ArcadeVGA and k7000 - off the screen and jumpy

[bluevolume]

I have been using MAME32 on this project because it was simple, but now I'm building my actual interface and I'm having problems.  ArcadeVGA attached to a WG k7000 25", MALA, MAME 116.

Initially, the number of working games was very low.  MK3 wouldn't display at all, GoldenTee 3D was way off of the screen, Metal Slug 5 was shifted to the left.  So I ran the "avres" utility I got from the Ultimarc website, and that did help somewhat.  MK3 displays now, pretty much correctly.  Golden Tee, however, is still way off of the screen on either side.  The outline box that MAME draws before it launches the game is about right, but the game itself is way over.

On Metal Slug and a few others, I've noticed that the horizontal scrolling is very jumpy (maybe jumpy is not the right word, its more like an out-of-sync issue).  Watching the trees, its like there are 2" bands that move in a non-uniform way.  I thought the ArcadeVGA was supposed to take care of this?

Galaga displays now also, but it is off the screen on the top and bottom.  So much that it is unplayable.  Even RTYPE, the score at the bottom is so far down that its squished.

I know running verticals on a horizontal is bad, and it isn't going to be perfect.  I just want to get to a point where most of these games are playable.

[ahofle]

Galaga displays now also, but it is off the screen on the top and bottom.  So much that it is unplayable.  Even RTYPE, the score at the bottom is so far down that its squished.

I know running verticals on a horizontal is bad, and it isn't going to be perfect.  I just want to get to a point where most of these games are playable.

Galaga is a 288 line game, so you are always going to have the top and bottom cut off on a CGA horizontal monitor.  You can either use 640x480 interlaced + hardware stretch for that game or adjust the monitor's V.SIZE to shrink it down (at the expense of big black bars in horizontal games).  I found that the 256 and lower vertical games (Centipede, Burgertime, Donkey Kong etc) looked great on a CGA arcade monitor however.

I would recommend you go back to MAME32 to experiment with resolutions for the other games you are having trouble with.  It's very easy to switch around video settings without messing with cfg files or command line parms.  Once you find the settings that work for you, they will already be saved in the games' ini files for standard MAME/MALA.  To find a resolution, look at the game resolution and then pick the ArcadeVGA resolution that has the closest number of horizontal lines. 

[bluevolume]

Galaga displays now also, but it is off the screen on the top and bottom.  So much that it is unplayable.  Even RTYPE, the score at the bottom is so far down that its squished.

I know running verticals on a horizontal is bad, and it isn't going to be perfect.  I just want to get to a point where most of these games are playable.

Galaga is a 288 line game, so you are always going to have the top and bottom cut off on a CGA horizontal monitor.  You can either use 640x480 interlaced + hardware stretch for that game or adjust the monitor's V.SIZE to shrink it down (at the expense of big black bars in horizontal games).  I found that the 256 and lower vertical games (Centipede, Burgertime, Donkey Kong etc) looked great on a CGA arcade monitor however.

I would recommend you go back to MAME32 to experiment with resolutions for the other games you are having trouble with.  It's very easy to switch around video settings without messing with cfg files or command line parms.  Once you find the settings that work for you, they will already be saved in the games' ini files for standard MAME/MALA.  To find a resolution, look at the game resolution and then pick the ArcadeVGA resolution that has the closest number of horizontal lines. 

Very useful info -- thank you.

On a related topic, I have an odd problem with MALA.  I created a layout for it, based on 640x480, and when I use it on my regular PC it looks great (only takes up a small portion of the top-left of the screen).  But when I loaded it onto my arcade box, MALA blows up the whole template so maybe 1/4 of the right and bottom are off of the screen.  It isn't just the background graphic, the entire mapping on the template is this way.  I looked through the settings, didn't see anything that would cause/fix this.  I am running 640x480 interlaced on the Windows desktop, and I don't think that MALA is switching the res when it starts up.

[ahofle]

Hmmm I'm not very knowledgeable on Mala.  You may get better responses on that part with a separate thread in the software forum.