Easy way to run Windows with G400 and arcade monit

[Mikeman]

There's an EASY way to get things to work for guys with a G400.  You can plug the arcade monitor in output #2 of the video card, set TV-OUT to ON, CLONE mode, and click on advanced and select type:SCART-RGB.  I know the windows says only for europe but it works fine with NTSC.  This gives you a 15Khz RGB output of Windows up to 1024 X 768.  You then just run the windows version of MAME.  The pinout of the #2 output to get this to work is:

1 - RED
2 - GREEN
3 - BLUE
4 - Composite sync
5 - Ground.
12 - connect to pin 15 - This lets the G400 know that there is a TV-OUT cable attached


I wish I could have known this 2 years ago...  I used to run the system in DOS with ARCADEOS.  Now I run Windows, MAME AND Daphne on my arcade monitor.. WOOHOO!!!  Cliff hanger brings back a lot of memories!

All the above info was found in the Matrox Tech support forums..  There's a wealth of info there...

BTW there site says that this will not work with any other Matrox card i.e. G450, G550, etc.  

ONLY the G400 DH and G400 MAX dualhead is able to do this.



Mike

[MannyTC]

Can you provide some pics of what this looks like on your arcade monitor? How does windows look? At 640x480? At 800x600? Also does the G400 support hardware stretching do you know?

Thanks!

[Mikeman]

I don't know if it supports hardware stretching.  It presents an identical picture on both monitors (in Windows).  It's a little bit fuzzy at 800 X 600 but 640 X 480 is pretty clear.  The picture is a bit faded but I'm working on installing a video amp to bring the signal up to 4V (ultimarc web site sells these amps).  I can't show pics right now everything is packed I'm moving in 2 days.  Once I'm set up at my other place I'll take pics (2-3 weeks).

My biggest reason to do this was to run the laserdisc game emulator.

Mike

[MrTomcat]

How do you get round the problem that SCART csync signal levels are not the same as arcade monitor csync ?

[Mikeman]

I don't do anything....  It works fine.  The adjustments I had to do to get the right picture with no distortion is in the TV-OUT settings:
Brightness to MAX
Very low contrast

It works great!

Mike

[Dirk the Daring]

I attempted this--

I wired pins 1-5 directly across, and looped 12 back to 15. I plugged this into monitor port 2.

I then set the cable type to SCART-RGB.

The result was an image on the arcade monitor that was scrolling vertically-- and the image was parallelogram-shaped (and squished. unusuable.)

Any ideas what I screwed up?

---Mike

[tom61]

Dirk: Try adjusting the V-Hold to stop the screen from rolling, and adjusting H-Shift to fix the geometery, using the knobs of your arcade monitor.

[Dirk the Daring]

I don't seem to be able to adjust it so that it works.

Other things that might be important:

* I'm using a J-PAC, and I'm still sending the signal through there. is that a problem?

* Some sites that have diagrams for making this connection include some resistors-- coudl this be the missing piece? Or were you sucessful in getting this to work with direct connections?

--Mike

[tom61]

If you're running the output directly to the J-Pac, the sync pin 4 from the G400 is going nowhere, that pin is unused with the J-Pac. You need to route it to pin 13, 14, or both to get it to work with the J-Pac (I'm not sure how the J-Pac combines sync, so you'll have to experiment).

I wish G400 dual-heads weren't so expensive, $64.75 for a 32MB card is the best price on pricewatch. I paid around $45 for my 64MB Geforce 2 MX dual-head card (although one of the 'heads' is TV out).

[Dirk the Daring]

How frustrating. I can't find information on what it does either. And I've never had to break a combined signal back into H/V... No clue how to do it.

Hooking pin 4 (sync) up to 13 doesnt work, hooking up to 14 doesn't work, and hooking to both doesn't work. All give approximately the same display-- a parallelogram image that shakes randomly all over the screen while rolling.

It's really confusing.

I'd rather not bypass teh J-PAC if I can help it-- I like knowing I'm not going to blow my monitor by doing something totally stupid.

--Mike

[Dirk the Daring]

Bah. replying to my own post. How lame.

Seriously, one thing I forgot to mention-- I did not add the resistors as listed on the Matrox website. Did anyone who had success with this use the resisitors? And if do, was there anything bizzare about how they hooked in?

--Mie

[MrArcade]

Is you monitor new or used?  If it is used it may need a cap kit.  I have had monitors that would not "lock" and would scroll no matter what I did.  Usually a cap kit would solve this...

I have had little luck with GO7 monitors.

This info is just about mame on arcade monitors....I want to try this windows stuff too....I just thought I would share my experience with used arcade monitors.

[Dirk the Daring]

Sadly, it's a good monitor.

I'm using a dedicated MK4 system for testing before putting it in the "real thing" (a machine my fiancee would KILL me if I damaged.)

The monitor works great-- tested with many JAMMA games including MK4.

--Mike

[Dirk the Daring]

replying again! I seperated the monitor from the rest of the cabinet, and took the J-PAC out of the system.

So now I have a direct connection, as listed in the first post of this thread.

I have a better image-- but not a usable one still.

I can stop the vertical scrolling, but the image is bent, distorted,  and interlaced.

I'm really hoping to get this to work-- it'll make a lot of my life easier in the long run. But for now it is a frustration.

If it would be easier for someone to talk me through it, they can reach me at: dirktdaring on AIM.

I really appreciate the help I've already been given-- hopefully this can be resolved soon!

--Mike

[ophtho]

Dirk, Leave the JPAC in, it works with it in there or out of there.

Try playing with the brightness and contrast controls within the Matrox TV settings. As was mentioned before you need low low contrast and low low brightness (mine were about 20 contrast and 75 brightness).  Otherwise the image is messed up and either scrolling or distorted.

BTW by changing the brightness and contrast controls, you'll find the colors are really over saturated and mucked up. You can play around with them some and improve the image, but its still less than perfect.

I think that this has alot to do with the composite signal that the Matrox is sending out. Its only 0.3 V. If you can amplify this (easier said than done) to a standard 5V, I would imagine it would make no difference what the brightness or contrast control was and the image would look ALOT better.

[Dirk the Daring]

I've played with the brightness and contrast-- and you're right, it helps a lot.

I found, though experimentation, that there were many values for brightness and contracts that showed a stable image.

The image I get now is stable, but far from perfect-- it has potions of the screen shifted to one side, and the entire image is displaced on the screen (down and left)

I'm starting to wonder if this is a good path-- it's starting to look like another method might work better. But there are reports on this board that this method looks fine-- does it?

And if it takes too much mucking with the monitor itself, it may not be useful for my purposes-- where it is hooked to the cabinet with a MULTI-jamma, and sharing the cabinet with another game...

--Mike

[Lilwolf]

Ok, I don't know what you have got working... I would love to know since I have a 19" arcade monitor I want to use in a cocktail table someday.

You have windows running with a G400 as a SCART TV-out at 15hz.
You are connecting throught a JPac.

but why is the conversation going on beyond that?  It sounds like you started off saying its all working.

I would LOVE to have a working system that allowed windows without going with a 10year old trident card.

btw, can you get the VGA monitor to run also by switching between tvout and vga?

thanks

[tom61]

Lilwolf: Mikeman is the thread starter, Dirk the Daring is trying to follow in his footsteps.

And yes, according to the thread starter both VGA and TV/Arcade out work simutaniously. G400 dual head/monitor cards have two VGA out connectors. For S-video and composite they use a dongle on the second VGA port.

[Dirk the Daring]

Yes. here's an entire description of what I'm trying to do:

I have a computer with a G400 Max (Dualhead) video card.

I have an arcade game, a Multijamma, and a J-PAC.

My Goal: To have the cabinet switchable between the computer and the original arcade game with minimal modifications to the arcade game.

The restrictions:
 * Fiancee LOVES origianal game. If it ever doesn't work I'm a dead man.
 * Fiancee wants original game bootable without turning on the computer.
 * Computer is used to play a game that runs under DirectX 8.1... NOT MAME.
 * Although I'll reluctantly return to win98 and g400interlace soon (at 320x200. Windows unusable. *sigh*) I was _really_ hoping for a solution under 2000, which gives me 802.11a turbo support.

What I've tried so far:
 * G400interlace and windows 98. Makes windows unusable, and occasionally fails to work properly. When it does work, it's a beautiful screen at 320x200. Attempting to do the same thing at 640x480 interlaced makes an unbearable flickering

 * SCART custom cable above, win2k, second monitor port. Displays an unusable picture on the screen-- but at least I can tell it's windows. Helped when adjusting the brightness/contrast, but I end up with a washed out image that is so off center that the control pots can't fix them. This defeats the "Dual Game" concept I'm trying to reach above-- the Fiancee will NOT tolerate having to fudge with the controls every time we switch between games.

 * Powerstrip, win2k, primary monitor port. Doesn't display at all. I just can't find the settings for this guy. And every time I screw up I have to (practically) reinstall windows.

 * Powerstrip, win2k, secondary monitor port: Untested. I would _love_ to muck around with this, but there doesn't appear to be a way to set it up.



Did I miss any options? Did I negate the possibility of using the second port with my use model? Can I even accomplish this with what I have?

--Mike

[ophtho]

Yes. here's an entire description of what I'm trying to do:

I have a computer with a G400 Max (Dualhead) video card.

I have an arcade game, a Multijamma, and a J-PAC.

My Goal: To have the cabinet switchable between the computer and the original arcade game with minimal modifications to the arcade game.

The restrictions:
 * Fiancee LOVES origianal game. If it ever doesn't work I'm a dead man.
 * Fiancee wants original game bootable without turning on the computer.
 * Computer is used to play a game that runs under DirectX 8.1... NOT MAME.
 * Although I'll reluctantly return to win98 and g400interlace soon (at 320x200. Windows unusable. *sigh*) I was _really_ hoping for a solution under 2000, which gives me 802.11a turbo support.

What I've tried so far:
 * G400interlace and windows 98. Makes windows unusable, and occasionally fails to work properly. When it does work, it's a beautiful screen at 320x200. Attempting to do the same thing at 640x480 interlaced makes an unbearable flickering

 * SCART custom cable above, win2k, second monitor port. Displays an unusable picture on the screen-- but at least I can tell it's windows. Helped when adjusting the brightness/contrast, but I end up with a washed out image that is so off center that the control pots can't fix them. This defeats the "Dual Game" concept I'm trying to reach above-- the Fiancee will NOT tolerate having to fudge with the controls every time we switch between games.

 * Powerstrip, win2k, primary monitor port. Doesn't display at all. I just can't find the settings for this guy. And every time I screw up I have to (practically) reinstall windows.

 * Powerstrip, win2k, secondary monitor port: Untested. I would _love_ to muck around with this, but there doesn't appear to be a way to set it up.



Did I miss any options? Did I negate the possibility of using the second port with my use model? Can I even accomplish this with what I have?

--Mike

Dirk, I don't know why this isn't working for you. I have a pretty similar setup (running XP, Matrox G400 Dual Head AGP) I have a VGA cable coming out from the lower port on the G400. All lines are sent to the JPAC. I soldered a small jumper between pins 12 and 15 on the lower D15 connector, accessing these pins on the back of the matrox G400 board. I also have another soldered connection to pin 4 on that lower D15 connector which I then run to the Csync on the monitor directly. The JPAC Csync wire is cut on the JAMMA harness (this is not really a solution for you since your original JAMMA game wouldn't run too well with this wire cut.  I then installed the latest drivers for the G400 downloaded from the Matrox site, enabled the Dual Head clone in the Advanced settings for the video display (which is some weird procedure where you select Dual Head CLone but then have to click on hotkey and define a hotkey to enable Dual Head CLone).  And then I went into the TVOut settings in that same menu and lowered the brightness and contrast. And wallah, it works. I still think I need to put in an LM1881 circuit to amplify the Csync to 5 V to make the picutre look better.  I suspect if you are not getting a good picture then this is the culprit. Probably the 0.3V Csync signal isn't enough to drive your monitor very well resulting in an unusable picture.  

[tom61]

I emailed how Andy asking how to run composite sync through the J-Pac(I presume that it will be amplified).

Here is his reply:

To do this, the small chip needs to be removed from it's socket and the
composite sync connected to the H-Sync connection on the VGA connector. The
sync protection of the J-PAC will be disabled.

[ophtho]

Thanks Tom

Unfortunately, the G400 C-Sync routed through H-Sync on the JPAC does not work at all. It works connected directly to the monitor, but through the JPAC it fails. The reason for this is that the Csync from the G400 is too weak (0.3 V).  You need to amplify it first using the LM1881 circuit (see link below) and then take the output from the LM1881 circuit and stuff it through the H-Sync on the JPAC.  Then all should be golden.

I have also verified that removing the small chip works for my scan converter circuit.  I am willing to make anyone who wants one a cable from the Tview to the JPAC for $30 (parts alone are $20).  You can get the Tview, plug in the cable, try it out and if it doesn't work, send it back and I'll refund the money.   I want to know interest before I buy parts to make the cables.

So my scan converter instructions for the more adventurous are as follows:


1. Buy a Tview Micro SXGA (Tview Micro itself will not work, but Tview Micro XGA will probably work as well). Its about $150 new, but you can probably get it cheap off of ebay.

2. There are 4 dip switches on the side of the Tview. Set the configuration as follows (running from left to right).  #1 (off - down) #2 (on - up) #3 (off - down) #4 (off - down)

3. Buy a cable from me, or.....

There is a 7 pin video connector on the Tview. Looking directly at it, the pinout is as follows:

  xx     xx
x     xxx   x
x   4 7 3    x
x  2 6 5 1  x
 x            x
   x xxxx

1,2-ground  
3- red  
4 - blue  
5 - +5V  
6 - Csync  
7 - green

Pinout on the VGA in case you were wondering is

1 red
2 green
3 blue
5 ground
13 horizontal sync
14 vertical sync

with the layout of the VGA connector (look on the connector itself as they are often numbered next to the pins:

   01 02 03 04 05
06 07 08 09 10
   11 12 13 14 15
 
So the connection from the Tview to VGA is:

Tview                           VGA
  3                                  1
  7                                  2
  4                                  3
  1                                  5
Soldered Csync            13
from inside tview
(see below)

or alternatively (with amplification from a LM1881 circuit)

Tview                                                     VGA
  3                                                             1
  7                                                             2
  4                                                             3
  1                                                             5
  6 -> pin 2 of LM1881 circuit          pin 1 of LM1881-> 13
  (see below)

LM1881 circuit http://www.gamesx.com/misctech/lm1881.htm

(To power the LM1881 circuit you can use pin 5 and pin 1 off of the Svideo connector. ).

3. The Csync issue:  As per above you can get a 5V Csync from inside the Tview, or alternatively amplify the (0.3 V) Csync from the svideo connector (pin 6) on the Tview using a LM1881.

If you use the inside Csync, you need to get the scan converter open. First, undo the screw located underneath the black CE tag towards the front of the box.   Next use a screwdriver to pry in at the sides of the box towards the rear. Gently press and you will open the box without too much difficulty.  Goodbye warranty !

Next locate Pin 20 on the FS401 chip, the big one in the middle of the board. I will assume that you have turned the box so that you can read the writing on the FS401 chip rightside up such that the rear of the box (where the VGA cable comes out of is towards you and the front of the box where the buttons are are away from you). Pin 20 is just to the right of the number 8 in the word K5038 printed on the FS401 at the bottom of the chip. You can also count this out yourself as the bottom left corner of the FS401 chip where you see a dimple on the chip is pin 1, and the bottom right corner is pin 30. To help you out Pin 21 and 22 are jumped together and you can see this on the board itself. You can actually trace the Pin 20 lead over to the second row of resistors/capacitors closer to you, where there are three brown colored resistor/capacitor and a 4th one next to them colored black and labeled with the number 115. The place to solder to is the end of that 115 resistor that is closer to the FS401 and thus closer towards the front of the box.  You could solder to the FS401 directly but seems much more precarious to me. A picture of this is shown below



4. And finally, remove the small chip on the JPAC.  The Csync is 15khz so you won't destroy your arcade monitor.

5. You will have to turn the Tview off and on when you reboot the computer as initially you get a picture that is entirely readable but has the red, green, and blue all slightly staggered from one another producing a yellow picture. Turn the Tview off and on again and it fixes itself and gives a beautiful pictue that is better than what I get with the G400.

May not be the solution you are looking for, but it is a good one for people looking to run Windows Xp on their JAMMA machine. Plus you aren't stuck using an old video card (the cab with the Tview in it is running a Gforce Ti 200 in it so I can play wolfenstein.

Hope that helps

[chrisdanford]

Hi Ophtho.
 
Would you be able to build me a Tview -> JPAC cable?  I currently have a Averkey Imicro and a LM1881 circuit, but I'm having a heck of a time anything to show up.  I'm very frustrated and would like to pay you $50 for a cable if you're sure that it will work :-)
 
If you're busy or are no longer interested in building a cable, I totally understand.

[AlanS17]

Well I have a G400 but it's not a dual head. I got it to work with no conversion at all by using PowerStrip and a J-Pac. Worked rather beautifully.

But for all the trouble and video processing involved just to get a stable picture... my next machine will use a VGA arcade monitor for sure.

[StLouisRod]

Why go through all this trouble?  Just run the G400Interlace.exe from Windows to set a 640x480 mode at 15.75khz frequency.  I was running a G400 for a long time... beautiful picture, and fairly good 3D performance.  However, some 3D games conflicted with the interlace utility at times, so I replaced the G400 with a Trident Blade T64, which is nearly as nice.  And it's BLADE15 interlace driver is more stable and plays better with games..