Monitor / Graphic Card problems

[stuiebluie]

Hi, I have a Nvidia Geforce 4 graphics card. Using powerstrip and jpac I am trying to transfer my computer image to a jammacabinet with an arcade monitor. When I select 640 x 480I (Arcade) the windows text is unreadable (so is the mame32 game selection) though the actual games are okay (Though a little flickery). Any ideas on what I can do. (Real Time adjustment is ticked but Composite sync is unticked - Powerstrip wont let me select it)

[wpcmame]

That is normal for low resolution monitors. The flicker comes from interlace, i.e. the monitor updates at half frequency (sort of).

You can't remove the flicker for the windows desktop but you can reduce it by:
- make everything bigger vertically, e.g. use a larger font, increase the window borders (display properties/appearance/advanced) etc.
- Reduce the contrast. e.g. make the bakground black and the font grey.

For best result you should look into a mame frontend instead of using mame32.

For the games you can remove the flicker by turning on "cleanstretch vert" for horizontal games and "cleanstretch horiz" for vertical games (or use "cleanstretch full" for all games but then some games will have the wrong proportions).

For best results you should define custom resolutions for the games.

[stuiebluie]

thanx for your help i'll try those out.

What front end would you recomend?

[wpcmame]

I use advmenu but mamewah is popular as well.

Some say advmenu is tricky to setup but that doesn't apply to the windows version. Installation works like this:

1. Put advmenu.exe in the mame directory
2. run advmenu -default
3. Edit the file advmenu.rc and change the line "display_width 1024" to "display_width 640"
4. run advmenu.