After playing around with a few different video cards I settled with a Radeon X1650Pro using the component outputs. The video quality is great on my 27" TV.
Something strange is now happening when I use DK. And this just started happening once this new card and drivers were installed.
When I start DK, it seems to take 2 to 3 times longer to start up. Then once in the game menus, I noticed that my CPU is at 50%. I am toggling between a title screen and snapshot, but just a small window. I am also running a P4 Northwood at 3.82Ghz with 512MB of DDR400 memory. I don't remember how much processing power I was using before the new video card, but this seemed a little high.
Now the strangest thing is that when I select a game, it sits at the 'Get Ready' screen for about 10 times longer than it did before (1 second vs 10 seconds now). Then the game finally starts, and for the first 5-10 seconds of the game, the frame rate drops down to like 4 fps. And this is even on MS Pac Man! After those initial 10 seconds, everything seems to start running normal again. That is until I hit ESC, and it seems to take 2 to 3 times longer to exit back into my main menu. And even when I hit ESC to exit DK back into windows, it takes a little while. And for about 10 seconds after my desktop displays, things are moving really slow.
I am using the video card drivers that came on my CD which are 8.282.0 versus the latest 8.33.0 drivers. The latest drivers cause my screen to flicker. I don't know if DK is having some sort of conflict with this driver. I can try installing the latest driver just to see if it works better. Though the screen flicker is a problem.
When I use the standard Mame32, it works perfectly, as does any other games I try and play.
Currently I have texformat at 22, maxtexsize at 512, and rendermode at 128.
Any idea of what might be going on?
Thanks.