Arcade monitor for MAME

[BaldiGit]

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.

[BaldiGit]

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.

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. 

[lordkahless214]

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.

[BaldiGit]

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

[BaldiGit]

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

[lordkahless214]

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.

[BaldiGit]

Wow... . 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...

[BaldiGit]

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

[BaldiGit]

Break through....

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

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?

[lordkahless214]

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 
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. 

[BaldiGit]

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 .

I love YouTube , 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....!!!!

[jtslade]

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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