Getting Sunset Riders to run well in MAME

[MrOldSchoolCool]

I'm having a hell of a time doing this.

If anybody has gotten Sunset Riders to run really well in Mame, I'd really appreciate you sharing your settings setup.

What I always end up with is this stupid line that moves from the bottom of the screen to the top occasionally.

[Ed Oscuro]

The game itself is still responsive and fluid, right?

What you're seeing is almost certainly tearing at a specific frequency due to the interference between Sunset Riders' original 60Hz output, and your monitor's PC standard timing being not quite 60Hz. It's a slight enough difference that the resulting interference pattern moves up the screen at a slow pace. (I can say this: I get the same behavior and my display reports it's getting a signal at 59.8Hz, not 60Hz.)

You could always search out a more flexible display. Adaptive sync, CRT...I don't know if other PC monitors will avoid this effect.

[MrOldSchoolCool]

The game itself is still responsive and fluid, right?

What you're seeing is almost certainly tearing at a specific frequency due to the interference between Sunset Riders' original 60Hz output, and your monitor's PC standard timing being not quite 60Hz. It's a slight enough difference that the resulting interference pattern moves up the screen at a slow pace. (I can say this: I get the same behavior and my display reports it's getting a signal at 59.8Hz, not 60Hz.)

You could always search out a more flexible display. Adaptive sync, CRT...I don't know if other PC monitors will avoid this effect.

It actually syncs perfectly with the HDTV that I use as my computer monitor, but does that line thing on my Sony pvm.

[Ed Oscuro]

You need to give complete information if you want an informed response. I assume the reason for the PVM problem is as I stated (60.0000Hz arcade PCB refresh, vs. 59.97Hz NTSC); otherwise, just play on your HDTV.

If you want to fix the PVM, I think an ArcadeVGA (or similar way of forcing refresh rates on a video card) is your way out here.

[Xan]

Do you really think 60 Hz would throw off the PVM so much that it would do something like this? The SNES is even further away from NTSC at 60.1 Hz, obviously no issues whatsoever on CRTs. And I guess he already has an ArcadeVGA or similar if this is a 15 kHz game and he's outputting to a PVM?

[Exidna]

Do you really think 60 Hz would throw off the PVM so much that it would do something like this? The SNES is even further away from NTSC at 60.1 Hz, obviously no issues whatsoever on CRTs. And I guess he already has an ArcadeVGA or similar if this is a 15 kHz game and he's outputting to a PVM?

If you aren't using V-Sync, you're always going to get tearing.
And if the framerate ever changes, the position of the tear line will move.

The solution to this is enabling V-Sync so that the frames are synced to the refresh rate of the display.
I'd also suggest using a front-end like RetroArch that is capable of adjusting the game speed to match the display's refresh rate.

[MrOldSchoolCool]

I actually figured it out the day I posted this and forgot to come back to say how. MAME has an option called something like "sync to monitor refresh". I selected that but it didn't work at first because I had the game running on both my HDTV and the PVM at the same time. So, I unplugged the HDTV before starting the game and then it worked perfectly on the PVM.

BOO YA Sunset Riders is such an awesome game. The arcade version just seems a lot punchier than the SNES version.

[E-Type]

Bury me with my money.