have you installed an arcadevga 3000 or 5000 and do you have it working 100%?

[happyfunball]

I have a couple of these cards I got, a 3000 and a 5000, and had been sitting on them a while. i finally installed the 5000 and have it mostly set up according to all the instructions. I ran the app to generate all the ini files for the various resolutions of the games and put them in a directory /ini

however, the games are coming in generally squashed so either its not seeing the ini files or something else is wrong. I'm still troubleshooting and I've talked with andy about it cause initally there was some confusion cause I thought I'd ordered a 3000 and he put one of the first 5000's in the box and I didn't realize it at first.

its outputting to the monitor and windows looks ok. but the games don't.

if you've done this and had any similar issues or pitfalls I'd like to hear them.

I did a search on the forums but didn't turn up anything particularly relevant.

[happyfunball]

I'm not sure this belongs in the monitor forum. is a mame configuration issue. the monitor itself works fine, its doing what it supposed to be doing.

[williamavished]

I  allso had ARCADE VGA 3000. but i sold it.  I'm really not satisfied with it ... it has a lot of problems. And there is no solutions for it

You might try this forum  http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=ultimarc

[happyfunball]

yea, looked there, didn't see much of use.

[happyfunball]

rather than hijack the other thread I'll post my findings here.

contents of my video ini portion:

#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     ddraw
numscreens                1
window                    0
maximize                  1
keepaspect                1
unevenstretch             1
prescale                  1
waitvsync                 0
syncrefresh               0
menu                      0

#
# DIRECTDRAW-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
#
hwstretch                 0



#
# PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS
#
screen                    auto
aspect                    auto
resolution                auto
view                      auto
screen0                   auto
aspect0                   auto
resolution0               auto
view0                     auto
screen1                   auto
aspect1                   auto
resolution1               auto
view1                     auto
screen2                   auto
aspect2                   auto
resolution2               auto
view2                     auto
screen3                   auto
aspect3                   auto
resolution3               auto
view3                     auto

#
# FULL SCREEN OPTIONS
#
triplebuffer              0
switchres                 1


__________

as seen in the various screenshots there are multiple issues. some games look just fine.
rallyx is sort of split like the rolling just stopped midroll.

the front end menu screen looks fine.

popeye is scretched and squashed

r-type, reactor, and roadblasters all come in pretty much loking like they should.

robocop and rush n' attack look ok, aspect wise, but seem too small and square for the screen. and you can see from the screenshots its scanning the whole screen. maybe this is normal. neither of those are games I play with any frequency.

[happyfunball]

also ran rallyx from the command line with the correct resolution and had the exact same result

[Dawgz Rule]

I checked my robocop and rush n' attack and they are filling the full screen with my arcadevga.  Post your ini for one or both of these and we can compare differences.

[happyfunball]

these are the files generated by arcadegares

robocop:

## robocopu ##

-screen0 \\.\DISPLAY1
-view0 standard
-switchres
-nohwstretch
-nobezel
-nobackdrop
-resolution 256x240
-resolution0 256x240@0


rush n attack

## rushatck ##

-screen0 \\.\DISPLAY1
-view0 standard
-switchres
-nohwstretch
-nobezel
-nobackdrop
-resolution 240x240
-resolution0 240x240@0

[Dawgz Rule]

They look good to me.  Mine don't have the -view0 standard line but I think that is because I am running an older version of mame.    Have you reached out to Andy?

[happyfunball]

I did up until when I posted. I figured I'd get some opinions to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.

I'll point him to this thread and see if he has any more suggestions or A-HA! solutions.

I was hoping I just did something dumb that was easily fixed. thats usually the ideal solution.

[AndyWarne]

I  allso had ARCADE VGA 3000. but i sold it.  I'm really not satisfied with it ... it has a lot of problems. And there is no solutions for it

What kind of problems did you have? Did you contact me about the problems?

The point about the card is it creates approx 30 resolutions available within Windows. What Mame does with these resolutions is up to Mame. The first thing to do is test each of the 30 resolutions using the Galaga icon on the taskbar, and make sure they all pretty much fit the screen. They wont be exact but there should be minimal size differences. The main size differences will be between low vertical resolutions, eg 240 lines, and the high eg 288. Although these are tweaked as much as possible to be the same, by varying the vertical refresh rate from 50 to 60 (remaining within the spec of a standard res monitor), the fact is, a 240 line screen will always be less tall than a 288 line screen, its a physical fact which cant be overcome.

So, if you check all the resolutions, observe the "fit" of each on the screen, thats what should happen in Mame. There are limitations.

Then, try running suspect games at different resolutions, manually, to check that you are in fact using the correct one. For horizontals, this means running at the resolution which is equal or greater than the game itself, or if there is a slightly lower (within a few lines) one, try that.

Verticals on a horizontal monitor cant be run at their native resolutions at all (obviously) so all will be a compromise. Most games can be run at one of the 352 x XXX resolutions which are intended for these games, to add side borders. Some games which are very tall will extend off the top/bottom of the screen as the resolutions of XXX x 288 etc have no top/bottom borders so as to keep within the vertical refresh rate. These are where the vert/horiz compromise is "worst". There are 2 options for these games, either live with the very top/bottom cut off, or run with D3D or stretch enabled at an arbitrary base resolution.

The only other issue to bear in mind affects Windows 7 and later, and is a bug in DirectDraw which means Windows cant set up the DDraw frame if it has to switch between an interlaced (eg 640 X 480) and non-interlaced (all res of 288 lines or less), resolution. There are workarounds for this but (as I have been saying for years) the Mame devs should move to D3D for use of native resolutions. Mame has never supported this for some unknown reason.

[Dawgz Rule]

Andy, thank you for giving some insight.  Also, thank you for the quick turnaround on my recent order for my Time Soldiers build. 

Happy, perhaps what you are seeing is Windows 7 related as Andy stated?  Besides the fact I am running an older version of mame (.141u), I also run WinXP SP3. 

[happyfunball]

looks like I'll have to step through the resolutions and make a note of which ones are wonky.

its not the win7 bug with interlacing cause i read that in the setup instructions and have avoided setting the desktop to it.

[Dawgz Rule]

Keep us posted as to what you find.  Definitely an interesting issue and I would be interested in what the resolution is.

[happyfunball]

definitely. I hate threads where people don't follow up with the fix. its irritating if you run across the same thing and you never know what resolved it.

might be a couple days, I may not have time to tinker with it tonight or tomorrow night.

[happyfunball]

I had started testing the individual resolutions, but the drive my installation was on just took a dump and I lost everything.
my backup disk died a couple weeks ago and I hadn't gotten to backing it up again.

so its going to be a week or two until I can get back to this point.

[telengard]

I recently purchased a 5000 and could not get it working w/ Windows and my WG D9200 even after spending nearly a month working on it w/ Andy.  However, the card works *flawlessly* under Linux using GroovyMame, including being able to read the EFI/POST stuff while booting.