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Mame .106u6 adds dual monitor support!

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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

--- Quote ---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.
--- End quote ---
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:

--- Quote from: cdbrown on June 21, 2006, 08:48:06 am ---(which game had 3 screens?)

--- End quote ---

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. 

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