John's Arcade Forum - Classic Arcade and Pinball Collecting and Restoring Discussion Forum - RETRO MAME - Nintendo Vs Forum

HELP....!!!

I'm trying to run my WG K7000 25" monitor in a JAMMA Street Fighter 2 cabinet on a PC for MAME. I have it connected through a J-Pac and a GBS-8100 video converter @ 640 x480 resolution. It's all sync'd up ok and I have a picture (of sorts)....
But the picture quality is atrocious…. ??? It’s bright and very foggy (high contrast). Colours are bleeding through and look wrong, it’s just awful.
 I have tried tweaking it with the GBS-8100 menu and the monitor controls and have improved it, but not much. I have also brought up a picture with red, green and blue on. And they are in the correct order with no colours missing. I've tried it in 32 and 16bit colour, which makes no discernable difference..
Is it maybe the combination of the J-Pac and the GBS-8100 video converter? As with the SF2 game board the picture quality is great.

Does anyone have any advice they could give me?

Many thanks

I'm thinking the 8100 is the problem in your set up since you say that the picture looks good on the SFII PCB.
I haven't had good luck using those Chinese converters for much of anything.

I have a PC based cabinet myself and it too is based on the JPac, but I don't use any converter in my setup, I installed a free software solution called soft15khz, which will tell your video card directly to run at arcade resolution.
Many video cards are compatible, but if you have one that isn't then I would suggest the ATI 4350, an older card that is now pretty cheap.

I did wonder about that. But I can only find people online who are quite happy with it... Maybe I've been to the wrong sites..... I was thinking maybe it was because both the 8100 and the J-pac have video amps.

I have tried Soft 15Khz with a couple of video cards with no luck. But I'll keep an eye out for a 4350, that's probably the way to go.

I think you are correct with the video amps interfering with each other, there is definitely a conflict on that circuit.

I suggested the HD4350 partially because it's what I've been using in my setup for the last 5 years without issue and because they are like 14.99 on ebay last time I looked, so they won't kill your wallet.
One more tip, if and when you do get a 4350, be sure to use the main DVI port with a VGA cable adapter to pipe video into the Jpac, It never worked for me trying to run the cable from the 4350's built in VGA port.

Good luck with your project!  ;D

Thanks for the tip. That's the sort of simple thing that drives you mad trying to sort it. And only works when you've tried a dozen different things, but your never sure which one did the trick...!!! ;D

I've managed to pick up a Sapphire HD 4350 on the bay for £11.99. We'll see what happens..

Love the avitar BTW. He was my favourite Doctor Who...

Yeah I chased that issue for weeks trying to figure out why it wasn't working, finally I tried the adapter and suddenly it worked.

I heard it's because the system treats each output separately and only installs the 15khz driver on the one port but not the second, and supposedly this also happened on the ArcadeVGA cards in the past. I wanted to put it out there because I didn't want it to trip you or anybody that reads this up.

Let us know how it works for you.

Thanks for the comments on the avatar, I am a big Doctor Who fan and the Fourth is my favorite doctor too :D

Hmm.. got the card, it's a Saphirre one, nice and compact (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272093580949?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT). Installed ok with what seems to be the last ATI driver and test ran on windows games to be sure it wasn't a dud. Turned down the resolution to 640 x 480, ran Soft15Khz and enabled the 15Khz, rebooted and nothing but hash..... ???

The J-pac gives me a split screen for the BIOS as expected and then sync is lost and hash.. Tried both DVI and VGA sockets but it seems soft15Khz settings don't stay. As each time you go into the program it offers to install...

Is there maybe a specific driver revision? :-\

Yeah, don't use the latest one I had problems when I attempted to update, I use catalyst 11.2 If I remember correctly.
Make sure you install soft15 with admin privileges if you are running vista or win 7

once you are sure it installed correctly, look at your Jpac, is the "Sync OK" light lit when Windows boots?

Thanks for that. I'll look for that driver and give it a go later.

And yes the sink light was up while I had the split screen of the BIOS then went out when windows booted. At which point I realised it wasn't working.... Doh... :'(

I'll do what I can to get you sorted and playing games  ;D

The strange thing here is that the sync light is going out completely, it should stay a constant split screen if soft 15khz isn't installed.
We'll see how it behaves when you install the older driver and soft15 again.

WOW, got it working  ;D. 

Initially the picture was rolling, but a quick fiddle round the back and that stopped it. The pictures not half bad if a bit flickery (but I suppose that's to be expected at 15Khz). But when in Windows, the bottom of the screen is missing, ie, no task bar...??? Hmmm...

Just checked online. The Wells Gardner K7000 25" native resolution is 640 x 200. I wonder if this is where my task bar has gone..???

Actually looking at it... I can just see some of the icons on the task bar but there all squashed flat. Like the picture at the bottom is crushed up.  :-\

Maybe monitor adjustment?

try to adjust it out, if you can't get it looking good then it may be time for a cap kit, as one of the symptoms of needing to be recapped is crushed image on the bottom (left side if mounted vertical)
Glad you got it working, it should look better when you are running a front end or a game. Windows always looks odd in this low res state.

Actually I have just recapped it and fitted a new flyback. And fiddling around the 50/60Hz pot sorted the bottom being squished. Odd that the Street Fighter Jamma board picture was perfect....!! :o!!  But now I can't get the picture to fit top and bottom....!!! :-[

Is 640 x 480 the correct resolution..?? :-\

Glad that the adjustments cured your issue with the squishing, it's not that surprising that they have slightly differing adjustments because many arcade PCBs have sync signals that are different from one another. If you ran for example, a Mortal Kombat PCB, then it would need to be adjusted again from where it is now.
Newer monitors compensate for this automatically where as the K7000 does not, and has to be done manually.

I use 640x480 and it works on my setup. I booted up my Mame cab today to check for you and it's cutoff a little bit like yours is, but I can still figure out what to do, I imagine that is normal.
You say it's not fitting top and bottom, Did you adjust the V.Height (on some monitors it's called V.size) adjustment? I'm assuming so but if not do check that.
You can try 800x600 and see if that works better for you, I'm also fairly certain that you can set it to 1024x768 and that will work also, but I haven't tried this one myself.

Once you get your front end set up, you won't likely notice it too much, I don't.

Many thanks for that. I'll give it a go, although I probably wont be aloud to fiddle with it for a few days  ::).

I'll let you know how I get on. ;D

Well I got there in the end. It seems to fit but there seems to be an odd left hand edge..!! Well at 800 x 600 that is. I thought initially it might be the neck coils incorrectly aligned at first but it moves depending on the background colour. (http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb391/Xgas/IMG_1264_zpsjibxk7b1.jpg) (http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb391/Xgas/IMG_1263_zpsmpzi1xxc.jpg)

But At 640 x 480 it's hardly noticable, just a kink. Probably my monitor telling me it doesn't like 800 x 600.... :-\

Also Windows 7's playing up now..... No Task bar  ???
O well. 2 steps forward and one back.  ;D

It's great that you got a working picture now, just need to work those bugs out.

Maybe adjusting the pots on the neck board will help the screen weirdness, it's my best guess since I haven't seen this often.
Definitely check if it happens when you launch your emulator front end.

I looked into the taskbar disappearing on win7, it seems that it's not very common, the suggested fixes are in this order : Windows key+D if that doesn't work then Ctrl+Alt+Delete then typing explorer.exe in the box and hitting enter, these are supposed to work but are fiddly temporary fixes.

Another fix I looked into is checking to make sure only one display is enabled in control panel, apparently sometimes a phantom display gets turned on and your taskbar is on that absent display.

Thanks for the advice.
 
I think we must have been looking at the same web page for the task bar issues. Needless to say it didn't work... :-[. But I'm not to worried about that as I can always start again and maybe try XP. Interestingly I initially thought the task bar was just off screen(odd that I had it last time I was fiddling with it). But then I tried pushing the Windows/Start key on the keyboard, and the start menu didn't pop up...??
Windows key/E brings up file explorer ok though..... Odd!!

I'm using an odd mobo though. It was given to me by a friend, it's a super small mini ITX board (BCM MX945GM) server board. And it does have an LVDS port which you can set the resolution for in the bios. But this limits the max resolution for the onboard GPU as well. Very odd and I wouldn't mind betting the cause of this issue. Display properties does show 2 screens, but the correct one is set as default.

On another note.... What version of Mame are you using? I have Maximus Arcade 2.1 and am currently using Mameui 0.161 (x86) as I have a rom set for it. Well I say I have the Rom set..... About 5% of them work.
Plus I had the controls working through the J-Pac fine, but that's all gone to pot now....

Hope I'm not ruining your day with my petty issues :o

Blime.... Just read that back. I got a bit carried away with using the word ODD... ;D

No worries, happy to help.
Here is my setup, maybe it will help you get yours sorted.

For the Emulation cab I have a former Technos Wrestlefest 4 player cabinet equipped with a U5000 monitor, the computer is a HP desktop core I5 with 8GB ram, the computer is a few years old (my sister was going to bin it) and the ATI 4350, it's piped through the jpac running hyperspin and x64 mame 151 nonag version, I don't typically use Mameui with a front end because I always had conflict issues.
(I did wish to point out that I do have my old copy of maximus and it works ok as well)

I have the complete romset, got it from that well known  ;) private rom tracker a while ago, I also am running daphne and singe with complete romsets for laserdisc games. I have a pair of PCBs salvaged from old Pelican  Xbox (original) Arcade sticks set up for players 3 and 4 and those are using a mayflash driver I believe.

I have win7 x64 setup in classic desktop mode with all of the fancy aero stuff turned off
I have it set to "duplicate these displays" in display/screen resolution properties

I think maybe we did read the same pages, the missing taskbar is apparently a very rare occurrence affecting about 1% of users so you are one of the unfortunate few It seems.
I'm reading up on it and your motherboard, perhaps I'll find something and then hopefully you won't have to reinstall the whole thing.

Edit: have you tried system file checker? if not you do it by rebooting into safe mode opening run dialog and typing sfc/scannow and let it do it's thing, then reboot. (you may need a regular monitor for this step) I have read it can be a solution to this problem.

Wow... :o. There's a lot of new words for me there :-\. That sounds like a lot of time spent getting that setup right. Sounds very impressive.

Weirdly enough, I think the task bar issue is resolution/soft15Mhz related. It works in safe mode and if I go back to a higher resolution. I'm not to bothered
about re installing as I have all the disks and repair computers as apart time job. I've got various old PC's lying around, I might try one of them. But the Mini
ITX would have been cool, as I'd put it in a Shuttle case and it fitted neatly behind the coin door.

I think I need to start from scratch, find working rom sets and build up from there. But there seems to scant advice out there on the net as to what is best with what and how
to set it up...

Sussed it... It was the driver.

I plugged it in the cabinet as a monitor wouldn't work because of soft15Khz (interestingly the monitor was perfect this time, no dodgy edge.....) and I couldn't adjust the resolution, it was greyed out. So ran Soft15Khz and uninstalled the 15Khz drivers. Shut it down and moved it to the bench with a 17" LCD monitor and booted up. Again no system tray and resolution stuck low. Went into device manager and uninstalled the driver. The display (without rebooting) imediately went to 1280 x 1024 and the system tray was back....  ;)

Now just need to sort out a better driver and MAME..... Ho-Hum

Break through.... :D

Re installed driver and all is well, deleted Maximus and started again.. sorted. Played my first game on the cabinet... yeh  ;D

Now just need to get it all in the cabinet.

The only issue I have now is..... I have stuck a shortcut for Maximus in the startup folder so it starts automatically after boot up.
But when the program starts it doesn't have keyboard control until I ALT/TAB..

Bummer as I want to run it without a keyboard.... ???

Any ideas? :-\

It sounds like Maximus is losing focus, when you start it up try clicking with the left mouse button. If you get control back I would say that's the issue.
One possible work around could be to set maximus to auto boot a game on startup, then if the controls work from there then it should keep working when you exit back to maximus.
Another option is finding out if something else is starting up after maximus loads, this will be the program that is stealing focus from it, when you find out what it is, then you can set it to load before maximus starts or disable it entirely if it's unnecessary.
I'm sorry if I got too technical, I guess by now I've gotten so accustomed to all the ins and outs of emulator setups and just spout technological babble  :-\ I can keep it toned down from here on in  ;D
It did take a long time to set up this cabinet, lots of tweaks and mods to get it running right.... I really should do a youtube video on it. should be possible now that I have a new camera again.  :)

I know what it's like.

You start trying to find things out about a new project and the more you learn the more tangents you follow and before you know it, you can speak the language ;D.

I love YouTube :D, especially when repairing Laptops. There's always someone who has done a video of even the most obscure laptop that shows you where all the screws are.

I think any tutorial would be great. There is a real vacuum for emulator/Mame setups. Loads of out of date hints, but no in depth tutorials of note.

I totally agree about something else grabing the priority over the controls. Just need to work out what....!!!! >:(

GroovyMame, CRT Emu drivers for ATI and Atom15 were made by Calamity too address the many issues with running and Arcade CRT with a pc and trying to get mame and games to sync correctly, run at the perfect native per game resolution and refresh rates. Give them a try.. It's amazing


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