Switchres vs. Spinner/Trackball

[nilfisk]

Dear BOYAC BYOAC forum members,

I am currently setting up GroovyMame on XP32 in my Jumbo Quadro cab,
and am stuck trying to get my spinner to work. The problems are
obviously connected to SwitchRes, as I can observe the following:

1. Spinner games (e.g. Arkanoid) are working flawlessly when being
played on horizontal orientation. The spinner is reactive as expected.

2. When rotating the games (i.e. by using -autorol), the spinner gets
very laggy, even though I am using the exactly same settings (mame.ini etc.) as in 1.

3. However, once I disable switchres in the mame.ini, I can rotate the
games with the spinner fully working again (but, obviously, losing the
"perfect" resolution)

4. The "Wait Vsync", "Multithreading" and "Triplebuffer" options are
all disabled (set to 0) in the mame.ini. However, the game specific
XML autogenerated for Arkanoid shows "-vsync -hsync" as options for
the game. I can, however, not alter these, as the file is immediately
overwritten once I start mame.

I suppose I have to switch VMMAKER to generate game specific .inis to
be able to disable vsync for the spinner games? Or is there any way to
improve this with options in the mame.ini?

Any hint is appreciated!

Cheers,
Martin

[lcmgadgets]

Can't help u with your problem, just wanted to say welcome to the Buy Out Your Aunt's Company forum. 

[Calamity]

Hi nilfisk,

When you say horizontal orientation, I'm not sure if you mean:

- Vertical game rotated with monitor on horizontal position.
- Vertical game displayed unrotated on its native orientation (vertical monitor).

With GroovyMAME, you leave the rotation options in mame.ini unmodified, and select the orientation of the monitor by using the -orientation option, with its different values: horizontal/vertical/rotate/rotate_r/rotate_l. This option manages the rotation for you.

Anyway, there's a known issue with spinners and trackballs affecting current version of GM. Check this thread: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,136443.0.html

Fortunately, a fix was found and will be applied in next version.

Regarding -hsync/-vsync, you're mistaking these params that refer to sync polarities associated to a modeline, with the actual wait for vsync feature that has nothing to do with that.

The values of -waitvsync, -syncrefresh and -triplebuffer, when set to zero in mame.ini, allow GM to decide when to activate each of them, automatically, depending on each particular case.

[nilfisk]

Hello Calamity,

Thanks for your reply!

With "horizontal orientation", i am indeed referring to vertical games rotated with monitor on horizontal position. In this mode/position, spinners and trackballs work as expected. Once I rotate the screen using "-autorol", the analog controlls start to lag/stutter. However, if I set switchres to 0 and use "-autorol" again, things are smooth again. I was also using Arkanoid as a test candidate, as in the thread you mentioned.

From reading it, I understand that I can either try to recompile MAME, with the codeblock in windows_osd_interface::update(bool skip_redraw) removed/commented out, or wait for the next version of GM. I've never compiled MAME, but I think I'll give this a shot

Thanks again for your efforts, and your excellent support!

Martin

[nilfisk]

Hello,

As an update: the problem disappeared when I changed the monitor type in mame.ini from Generic CGA/15khz to "H9110" (I am indeed using a Hantarex monitor). I had done this in vmaker.ini already and therefore had the correct modelines generated, but it seems the mismatch towards Mame was causing the problem with analog controls.

Thanks again for your help!

Martin