Posted by Mr SaLTy on 26, 2000 at 6:39 PM:
In Reply to: Those that wanted Arcade Monitor support for Windows, good/bad news. posted by Andy Geez on 26, 2000 at 4:43 PM:
: Well I've spent a quite a while researching Windows, this is all new to me, the programming/development side of it.
: Unfortunatley there is pretty much no way for Standard Resolution users to have Windows support, Windows display drivers work a lot differently to DOS, you can interlace the display for 640x480 for cards that support it, but unfortuntley this has pretty weird side effects to certian programs, for example Overlays (used for WinTV/DVD/MPEG playback is all weird in certian cases), also the mouse operation in relation to the screen is also messed up.
: Also cause its interlaced at 30hz, the actual picture quality is very bad, and it would surely hurt your eyes in no time, it sure did mine.
: You might say you get 320x200 and 320x240 modes working, and on some cases you might be able to, but I expect in most cases that 320x200 and 320x240 are actually 640x400 and 640x480 with pixel doubling enabled, meaning they are high resolution equivilants.
: I am sorry for all people that expected Standard Resolution support for Windows, while somebody out there might be able todo it, I can't..
: The only way I know how someone would do it, is to write a display driver for a specific card, and that would be a nightmare of a job, especially if they wanted DirectDraw/3D/OpenGL and so on.
: But to some, this is the good news.
: Medium Resolution support is a lot simpler todo, for example I have a alpha Voodoo Banshee/Voodoo 3 driver, once again the driver/vxd work is by SAKA of VsyncMAME fame (this guy surely is a legend!) :)
: The alpha driver supports the following:
: 320x200/640x400 at 60hz
: 320x240/640x480 at 50hz
: Full DirectX/DirectDraw/D3D/OpenGL/Glide is all supported at these modes, the 50hz update is not noticably slower than 60hz, for example it still looks the same smoothness, to be honest I am not sure I eyes can notice the diffence greater than a 47fps update.
: The output at 640x480 is truly amazing, the quality is like 1024x768, as the Arcade Monitor seems to add a anti-alasing effect, far surpasing the quality of my Quantum3D in Native medium res 512x384 mode.
: As for other card support, then it might be able to be done, forget the SIS cards though, personally I wouldn't bother with a Windows driver as D3D is too slow to be useful, no disrepect to SIS as a MAME arcade driver though.. G400 is possible, although myself wouldn't be able to develope it without a G400. I am hoping that the new Voodoo's will have similar Video clock programming registers to the Banshee and Voodoo3, cause heck every game should run at full FPS in 640x480!
: Okay I hope this helps anyone..