Mame .106u6 adds dual monitor support!

[Howard_Casto]

I just thought I would let you guys know that .106u6 adds the first drivers that let the screens of dual screen games appear on seperate monitors!

The new monitor managment code already looks great.  Support for up to three displays has been added (the maximum number of monitors ever used on a single game in the arcades).  Each monitor can have it's own settings and you can select which display you want to show on which monitor.  You can even mirror the primary display on other monitors for games that don't have dual displays.

Right now the only drivers updated to take advantage of it are the sega system 32 drivers (hard dunk and a few misc sega racers).  Also it seems that when running in dual screen mode mame can only run as fast as the slowest video card you are using.  Hopefully that can be fixed eventually. 

I get accused of only posting complaints.  This isn't the case, I just know what people are capable of and expect a high standard of quality. 

The new mame core is exactly the kind of quality I am talking about.  It gets better with every "u" release and the way new features are being added are both logical and user friendly.  I commend Aaron and all those who helped him on this masive upgrade.  Great job to all parties involved. 

[cdbrown]

This is good news to those with dual screen cabs and those planning on building dual or triple screens (which game had 3 screens?)

When you say

Also it seems that when running in dual screen mode mame can only run as fast as the slowest video card you are using.  Hopefully that can be fixed eventually.

I can't conceptualise how it could be sped up to match the faster video card, without causing problems on the other monitor (artifacts, tearing).  Do you have any ideas on how this could be achieved?  You wouldn't want mame to run one screen faster than the other - or am I looking/thinking about this all wrong?

[Howard_Casto]

Well right now I believe that mame checks the hw capabilities of each card and only uses the ones that both support.  It might be possible to use a different dx initalization for each display (let monitor 1 use dx9 and monitor 0 dx7 or whatever). 

And you are right, it wouldn't be acceptable to have one monitor running slower than the other for some games (xmen6p, harddunk, ect) but particularly for the vertical dual screen games, the top monitor barely does anything.  As a matter of fact, I think the games running on the punchout driver only update the top display when a value changes and only that area of the screen.  That means the top screen could get away with running at a much lower framerate than the bottom.  I think these are the only types of hardware setups that would be running seperate cards anyway. 

In my case I have to run a pos old matrox to power my psone top screen.  It's mainly for pinmame and secondary info (like johnny5) but it would be nice to do punchot and those games as well.  It only has a 2 mb buffer though so mame runs really slow on it.  Even punchout doesn't run at full fps.  I tried harddunk and auto fps had it running at  a lousy 5fps.  If I manually set the frame skip I could get it up to 25 fps, which is acceptable, but that age old "bug" that causes the sound to skip horribly when mame isn't running at full fps kicks in if I do that.

[Buddabing]

I think dual screen users will largely fall into these categories:

1) ArcadeVGA (or other single-head AGP/PCI-Express card) for main screen and POS PCI video card for secondary screen
2) Dual head video cards with main screen and secondary screen on the same card.
3) SLI setup (two PCI-Express cards)

Hopefully Howard's setup with the POS PCI card will work with v0.107.

I don't use u releases so I can't tell what MAME does for each video card.

[Howard_Casto]

(which game had 3 screens?)

I didn't see this bit.  Nothing worth mentioning.  A few racing sims (not sure if any of them are actually running in mame) and a really wierd beat em up similar to golden axe.  The name of it escapes me though. 

[cdbrown]

Cool - thanks for clearing that up - just couldn't work out how to make it faster but I had only been thinking about the games which have the action 'split' across the screens and not the 2nd screen having stats etc and bein somewhat independant of the action

[2600]

I believe "The Ninja Warriors" and "XMEN 6Players" as well.

[Howard_Casto]

I think dual screen users will largely fall into these categories:

1) ArcadeVGA (or other single-head AGP/PCI-Express card) for main screen and POS PCI video card for secondary screen
2) Dual head video cards with main screen and secondary screen on the same card.
3) SLI setup (two PCI-Express cards)

Hopefully Howard's setup with the POS PCI card will work with v0.107.

I don't use u releases so I can't tell what MAME does for each video card.

Yeah and realistically speaking we can assume that the only dual horizontal cabs we see are existing arcade cabs that get mamed.  Since both monitors would be identical, a user would obviously use a dual head or dual pci setup, which wouldn't suffer from the issues I am having.  

The thing I'm worried about is hardware limitations.  Finding a dual head that can handle arcade resolutions is kinda hard.  I know the radeon 9800 can support some with powerstrip, but other than that, it is literally the only high-end card that I know of which would work.  

PCIE cards aren't really there yet for our community so we will have to wait on that one.  


So with those exceptions, my setup (at least for mamecabs) will be the most popular, mainly because secondary screens on home built cabs tend to be smaller and lcd-based, while the main display is a tv or traditional arcade monitor.  So if you are using a lcd with composite/svid input and a tv you need to cards.  If you are using a psone screen and a arcade montor you need two cards (psone screen only supports one res).  If your primary monitor is an arcade monitor you will also need two cards as tv-out on the avga doesn't really work from what I've been told and it isn't available in a dual head.  

Just rambling.... doesn't have much to do with the mame release.  Since mame has officially gone dual screen though and mccoy's dual cab turned out so well, I figure it'll become a popular option.  I just thought I would explain some of the pitfalls a builder might face.

[Howard_Casto]

I believe "The Ninja Warriors" and "XMEN 6Players" as well.

Xmen 6p only used two monitors.  There was a rumor of a mythical xmen 8 player though but it never saw the light of day for obvious reasons (there are only 6 playable characters). 

[Silver]

The beast'em up you could be thinking of is "Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga III" - However, I think this was only 2 monitors wide.

Ninja Warriors, as mentioned, had 3 (One in front, and then 2 below reflected up using mirrors I think). Taito used the same cab design for Darius and Darius II (or some versions of) which had 3 screens wide IIRC...

Some other 3 monitor games: Atari Racer TX1, Sega Strike Fighter, Sega Ferrari F355 Challenge, Sega Airline Pilots, Namco Drivers Eyes, Tatsumi Round Up 5: Super Delta Force.

[mccoy178]

I am very excited to hear this news.  I have got the .avi's to play on the secondary while the FE runs on the primary.  Howard, If I have J5 running on the secondary during a game, will the game be on the screen or J5?  Otherwise, will J5 have priority or will mame?

[Howard_Casto]

Mame makes a fullscreen display for each monitor, so j5 won't be displayed.  (Or at least you won't be able to see it.)  If you set the new numdisplays setting in mame in the mame.ini you are going to get a display on each screen with every game, even games that only used one monitor.  What you want to do is take advantage of the ini folder and only set the option to 2 in ini files named after drivers with dual screen games.  Other than that, It is a sinch to setup. 

There is also a nasty bug atm in which mame renders the display twice to the same monitor if you have the number of displays set to more than one but one of your monitors is turned off.  I figure that'll be fixed soon though.

I've recently done several tweaks to j5 to ensure that  it can run well in an "always on" state on a secondary display.  I've been sick (still am) but once I feel up to it I will release the updates. 

On a slighty related topic, the new version of pinmame, which is supposed to add dual monitor support, doesn't work at all.  It works fine alone, but when you combine it with visual pinball, they interfere with each otehr if the new "fullscreen" option is ticked. However, combined with my vpinball wrapper, which supports dual screens and actually works, it runs much faster than it did in previous builds.  See you can set a target monitor now (the only option that works properly), so the pinmame window doesn't send rendering errors for blitting to a window dragged to a different monitor, which undoubtedly has different resolution settings and different direct-x support.  These errors are minor and never crashed pinmame, but it slowed it down a great deal. 

And btw... the psone monitors in rgb mode are PERFECT for the pinmame display.  They are just big enough for the dmd to display clearly and the scaling almost always ends up being a multiple of 2, meaning the interlace mode you have to run doesn't degrade the picture quality. 

[u_rebelscum]

... Darius and Darius II (or some versions of) which had 3 screens wide IIRC...

That's probably the best 3 monitor game mame already emulates.

[AllisterFiend]

... Darius and Darius II (or some versions of) which had 3 screens wide IIRC...

That's probably the best 3 monitor game mame already emulates.

Agreed, I loved that game in the arcades, really nice side scrolling shooter, had great graphics for its time.


Allister Fiend

[Silver]

Yeh I loved Darius...

Although building a 3 monitor cab might be overkill for the small number of games that used them.

I would consider 2, but even then you would have the "gaps" inbetween the screens (avoided in Darius/Ninja Warrior by the mirror setup).

[Howard_Casto]

Yeh I loved Darius...

Although building a 3 monitor cab might be overkill for the small number of games that used them.

I would consider 2, but even then you would have the "gaps" inbetween the screens (avoided in Darius/Ninja Warrior by the mirror setup).

Yeah which is exactly why I don't think anyone is gonna be crazy enough to build a dual (or triple) monitor horizontal setup.  In the case of vertical dual screen games, the gameplay field had a visible gap on the orginal machine, so it looks ok.  Not to mention you can turn off the top monitor for regular games and not have the rig look lop-sided, like it would on a horizontal cab. 

[dougman]

Here is an idea I would like implemented.

DUAL COMPUTER Setup.
Each computer shows one side of the of the dual screen game, and mame communicates between the 2 through the LAN.  So If you have 2 mame cabs next to each other like I do, you can play 4 players!

The advantage of this is that both screens are useful. When not playing dual monitor games, you don't have to waste your other monitor being blank.  I mean, how often are you going to play dual monitor games in a mame cabinet?

[horseboy]

What would be even more useful with a 2 computer setup via lan would be for some of the driving games. If that ever got done I could see a bunch of people making 2 driving cabs.

[Howard_Casto]

Here is an idea I would like implemented.

DUAL COMPUTER Setup.
Each computer shows one side of the of the dual screen game, and mame communicates between the 2 through the LAN.  So If you have 2 mame cabs next to each other like I do, you can play 4 players!

The advantage of this is that both screens are useful. When not playing dual monitor games, you don't have to waste your other monitor being blank.  I mean, how often are you going to play dual monitor games in a mame cabinet?

This is how it's done on many real arcade systems, including the system 32 games I was talking about... in the arcade it was two cabs, one without guts linked together.  In tight-spaced environments the second cab could be removed.  Nintendo vs games also used this setup. 

It wouldn't really work for many of the fun games people mentioned in this thread though as the gap between the monitors would be too great to play well.  Xmen 6p had less than a 1 inch gap between the crts and it was very disorienting when you crossed screens.  I can only imagine how bad it'd be when the gap is increased to 4 inches or more. 

[dougman]

This is how it's done on many real arcade systems, including the system 32 games I was talking about... in the arcade it was two cabs, one without guts linked together.  In tight-spaced environments the second cab could be removed.  Nintendo vs games also used this setup. 

It wouldn't really work for many of the fun games people mentioned in this thread though as the gap between the monitors would be too great to play well.  Xmen 6p had less than a 1 inch gap between the crts and it was very disorienting when you crossed screens.  I can only imagine how bad it'd be when the gap is increased to 4 inches or more. 

4inch gap should still be ok, i mean, how often would you be playing dual screen games AND crossing the middle? 


Another advantage to using 2 computers is that you can play the same game on 2 machines together!  Like you play street fighter or something without someone shoving your arm next to you. I think it kinda works like that kallera mame or something, but something a little more integrated for arcade cabs since kallera requires a keyboard to do most things.

[XtraSmiley]

Xmen 6p had less than a 1 inch gap between the crts and it was very disorienting when you crossed screens.  I can only imagine how bad it'd be when the gap is increased to 4 inches or more. 

Really?  My childhood memory makes me think it had a mirror or something to overlap it, b/c ours was off and the screens actually overlapped to much.  Could be a crossed wire in my memory though.

Another question I have is, currently MAME allows you to play Ninja Warriors in widescreen on one monitor.  Can you do this with Xmen as well or only the regular screen size?

OK, one more, then that's it, I promise.  If you're computer monitor is widescreen, is there less black bars on games like Ninja Warriors?

The reason I ask instead of checking is that my MAME machine is currently down.  Thanks guys.