at the point of giving up...FIXED!!

[Gaston77]

Hello,

I don't know what to do anymore. I have tried everything I could, but my arcadecab seems dead in the water....

For a long time now I have been trying to figure out what is wrong. This is my last try at getting an answer. I'll make it thorough.

I have an ASUS Motherboard with an ArcadeVGA card. I also have a new D9200 which I have already fried because I fed it the wrong refresh rate. That is behind me now. Mame and Mamewah hold no secrets anymore either. I started up in SAFE MODE  with F8 and installed the Arcade VGA as my main driver. It's the newer RADEON 9250 model. In the configuration screen there are two adapters showing up;

RADEON 9250 Secondary and
ULTIMARC VGA which is what I use.

After installing the Tri-sync utility I get a good, clean picture 640*480*60Hz on my D9200. Or at least, I used to. I will get to that later.  When I look at supported modes (Display options-> advanced) it also shows the modes & refresh rates which are not supported by the D920 such as 1024*840 at 200Mhz etc. To make sure nobody accidentally selects any of these modes, I have used the refreshforce utility to delete these modes. So that I now have all 640*480 *60Hz modes and below. According to Refreshforce the other modes cannot be used anymore, but if I go to display options again, the 1024 etc modes are STILL there.

To make matters worse, I deleted all utilities I was working with and decided to reinstall the AVGA. I have shut off the RADEON 9250 in my profile so that only the Ultimarc adapter would be active. Now, when I restart I get a 640*288 *60Hz screen. When I want to adjust it, the display options screen won't let me anymore! In fact, I cannot even get to the part where I can switch resolution since the screen is too small!

Another strange thing is that when I did have the 640*480*60Hz mode, the screen adapter could not draw anything 3D according to the "screen saver options"....you know the floating windows flag etc. Sometimes it would, other times it would not. If I try to change the resolution, the entire system crashes OR the PC reboots.

I have used the powerstrip tool which causes some confusion. I try to create a D9200 specific driver type file which seems to work fine (I set that at max resolution of 640 * 480 * 60HZ and max monitor refresh rate of 33 Khz * 60Hz.) I created a file and linked the monitor driver to this file. However, when I go back into Powerstrip, it should read the inf file I created but somehow it still shows a refresh rate of 150Mhz *60Hz!!! Wtf?

Another tool I used is Multires, although that is pretty much the same as quickres which comes with the installation of AVGA. I believe that initially my  inability to switch resolutions was due to this. I used Multires and set the res to 640*480*60Hz. After that, the system would always reboot if I changed resolutions. I could see in Multires that the only available resolution was 640*480 albeit in 16-bot color& 32bit. This was the reason I decided to uninstall all the apps and utilities in the first place.

I have tried everything that the forum suggested and still nothing. What should I do? Should I clear my harddrive and set everything up from scratch? What is to tell me I won't run into the same issues then?

I need some sound advice guys. I am lost in resolution space...
Thanks in advance for your valuable help...

[DaveJ-UK]

You shouldn't need any other software than what comes with the Arcade VGA to get a resolution you can work with. Remember you only need this res to be used on your Windows desktop - once you load MAMEWAH it will set its own resolution, and then when you load a game MAME will set the res for that game.

I usually ignore the resolution shown by Windows display properties if I set it with another piece of software. I'd recommend you don't load any resolution stuff other than what comes with the ArcadeVGA card unless you're sure of what you're doing.

If the PC is freezing this will be an issue with software or possibly even hardware. Try and rule out the main components - main board, CPU, memory, graphics. It would also be a good idea to reseat those components and make sure they're locked in nice and securely.

[grantspain]

the one thing i don't understand(and please put me right if i am wrong) is why does a multisinc/freq monitor require a arcade vga card as surely a standard vga with the correct settings should suffice-or am i missing something?

[Gaston77]

I formatted everything. Took one hard drive out of the system since I suspect it is corrupted (seems to have residue windows code on there). Then re-installed everything. Avga, DirectX 9.0, Refreshforce, the works.  All in safe 640*480*60 ofcourse. I then installed all the software and my D9200 has never looked better!

I hope this info helps somebody in the future.
Take care

[Jess--]

A Bit late I know... bu this may help others with similar problems...

You would probably found that if you did the following it would have cured your problems.

pulled the arcadevga card, and used any video card other than ATI (even basic onboard) on a standard PC monitor

from Safe mode uninstall the arcadevga and ANY ATI CARD

reboot in normal mode and install the arcadevga drivers, NOT updated ATI drivers