Posted by Rockin' G on 17, 2000 at 4:09 PM:
I'm very frustrutated trying to find a video card that will work well with my standard res 15kHz arcade monitor. I now own four AGP video cards, and none of them work correctly. I have tried using both the standard MAME (which has an ATI-specific driver and a generic VGA driver, according to the PC2JAMMA web site), as well as AdvanceMAME, which has support for many more video cards.
Here are the cards I have:
Unfortunately I don't have my notes with me at work, but one of the above cards worked in 16-bit mode at some resolutions, and in other (higher) resolutions, it had vertical black bars running from top to bottom, making it not 100% compatible either.
So... what I'd like to know is what video cards people are using with their 15kHZ arcade monitors if it works for 16-bit games (Pac-Mania or Galaga '88, for example) AND you can use interlaced video modes (to play vector games, like Space Fury or Tempest). If so, what kind of video card is it, what MAME variant are you using (if any), and did you have to set any special settings in the .CFG file to get it to work? Are you able to use "tweaked" modes to better fill the display? Does it still work if "vsync" is set to yes?
Believe it or not, the best support I've seen for my 15kHz arcade monitor is from VSyncMAME, using a $70 all-in-one K6-2 motherboard with a SiS6326 on-board video card (the SiS6326 is specifically supported by VSyncMAME). Unfortunately, according to the author of Mon-Arc, the 6326 is SLOW. I experienced MANY games playing at less than 60FPS using this motherboard with an AMD K6-2 450... games I would expect to not have problems, such as Pac-Mania (less than 30FPS), and Super Space Invaders (sound was provider by a standard ISA SoundBlaster 16). So I relegated that MB to other tasks, and am now using a 433MHz Celeron system with a "real" AGP slot and the same SB16... I haven't been able to compare performance to the el-cheapo motherboard since I haven't found any video card that works as well as the on-board video on that thing!
Any suggestions, comments, advice, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
I hightly recommend trying out the "mv" utility in AdvanceMAME. It allows you to test a wide variety of resolutions and depths quickly and easily. To use it, simply add the following lines (which are correct for a standard res arcade monitor) to your MAME.CFG file, copy MV.EXE to your main MAME directory and run it:
[video]
hclock = 15.75
vclock = 50 - 60
Assuming your video card is supported by AdvanceMAME, it will provide a good indication of the modes/depths your video card can or can't support on an arcade monitor. Please report back with whether you could use modes like 640x200x8, 640x200x16, 640x400x8 and 640x400x16 (the last two are interlaced), etc.