How to target the VGA output on a laptop?

[Paradroid]

G'day,

Been a while since I posted here but I'm still reading everyday!

Fun year for me: have just completed a road trip of New Zealand and then I'm off to the "Heart of SCART" (that's Berlin to normal people) for 3 months in June. ebay.de, here I come!

In the meantime I'm staying with my girlfriend's parents in Dunedin. That means all the Grundigs, Loewes and B&Os are in storage in Aussie. Fortunately, I picked up a nice little 34cm Thomson on my second day in NZ! Found in it an op shop. Too cool! Carted it around in a camper van for 10 days and now it's all setup and working beautifully.

I have it running with my Lenovo laptop using the VGA out. I have been using the Catalyst Control Center to swap my primary display before running GroovyMAME. I like to avoid having to do this though so I'm wondering if there is a way to tell GroovyMAME to output through the VGA port instead of directing to the in built LCD? It would save fiddling around with CCC each time I want to play a game.

Is this controlled by the "connector" option or something else? I've never tried something like this before...

Cheers!

[Yeltsew7]

What model laptop? I know on my T510 with the Nvidia card, you can only show it on the primary display, not sure about with ATI cards.

[Paradroid]

It's a Lenovo W500 ThinkPad with an ATI Mobility FireGL V5700.

I haven't got Calamity's CRT EMU driver installed but VMMaker and GroovyMAME seem to work fine with it. Low dot clocks don't work but that's easily overcome with horizontal doubling.

Hopefully there is a way to target the VGA port but even if not it's awesome having a mobile setup with a little 34cm TV. Arcade games wherever I go.

[Calamity]

Hi Paradroid!

Well, it's quite easy to target both outputs independently without the need of the Catalyst bloatware. You only need to enable each output from the usual screen properties dialog->extend desktop. Notice that maybe you need to have the TV connected to the vga so it's detected beforehand otherwise these options will be grayed out. Then, from MAME, you need to specify the right output, using the option -screen, like this:

groovymame.exe romname -screen \\.\DISPLAY1

or

groovymame.exe romname -screen \\.\DISPLAY2

Maybe the \\.\DISPLAY numbers are different in your system. If you want to know the exact numbers of your outputs, launch GM with the -v param and it will show the names somewhere inside the log.

Have fun in Berlin!

[Calamity]

BTW how will you connect the laptop, with an umsa or a normal VGA-SCART cable? And how will you get the power from? Since long I've thought about having a portable 15 kHz testing laptop in the boot of my car.

[Paradroid]

groovymame.exe romname -screen \\.\DISPLAY2

Ah, perfect! That works exactly as I was hoping. Danke schön!

I'll report back soon with some pictures of my mobile setup...