Benefits of Advmame with AVGA/D9200 combo?

[Santoro]

I recently upgraded my DOS/Advancemame/advmenu/ATI Card setup to a Win/Mame/Mamewah/ArcadeVGA setup and so far I am pretty happy.  I have a D9200.  I read this somewhere elso on the forum:

It's not just the scanline size that you need to consider.  All horizontal resolutions other than 320 are lossy on a setup running at 640x480.  Basically,
ArcadeVGA will allow you to perfectly emulate
240 line games
480 line games

AdvanceMAME (on a supported card) will allow you to perfectly emulate
192 - 240 line games
384 - 416 line games
480 line games

Does this mean that the only way to get the best performance from my setup is to use Advancemame?   I am having issues getting verticals to run properly (they get cut off ont he top and bottom.)

thanks

[wpcmame]

Does this mean that the only way to get the best performance from my setup is to use Advancemame?

No.

Advmame only works with SDL in windows. This means that advmame can only use the resolutions available to windows which in your case are the ones on the AVGA card. Only reason to use advmame (instead of regular mame) in windows is that it is more flexible when it comes to stretching.

I am having issues getting verticals to run properly (they get cut off ont he top and bottom.)
thanks

That is a fundamental property of arcade monitors and is independent of graphic card and software.

If you don't want to use stretch on vertical games, the only solution is to run them at another sync rate.
i.e. horizontal games runs on 15KHz and vertical games on 31KHz.
Unfortunatly the AVGA card only have a few >480 line modes so vertical games will not get the correct aspect ratio with that setup. You might be able to create some better modes with powerstrip but I am unsure if powerstrip works with AVGA.

[Santoro]

So a clarifying quesion...

On my old 'crappy' DOS config, everything was perfect.  I seems that I have effectively downgraded when migrating to the AVGA and windows..is that true?   Boy that would suck because I really like Mamewah.


Thanks for the help..

[Santoro]

Another Q:the ArcadeVGA I am using shows up as a supported card for Win-Advmame.  It still can't creade modes other than what Windoze knows?

[whammoed]

Another Q:the ArcadeVGA I am using shows up as a supported card for Win-Advmame.  It still can't creade modes other than what Windoze knows?

Yes, within windows.  It should be useable though in Linux or dos just like a regular radeon.

[Santoro]

So I am still confused.  From the AVGA FAQ at Ultimarc:

Can I use Advanced MAME?
The ArcadeVGA card is designed to avoid having to use Advanced MAME. But it can be used. Advanced MAME controls the VGA card's registers directly.so needs to be configured for an arcade monitor as it will over-ride the card's built-in modes. The card gives the advantage of lower dot-clock limit than a standard card, so allows very low resolutions to be configured.

He doesn't say that this is true only for DOS.... this sure sounds to me like I can still eek out some other modes by switcing to Advancemame.  Anyone else got any insight here?

[whammoed]

from the advmame docs regarding supported cards in windows:

The `svgawin' driver is a subset of the Linux SVGALIB library.
This driver is experimental. At present it's only tested on Windows 2000 with a GeForce 2 board. It's supposed to work with GeForge boards, it may not work with all the other boards.

It is one of the reasons I run Linux.

[2600]

Why don't we see what your problems with the vertical games are in regular MAME with the AVGA and D9200 first and see if we can fix those.  Many people have that setup and don't have a problem.

Post a couple of particular problems.

[elvis]

Vertical games are designed to run at vertical orientation.  Running them on horizontally oriented monitors will always result in some sort of stretching, cropping or blitting effect that won't look authentic.

And I'm onside with whammoed on this.  I use AdvanceMAME with SVGALib under Linux to generate correct modelines and resolutions.

[wpcmame]

Vertical games are designed to run at vertical orientation.  Running them on horizontally oriented monitors will always result in some sort of stretching, cropping or blitting effect that won't look authentic.

Not for me. No vertical scanlines and wrong refreshrate but otherwise pixel perfect and correct aspect ratio.

[Santoro]

Yeah, I had no issues with the Advmame/DOS/ATI card setup for 3 years. Everything just worked. 

Anyway when I get some time I will post the specifics and see what the group can come up with. I may also try to run Advmame to see what happens. I still have a supsicion it will overrride Windows' modes with its own better ones.

[tetsu96]

Yeah, I had no issues with the Advmame/DOS/ATI card setup for 3 years. Everything just worked. 

Anyway when I get some time I will post the specifics and see what the group can come up with. I may also try to run Advmame to see what happens. I still have a supsicion it will overrride Windows' modes with its own better ones.

That's interesting that so many people run Advmame with the ATI card.  It seems to me like overkill as both are supposed to create those perfect video modes.

I run Advmame in XP with NVidia cards, and that seems to do a good job with creating and running @ the correct refresh / resolutions.  SVGAWIN, as documented earlier in the thread, works fine in XP though it's listed as "experimental".

One thing that I've noticed is that SVGAWIN (and this is also true of SVBEWIN when using DOS inside Win98) seems very sensitive to running video drivers - the 88.xx forceware drivers cause it not to work at all and 30.xx-60.xx detonators (don't remember 70.xx tests) cause the games to display fine @ native resolution or doubled with scanlines but seem to cause video corruption when magnifying the image (regardless of effect processing).  I use the 28.83 drivers on my Geforce2 and 3 and they can do everything I can throw at them, but I'm stuck with the 30.xx drivers when using the fx5950 card. Still pixel perfect, but pure black scanlines vs rgb effect generated ones is a bit harsh when sitting close to the monitor.

[elvis]

.

Vertical games are designed to run at vertical orientation.  Running them on horizontally oriented monitors will always result in some sort of stretching, cropping or blitting effect that won't look authentic.

Not for me. No vertical scanlines and wrong refreshrate but otherwise pixel perfect and correct aspect ratio.

If you consider that to be "perfect", then that's cool.  I'm a bit more picky.

[wpcmame]

If you consider that to be "perfect", then that's cool.  I'm a bit more picky.

Not perfect but doesn't "result in some sort of stretching, cropping or blitting effect"