Hi all,
I am re-outfitting, if you will, the machine that I originally used to run MAME about three years back when I was new to the hobby and had just bought a control panel. Well now I'm about to start work on a full cab and decided, based on what I read on the forum, to switch out the video card and do the ATI component dongle trick.
I received the Radeon 9550 yesterday and hooked up the dongle to it, then the component cables to my Toshiba 27A34. Set the resolution to 640x432 to prevent overscan, then loaded up Missile Command for an example of horizontal and Ms. Pac for vertical -- both looked excellent.
I noticed when I loaded up Football Champ, however, that I was skipping frames, something which I had never encountered while running it with the old card, a Radeon 9200 and S-Video. After digging around a bit, I realized that when I checked the performance tab on the Task Manager that CPU Usage was hovering around 70% with no programs loaded! Stranger still, nothing in the Processes tab on Task Manager showed any activity at all, except System Idle which was at 99.
So I can only imagine that for some reason the Radeon 9550 is pulling 70% of the CPU power. The CPU, incidentally, is a first generation P4 2.8GHz, one of the lower end ones. Also have 256MB of PC2100 installed, which I would hope wouldn't be a problem because I'm using TinyXP.
Just thought I'd check and see if anyone had similar problems and a solution in mind. Thanks in advance!
~Justin