Software Support > GroovyMAME

H9110 issues

(1/4) > >>

Podbod:
Hey guys!

So I finally got my shiny new jpac/radeon4xxx combo working in my cab and before hooking up the monitor I did all the driver set up on a normal CRT. All good, modelines found and saved etc.

Tried to boot on the arcade monitor but after a vary fast rolling dos screen it went black. (trying to set 800*600 I guess, dunno why the jpac didn't sort that out). Anyway, rebooted on the crt. Used the arcadeosd tool and selected 640*480i. Crt turns off, switch over to Jpac and rolling screen. Fiddle with screen controls and screen comes into focus.

Now this is where the issues start
640*480i is extremely flickery. About a cm of vertical flicker. Setting it as the desktop mode drops me to a very washed out (as if brightness was boosted 300%) XP desktop with the startbar missing and diagonal lines along the screen (as if the horizonal sync was out, only it isnt)
I've never run this monitor at this res before (My old setup was arcadevga mark 1 and that did 640*288i or something in windows. Maybe it just can't do it? Maybe my monitor is so old that its just unable to cope with this res?

I flicked through various other modes. Quite a few had rolling screens but then I expect the different resolutions to cause this with their different v-hz rates. However one thing is clear. Anything above 280ish vertical lines has this crazy flicker.

I tried using a lower res as my desktop res but windows was still messed up (Zsnes seemed fine tho, I'd have tried mame but when I went to try that I realised I'd left my rom drive in London, 80miles away! Argh!). Often I'd only get a partial screen. Is there some limit in windows that prevents anything below 640*480p?

Long term it might not be an issue. I can remove the duff modes and set up GameEx and all the emulators to use lower resolutions. Then just auto boot into GameEx bypassing windows entirely.

However, if anyone has any advice on things I might be able to do to improve the situation it'd be much appreciated


TLDR : Resolutions above 280ish vertical lines have horrible flicker. Windows is bleached out and missing some of the screen. At lower resolutions windows is still visibly broken and mostly unusable. Anyone got any advice? Is my 9110 just too old? Or is there possibly some other issue?


Cheers for any advice

Pod

Calamity:
Hi Podbod,

I've got two Hantarex MTC 9110 monitors and they're great. There're several issues going on there:

- Wash up colours. Fix this the first. I guess you've just installed your new j-pac and you didn't have this problem before. The j-pac has a built-in video amplifier, which is necessary to adapt vga signals to the standard used by arcade monitors. However, in my experience, I always needed to correct the contrast pot in the monitor's chassis when switching from a pcb source to vga+jpac. Sometimes you also need to fix the color pots on the monitor neck board.

- Rolling screen happens when your vertical frequency pot needs adjustment. This one is on the remote board. Go into Arcade_OSD and set a mode with a 60 Hz refresh. Adjust vfreq pot to get a stable picture. Then set a mode with the lowest refresh available, 50 Hz or so. Re-adjust. You need to find the sweet spot where both frequencies are stable. Then you'll be covering the whole useful range.

- You may also need to adjust the horizontal frequency pot. Set one of the modes with highest horizontal frequency, around 16.7 KHz, those will be the  256-288 lines tall modes. Adjust until you get a stable picture. Then go back to your desktop mode and make sure it's still on sync.

- Forget about getting a stable picture during boot. J-pac can't resolve some of the high frequency modes built in the modern video cards.

- Interlaced modes are what they are, they flicker a lot. However the flicker is more annoying on some monitors than others. Some video cards seem to produce nicer interlaced modes than others, for some reason. This is something you have to live with.

Podbod:
Ah right. I'd played with the normal controls to adjust Hfreq, VFreq but hadn't touched any of the others. (I didnt even know some of them existed).
I'll play with them tomorrow and see if I can improve the picture. As mentioned I did manage to get a good picture at the lower resolutions but maybe its a cliff style situation? A tiny bit over and the picture drastically fails? (clue might be that the limited colour arcadeosd screen at 640*480 isn't washed out but the desktop is?)
If I cant get it any better I'll take some photos/videos

Shame about the interlaced modes. I was able to run windows on the old arcadevga which I think was some special interlaced mode that was essentially 640 *288 or something? That didnt flicker anywhere near as much but perhaps that the same thing as the washed out stuff and a little fiddle will improve it. Just to clarify. This isn't a shimmer style flicker. It literally looks like the image is moving up and down about 1cm every frame.

Cheers for the info.

Pod

Podbod:
Played with it some more this morning. Contrast and brightness altered as suggested and the wash out is gone! Horray.
But the flicker is still there (sometimes) and now that I can see clearly I have identified further issues.

The screen often looks like its rolled partly over as if its started drawing the screen from about 1/5 down. Then theres a small gap and then it draws the first 1/5 at the bottom of the monitor. When selecting a resolution it'll often roll the picture vertically once and settle like this.
Each resolution is slightly different (sometimes its half of the screen!) and it also changes depending on how much information is on the screen. Opening control panel or being on a arcadeosd color pallette screen often results in it being 100% correct for instance. Ther vertical flicker explained in my earlier posts at 640*480 is actually only present when in the arcadeOSD screen. Again, could be a symptom of how much work its having to do?

I know you said ignore dos modes but if it helps the boot screen is now split down the center (as I expected the jpac to do with a 31khz mode) but the top half is diagonal where as the bottom half seems to be fine!

Do you think this is likely to be a capacitor issue? I've been reading around and replacing them seems to be the first step people make but I'm a little reluctant to play with all the high voltage stuff!!

Cheers for any further help

Pod

P.s I'm also having trouble getting windows to boot into the correct resolution. If I boot with the arcade monitor plugged in it gets past dos and then the jpac drops sync and never recovers. Swapping in a pc crt doesnt display anything either. If I boot with the pc crt plugged in I get nothing as expected but if I swap to the arcade monitor at this point it displays ok. I assume its some kind of monitor auto detection thing windows is trying to do but I've changed the monitor to default (away from pnp) and it hasn't made any difference. Any ideas on this one too? Cheers again

Calamity:

--- Quote from: Podbod on September 07, 2012, 06:22:23 am ---P.s I'm also having trouble getting windows to boot into the correct resolution. If I boot with the arcade monitor plugged in it gets past dos and then the jpac drops sync and never recovers. Swapping in a pc crt doesnt display anything either. If I boot with the pc crt plugged in I get nothing as expected but if I swap to the arcade monitor at this point it displays ok. I assume its some kind of monitor auto detection thing windows is trying to do but I've changed the monitor to default (away from pnp) and it hasn't made any difference. Any ideas on this one too? Cheers again

--- End quote ---

You *need* to use the dvi output with the HD 4xxx cards, by means of a dvi-vga adapter. This will fix this issue.

As for the vertical inestability you're describing, that's definitely something you wouldn't expect from a properly working monitor. There's something odd with vertical circuits. I have never repaired a monitor so I can't be of much help here but there're plenty of skilled people in this forum that will help. However before messing with that I would try using some contact cleaner on the remote board pots.

The boot screens you describe are the best you can get with the HD 4xxxx, trust me on this.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page