New MAME dual monitor support... Dual ArcadeVGA cards?....

[krick]

As you probably know, Aaron's writing a new renderer for MAME so that it can properly support multiple monitors.

Since you cannot use two AGP ArcadeVGA cards at the same time, there's no way to take advantage of this feature with multiple arcade monitors.

However, I recently found guy on a german arcade emulator board that somehow managed to hack the ArcadeVGA BIOS onto an off the shelf PCI Radeon 9200SE card.  Yes, you read that right, PCI, not AGP.

Here's the page (translated via google translator)...
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Farcadezentrum.info%2Fforum%2Fthread.php%3Fpostid%3D12650&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

In the past, Andy (and others in this forum) have said that there is no market for a PCI ArcadeVGA card.  I think that the new MAME multi-monitor support has just created one.

[Howard_Casto]

Well I've found a pci video card that is extremely cheap and with powerstrip's help it can display arcade frequencies no problem. 

The matrox mystique 64bit pci card. 

They cost around 1$ plus shipping on ebay and someone is always selling them. 

While you might need a fast video card for your primary display, your secondary display can be a pos card.  Punch-out and arm-wrestling are the only dual monitor games that come to mind and they are very puny games graphically.  (Except xmen 6p, which isn't practical due to control limitations and a few wierd psychio games.)  Also I'm not sure if this is still true, but back in the day windows really only used hardware acceleration for the primary display (unless the card is a dual head). 


I can't say enough about the mystique.  It's a real piece of crap for anything else, but if you want to run arcade frequencies with as little powerstrip tweaking as possible, you can't beat it for the price.