Tell me about your MAME setup

[kamiboy]

Cheezus crackers, I finally managed to get everything working just right. Boy 'o boy is setting up this shit up certainly not for the faint of heart. So many tiny obscure tidbits had to be dug out of random message board posts. The level of sleuthing it took to put all the pieces together would have made Sherlock Holmes himself blush.

So, ye hopeful, if you feel like you want to dive into this whole GroovyMAME thing and feel like saving, oh, let us say about a week or two of hair pulling then take a seat and let me enlighten you so thoroughly that by the end you'll owe a couple of rounds of beer, the good stuff too.

So, first of all, HyperSpin and the Radeon HD4650 crashing when preview videos are played. Simple solution, just convert all HS videos from mp4 to flv. There is actually a tool on the HyperSpin (or Emumovies?) website to do this. This conversion disables hardware acceleration for video playback. Never did manage to figure out what the exact cause of hardware accelerated video in HS crashing the graphics card was though, but I suspect it is some sort of bullshit copyright protection at some deep driver level. All I can say is fuck the popo, I'll be pirating movies for the rest of my life out of spite. Deuce, I would have anyhow, but I am going to do it extra super hard from now on. You see this twopence here mister Hollywood? Yeah, you want it? Too bad, cause I rather donate it to the paedophile friendship association than let it go into your filthy pig pockets.

Secondly, it seems the powers that be of MAME have, in their infinite wisdom, decided to change the naming convention in the MAME.XML file at some point in the nearish past. Brilliant work lads, because this has broken compatibility with a bunch of software that has not been updated in the past few years.

In particular VMMaker.exe, which, you know, plays a pretty instrumental role in the whole GroovyMAME/crt emu driver setup.

This means that after you edit the VMMaker ini, set it up all good and proper, then launch it to have it scan a MAME.XML generated by groovymame and then generate a bunch of resolutions for all the arcade games contained within it is going to find no games at all and do fuck all.

Now, mind you, it never tells you that it found no games in the xml, and it does actually generate some resolutions so you think all is right with the world. Be not fooled though, after reading though the documentation for VMMaker carefully I discovered that the tiny handful of resolutions that it generates are just a bunch standard resolutions included in the provided ReslList.txt

These are meant for emulators of other machines, like the PC Engine and the likes. Chances are that these resolutions will not match your MAME games exactly, which, you know is pretty much the whole raison d'etre of VMMaker to begin with.

To get VMMaker to do its job you'll have to hold its hand gently, like it is a disabled blind little girl. First you disable its ability to generate a MAME.XML by setting "GenerateXML = 0" in the ini file. Then you get an older version of mame to generate an xml file, copy this over to the VMMaker folder and let it work with that instead. Which older version of MAME? Hell do I know.

If you do this right you should see VMMaker count up the number of resolutions that it is finding. The number should be around 100 or so, not the measly ~20 it would otherwise generate.

In fact, unless you plan on running other emulators I recommend you edit ReslList.txt and remove the extra resolutions for the other systems in there.

Why? We are getting to that. You see, crt emu driver can handle around 120 resolutions in the windows registry. That is fine since VMMaker is set to limit resolutions to 120 anyhow, and indeed generates a few hairs shy of that after parsing a properly formatted MAME.XML

However, and this only applies to the unfortunate souls using HyperSpin. Apprantly HS will shit its pants and crash if you have that many resolutions in the registry.

So, if you are like me and only plan on having a few dozen games in your mame setup, rather than the option of playing everything, even the garbage no one should ever be forced to play again, then there is a way.

In the VMMaker folder there is file called "MameMain.txt", in there you can put a list of only the arcade games you want VMMaker to generate resolutions to. You will also need to edit the ini with "OnlyListMain = 1".

Well there is a bunch of other horseshit too, but this is all a round of beers will buy you, friend. You'll have to figure the rest out on your own, and good luck to ye.

Let me just finish off by saying that my plan of having a clean MAME arcade setup by using two displays actually works, and how. Now the only thing you see on the arcade monitor from cold boot until HyperSpin launches is a simple black screen. No windows bullshit, praise the gaming lords!

[Xyga]

Lol yeah, lots of shit and hairpulling before it works 'right'.

By the way I've bricked a couple GPU's in the past, few people tell but it might happen when messing with 15khz emulation.

Probably most of those who've experienced bricking took the immediate decision to destroy their setup with a baseball bat, and dared anyone to ever mention that shit again.

[kamiboy]

Wow, actual hardware failiure due to naughty messing about in the software? Who knew. I can imagine bricking GPU's by way of Atom15, or maybe even breaking a monitor by feeding it bad mojo refresh rates, but the actual GPU giving up the ghost?

Blimey, and here I thought people dealing with actual PCB's and all the headaches they bring were crazy.

[Xyga]

Might not necessarily be software related, I've been suspecting some bad current feedback protection via the VGA output.
Heavy video output corruption occured, fresh driver installs/flashing not helping at all.
At some point you have to admit something got fucked for good...

[Fudoh]

Might not necessarily be software related, I've been suspecting some bad current feedback protection via the VGA output.

that's why you always put an Extron interface after the source. The same can happen when you use SLG units with video processors or transcoders. I had heavy creeping currents (to the touch) in the past.

[Xyga]

The same can happen when you use SLG units with video processors or transcoders. I had heavy creeping currents (to the touch) in the past.

*shivers*

Well, I'm scared now. I might consider ending the procrastination for a 203 Rxi or something.

[kamiboy]

I suppose the crude T-connector sync combining that I am currently using cause their fair share of feedback. But this is just a temporary solution until I find an actual cab to put this thing inside of.

[donluca]

I didn't have any issues with VMMaker and latest MAME build.

Are you using the latest version of VMMaker?

[kamiboy]

The latest I could find. Where did you get yours?

[kamiboy]

Dang, you are right. I have VMMaker 1.4, but I see that there is a 1.4b, which can parse the new xml format.

[donluca]

I strongly suggest you doing the process again with the latest xml produced from MAME.

[kamiboy]

I plan to, but it won't change much I reckon since what I did was just use search and replace to change the newest version of groovy mame xml to have the old naming convention.

I see from the changelog that not much has changed between 1.4 and 1.4b.

[kamiboy]

Has any of you groovymame users tried Gokujou Parodius? Now that I've been testing games with sound for the first time I've noticed that the music is messed up in that game.

I tested the same game on another machine and got the same results.

[kamiboy]

Ok, it turns out the sound in Gokujo was messed up because the game was running at a very low speed. In fact this seems to be an issue with Konami GX games in general.

Apparently the GX system takes some serious processor chops to emulate at full speed which comes as something of a surprise to me since the games seemed like so much else simple early 90's 2D arcade goodness.

Oh well, at least I have perfectly good ports of most of them on various consoles.

Let this be a lesson to ye hopeful, do not skimp on processor power when buildiny yourself a MAME machine, even simple 2D games may need plenty of power to emulate without sound issues or slowdowns.

[kamiboy]

People were talking about performance improvements in Groovy by going with 64bit. What sort of performance improvement are we talking about, in terms of percentages are talking about single or double digits?

[Taiyaki]

Reading through parts of the thread I was thinking to myself, there's a real business to be made by someone in building Mame ready pc's. Can you imagine how popular that would be? It seems like most users go through multiple attempts before settling on proper hardware and settings, making things more time consuming and costly to get ready.

[Xyga]

Some people have been doing exactly that for years, selling 15khz-ready configurations I mean.
It's in a really dark grey area though.

[philexile]

I suggest you this motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product
It's cheaper and it has a 4 power phase which will help you a little bit with OC.

I finally got around to starting to put this together. Unfortunately, the motherboard you recommended is Micro ATX – not Mini ITX like the case I want to use. I didn't realize that there were multiple small form factor motherboards these days. Just an FYI.

Hopefully NewEgg will take a return.

[SNK-NEO-GEO]

Building your own Mame PC built Is the fun part..Building your Mame setup and ending up with tha "ideal" configuration is very rewarding .. I have been using Mame for many moons and what worked for me on the last build is groovymame, the compatible video card and a WG9800 for horizontal and a WG9200 for vertical games. I have Mame on the Egreet II as well but the WG monitor look better to my eyes than the Egreet II monitors. I upgrade Mame filed about twice every 5 years.

Reading through parts of the thread I was thinking to myself, there's a real business to be made by someone in building Mame ready pc's. Can you imagine how popular that would be? It seems like most users go through multiple attempts before settling on proper hardware and settings, making things more time consuming and costly to get ready.

[donluca]

I finally got around to starting to put this together. Unfortunately, the motherboard you recommended is Micro ATX – not Mini ITX like the case I want to use. I didn't realize that there were multiple small form factor motherboards these days. Just an FYI.

Hopefully NewEgg will take a return.

Damn, that's a harsh way to discover things, I thought that all those standards were "hole compatible" and the only differences were in dimensions (that was my experience with lots of motherboards I had in the past: in the end I'd always find a position where holes would fit).

I hope they take the return!

[philexile]

Damn, that's a harsh way to discover things, I thought that all those standards were "hole compatible" and the only differences were in dimensions (that was my experience with lots of motherboards I had in the past: in the end I'd always find a position where holes would fit).

I hope they take the return!

I think some rare cases take both type of boards, but the Cooler Master I ordered isn't wide enough. They did take the return and I had them wave the restocking fee.

The motherboard I ended up getting was my first choice and it should arrive Tuesday. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813157526

I looked into replacing the case, but that board's standard seems to need pretty big cases, which I don't want.