymore.
I may need to dig up an old build (mame 106?) and try the same experiment to see what I get. I'm not sure if MAME has changed, or the ArcadeVGA is different. Is it possible that the old ArcadeVGA supported a resolution that the new one does not?
I wish I knew where my old mame setup was. I'd like to look at the mame.ini and pacman.ini to see what settings I was using.
bitbytebit:
--- Quote from: krick on April 14, 2011, 11:25:21 pm ---I've attached a zip file containing 4 files...
First is the output log from groovymame 142, along with the default ini file generated from groovymame -cc
groovy_output.log
groovymame.ini
Second is the output log from standard command line mame 142 along with a default mame ini file modified as instructed by Andy at Ultimarc.
ultimarc_settings_output.log
mame.ini
The reason that I ran the standard mame build was to see if I could recreate the results from my old cabinet setup. Pacman looked really good pixel-wise, but sadly, there were two glaring problems... first, the image took up nearly the full width of the monitor. Second, the bottom two inches or so were completely cut off. Even more concerning, the cut off image wasn't just off the monitor, it wasn't being displayed at all. No amount of monitor adjusting could get it to display because it was just gone. In my old setup, at first the image was off the top AND bottom of the screen equally. By adjusting the vertical height on my monitor to compress the image a little, I could see it all. It doesn't seem to work that way anymore.
I may need to dig up an old build (mame 106?) and try the same experiment to see what I get. I'm not sure if MAME has changed, or the ArcadeVGA is different. Is it possible that the old ArcadeVGA supported a resolution that the new one does not?
I wish I knew where my old mame setup was. I'd like to look at the mame.ini and pacman.ini to see what settings I was using.
--- End quote ---
I'll upload a new build, 012k, and hopefully it'll fix the issue. I think I need to only set keep aspect when the resolution width turns out wider than the original, not also when it's smaller. This hopefully will make things so that everything is just good and works, better than what your seeing currently. Technically the resolution is not *perfect* being 384x288, since pacman really should have 400x288, but then again this is just a fact of life for the ArcadeVGA and won't be so bad actually I'm guessing since it's just 16 pixels wider than it should be.
krick:
--- Quote from: bitbytebit on April 14, 2011, 11:36:05 pm ---
I'll upload a new build, 012k, and hopefully it'll fix the issue.
--- End quote ---
Very cool. I'll check it out tomorrow night after work. I also want to try some more games with strange resolutions. Any recommended "problem" games?
I have a few questions...
1) Should I be generating a groovymame.ini? After examining the log file in more detail, I see that the program is generating it's own settings. Wouldn't the settings in the ini file override that and screw stuff up?
2) How does groovymame know that I have an ArcadeVGA? Also, how does it know what resolutions the ArcadeVGA supports, is it determined dynamically from the driver, or is there some sort of hard-coded list within groovymame itself?
3) I noticed that groovymame's output said that it's using "Using DirectDraw 7". Is there a 64-bit version of DirectX 9 that I need to install on my computer? I'm new to Windows 7, so I could be screwing stuff up.
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