Zinc on your cabinet?

[atog]

I have been getting depressed lately about how slow all the games are starting to run on my cab.  The pc in there is an Athlon 2000 or so, so it isn't horrible, but nowadays to run anything you about have to have a p4 3.2.  Someone said Zinc takes more advantage of hardware acceleration, so I downloaded it and fooled with it a bit last night.

It looks like a great emulator, but I ran into a couple issues and wanted to see if you guys had the same when you tried it on your cabinets.  

1)the pause key is internally mapped to IPAC's player 1 button 1.  - this is a bummer, I tried the keyboard configuration to try and change it, but it's somehow mapped internally.  I searched the zinc message board for a fix, but I don't think the guys there use arcade cabs, so it's not too big an issue for them.  Someone in jan 2002 reported it as a problem, and they suggested he try to download the glide drivers, but they probably wouldn't work if he used an ATI card (which I do).  I might try the glide drivers tonight just on the off chance it helps.

2)the game won't run full screen - my cab runs at 800X600 on my tv and the ATI driver I has won't even allow me to bump it down to 640X480.  I searched the zinc board again and there were a few references to a 'full screen = 1' setting in some zinc cfg file.  I will take a closer look at that when I get home tonight and see if it works for me.

So if anybody uses it on their cabs, let me know.  Did it work out of the box for you?  Do you like it?  Is it worth the trouble?  It looks pretty sweet to me, I hope I can get it running.

[ashardin]

It worked out of the box using one of the front ends (as I recall there are two, ZincGUI and another that I can't remember off the top of my head).

Included in the front end is the ability to set the controls us as HOT ROD, which is idenitical to the IPAC exect for the player two start and coin.  So set to Hot Rod, manually change those two, and you are ready to go.

If you need more help, let me know.  I'm at work right now and don't remember all I did.  I got it working, and then forgot about it, just play the games.  You need to use the front end though to get it working.

It will work MUCH better than MAME though for those games.

[Howard_Casto]

In the rendering options, there should be a disable gui keys.  That'll fix your pause problem.  

[atog]

Thank you both, putting your advice into action solved all of the problems and it is now running smoothly.

It does do some hang ups when you try to quit out, but I gather that's just the way this emulator is.

Those of you who haven't tried this in your cabinet, I think it is worth your time if you like fighting games.  They run at very high speed and I thought the Strider 2 game was worth the hassle all by itself.  Very nice looking game.

[Aceldamor]

Did they ever fix the bug with the I believe it's p2 button 3 won't map correctly?

[atog]

seemed to me that p2 button 5 was not working and I couldn't set it to match MAME.  That would be medium kick, for you SFII layout folks.  You could probably get it working by changing it to a different key in MAME and having it match that in Zinc, but I don't really want to change anything in MAME, it's all set up and working fine and I don't want to mess with it.

[Howard_Casto]

The glitch still exists.  It's promised to be fixed upon the final release of zinc.  Apparently the last version isn't too far off.