Posted by Mani on January 14, 2002 at 11:23:03:
Please forgive me because I'm still in newbie-land with a lot of this stuff.
I have a Final Fight (with a working monitor) cabinet that I want to run mame on. I did the necessary research, and decided to go with the arcadeos front-end and dos mame.
Arcadeos just works "out of the box", so I configured it to display using arcade monitor refresh/resolution. Mame, on the other hand, I wasn't so sure of. So to test my hardware, I was just going to fire up arcadeos
but not select any games for fear of the machine switching to a setting that would destroy the arcade monitor.
Now on to the hardware. I chopped the VGA cable off an old broken monitor, and identified with a multimeter the r, g, b, ground, hsync and vsync. Note that the VGA standard seems to have two grounds,
numbered 5 and 10. I used 5.
The first stumbling block was the fact that my arcade monitor only had r, g, b, ground, and "sync" (never specifying anywhere whether it is hsync or vsync). After some research, I discovered that this sync is in fact
the hsync, and for american monitors it is likely that there is a 60hz clock built in the monitor that generates the vsync. So I soldered all the wires (except the vga vsync) and taped them up.
On the pc, I fired up arcadeos, of course making sure that it is using the arcade monitor frequency. Then I plugged in the arcade monitor vga cable. After some adjustments ... voila! I had arcadeos displaying on my
arcade screen! (At this point I patted myself on the back, since this is my first electronics project, and quite happy that I'm not dead or convulsing after fiddling with an arcade monitor).
Now on to my question ... running dos mame "-monitor arcade" or "-monitor ntsc" produces nothing but a black screen, on both the arcade machine and on a multisync vga. On the arcadeos website, the author
mentions something about mame no longer supporting tweaked video modes ... should I just forget about using dos mame?
Also, I downloaded advancemame, but during the configuration process (advcfg), the screen goes black and I get no response from my machine during the "centering" phase. After re-reading the advancemame faq,
this *might* be fixed by changing the video mode (driver?) to use vbeline or vgaline, and I'll try this when I get home from work ... but does anyone have any other suggestions? Could it possibly be my video card? I
thought ATI cards were the best for this sort of thing!
Here's is my configuration:
-Celeron 400mhz
-256mb ram
-ATI Radeon 32mb DDR (AGP)
-SB AWE64 (PnP ISA)
-dos mame (latest as of 3 days ago - 0.57?)
-advancemame (latest as of 3 days ago - 0.57?)
-arcadeos (latest as of 3 days ago)
-booting in pure dos (i.e. windows 98, "command line only", does nothing on bootup except for smartdrv, emm386, and running ctcm.exe for my awe64).
Your help/suggestions are greatly appreciated!
-Mani