New Video Card DK not the same (problem with Mame not DK)

[Terry]

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.

[Terry]

Ok, I mis-spoke in my previous e-mail.  This does not seem to be a problem with DK, but with Mame.  I was fooled becaused I checked it with Mame32 .104u4, and the problem does not exist at all.  But when I checked it with my old version of mame32 .79 (I am running mame .79 from DK), the problem happened exactly as I described before.  And I even checked it with Mame32 .106, and the problem also existed.

I have no idea why .104u4 just works perfect.  I'll have to go through every single setting and see what's different.

Any idea on this?  I would think people running the newer Radeon cards would have noticed something like this.

Thanks.

[Terry]

I figured it out.  I had the resolution forced to 800x600 in my mame .79, and mame32 .106.  This worked better with my old video card I guess.  I switched everything to auto, now all works great.

It looks like the video card was contending with mame to set the resolution and causing the system to hang whenever I would start up a game, or exit it.  I may need to mess with my video card a little more also.  But it works for now.

Anyway, sorry for the long posts.  Hopefully it will help someone else out in the future.