GRRR! Edited and reformatted for the general educated public


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Posted by Mojo2000 on 16, 2001 at 4:10 AM:

In Reply to: A NEW WAY to hook up TV AS VIDEO FOR ARCADE EMULATION posted by Adam Weisbrod on 16, 2001 at 1:40 AM:

[Disclaimer: I do not claim that this post is not some kind of attempt at propaganda. I certainly am not an acquaintance or client of the original poster; I only took it upon myself to translate for the benefit of my fellow readers and save them some major hassle. Okay, so it's 5:00 AM Atlantic - I'm hungry and wrangy!]

I found a new way to use MAME on my TV! I bought a TVView PCI Video Board - it's a separate board for your regular PCI video card which ties in with a patch cable to allow S-Video or Composite Video Out at all times in Windows.

After loading Windows it lets you do DOS window emulation and works up to 1152x864, all frequencies. So far, I can get the thing to work in DOS just by typing "MAME dkong -noscanlines - 800x600"... -noscanlines turns off the scanlines, which appears better on TV and looks exactly like arcade games. You must have a large enough TV, though. I have a 20-inch TV and I can play Unreal Tournament at 1152x864 32-bit with my Voodoo5, or play Asteroids at 1024x768 -noscanlines on my TV (more on this later). In fact, I'm online now, using my TV to post this now...

Granted, at resolutions finer than 800x600 it's a little hard to read the windows, but it has a Zoom With Scroll feature. It's made by:

Focus Enhancements
132 North Road
Sudbury, MA 01776
1-800-538-6000

Now I am ecstatic with the performance of the card since it lets me use the monitor at the same time as the TV! I can tweak the emulation to work with TV modes - known TV modes are:
224x288 320x200 640x480 800x600 1024x768

And in Windows, 1152x864 is the highest. For some reason, they say 1024x768 is highest mode on TV but it works at 1152x864! In Windows and also
works in DOS window: fullscreen = Alt-Enter. You make a shortcut to command.com and right-mouse-click, click Protected Mode Memory and have

set blaster=axx ix dx t?

and then you can run any MAME game from DOS. Some games like Space Invaders '91 require weird modes,
but do work on the TV, so you're all wrong about
the TV not working with the computer because for some reason, this board auto-selects the frequency for the TV output. I can change the monitor frequency in the video card and the TV stays same. If I go over 1152x864 it goes black,
but the computer monoitor stays on always !

So, for the cheap way to get your TV as a MAME box
just get a TVView PCI! They have external boxes, but they do not goto 1152x864 and cost about $150. [??] Well worth the price since you can surf the Internet on your TV with 20- to 16-inch fonts [LOL LOL] in Netscape or large on E.

I also have a Happauge TV Tuner which works great
on the TV, in a small window in the corner by the clock. I can start AOL Instant Messenger and the news ticker, and change all colors to pink - which is see-through on the TV tuner window! This means I can watch TV, follow the news ticker and zoom the TVView, so I can see the news ticker, the clock and the TV all at the same time. Another advantage is that it hooks up to the VCR in stereo thanks to the stereo Soundblaster. I could get a new Sound Blaster, a 5.1 Dolby DTS and a DVD drive and watch on my TV, but if I did that I could also just get a big-screen too!

So for now, I'll use MAMELoad and keep playing.
I forgot where I got MAMELoad, but it's good because it lets you select VESA or VGA Mode (this only affects the monitor, not TV-Out). This card is the best.

Drawbacks? Sometimes, if you switch windows from
task to task like QuakeII. For instance, if you get kicked sometimes after killing the Control Panel window for TVView board, you can get stuck in a corner of the zoom window and lose the autoscroll. Unless you fill Desktop with icons for control, you could get stuck. So I used the bottom Quick Start Win98 SE bar.

This is the easiest way to make a MAME box. Then all you do is get the joystick working and
a COMPUSA Crystal Mouse $19.99 trackball running. Voila, you have a MAME box! The box is the hard part to get. The control panel can be made or bought. [Ed: Not that this whole fricking website mentions this or anything.] You could rip a controller joystick apart a gamepad, and then solder steal its inputs to real buttons. [WTF] That way you don't have to ruin the keyboard. Then just map joystick buttons to the Start buttons or solder to the bottom of the keyboard too.

Wow! That was fun. Have fun building MAME boards.
The TV only runs at like 56HZ, but the TVView
emulates 1152x864 at 75MHZ with my monitor. However, the TV flickers alot at that rate so the Most Best Mode is 800x600. Still, for MAME the range is more

[And there you have it, folks.]


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