MAME PC / Emudriver questions

[Shakunetsu]

Hi all,

I've been doing a ton of research on ideal mame setups and how to get the most accurate picture possible and this board has been an incredible wealth of information. There is so much to learn and it can all be a little confusing so I thought I'd run my plans by you good folks and see if there were any major issues.

My TV is a Sony KV-27FS13 and I'd like to use its component input.

I've been unable to find one of the recommended RGB to YPbPr transcoders (9A60[A], FC-14, Crescendo's options) but instead recently purchased a Key Digital KD-VTCA3. I have not received it yet but I am greatly hoping that the device won't have any issues with nonstandard timings or low resolutions. If anyone has any experience with the device I would love to hear about it. If it will not serve my purpose then I suppose I'll have to build a VGA to Scart cable and use the popular Scart to YUV transcoder.

I plan to run Windows 7 with crt_emudriver and I'm not sure what the best GPU to buy is. The most convenient options for me would be either a 5450, 6450 or R5 230. I don't care for the power of the card as I use a 780ti for modern games. I was wondering if there are any meaningful differences between these cards?

Finally I was wondering whether it may be possible to have both a 780ti and older radeon card in the same rig, connected to a modern HDTV and my Trinitron. This would certainly be the dream setup but is maybe a little bit farfetched. I'm assuming even if this is technically possible it may not be very convenient due to the way Windows handles fullscreen applications with multiple displays. I am also toying with the idea of dual booting with one OS being configured to work solely with the CRT. Has something like this been done?

Apologies for the sheer length of this post and a huge thank you to anyone reading for your time and any input!

Take care.

[Fudoh]

I am also toying with the idea of dual booting with one OS being configured to work solely with the CRT.

Since you can disable the video card you're not using right now in the windows device manager, this should work pretty well. At least I don't see why it shouldn't work.

[orange808]

Your other option is a splitter and a video processor before your CRT tv/monitor, but you would lose the ability to apply filters/overlays to specific displays. For instance, you would probably want to make your HDTV look more like an arcade CRT monitor and send a "clean" 240p/480i to your tv.

Of course, in many cases, resolution and refresh rate issues will keep you from getting authentic results on both your HDTV and consumer CRT. You might consider a PVM or older CRT multisync monitor.

[cyborc]

I've done the dual video card thing before with CRT emudriver and MAME. It worked pretty well from what I remember. You can configure MAME to automatically output to the crt only and have all the correct resolutions and refresh rates. Or you can just disable the HDTV and make the CRT the primary monitor while you're playing MAME. (windows key + p to switch monitor configs)

a 5450/6450 will be just fine for your needs. Hope that helps.

[Shakunetsu]

Thank you all so much for such prompt feedback!

I hadn't considered that the TV itself might give me issues with nonstandard timings... I suppose I'll see what the set is willing to do once I get the transcoder and gpu. One of my main interests is Ghouls 'N Ghosts and according to MAME it's meant to run at 384x224 @ 59.637405Hz... pretty close to standard, but any idea if consumer Trinitrons get that precise? I'd love to upgrade to a PVM but with the lack of availability in Canada and prices shooting through the roof it's just not an option for me yet. I try to keep an eye out, though.

I don't have any interest in upscaling or playing arcade games on the HDTV, at least for now. The idea of the dual setup was so that I could play Arcade / older emulated consoles on the CRT but still play modern games on Steam using the HDTV without needing two PCs. It's great to hear that you've had success with the dual GPUs cyborc! Thanks for the heads up!

I actually saw both the VGACTV1 and AA 9A60 on eBay just a month or two ago for around $75USD each but it wasn't until recently that I had any money to spend and they were long gone... I came across the KD-VTCA3 for only $35USD (!) and found some chatter about it on a forum called HDTV Arcade... a user there says image quality is comparable to the 9A60 but as far as I can tell he was only using it for 480p on a projector and so I wasn't certain that it would handle 240p or nonstandard timings. As I did more research on it though, it seems to be quite promising. I'll definitely keep you all posted on how it works out!

Just as an aside, I've gotten my old 1st gen Raspberry Pi to output 240p over composite to the TV I plan to use and was quite pleased with the results, for what it is. Thought some of you may be interested to see

Thanks again!

[Fudoh]

One of my main interests is Ghouls 'N Ghosts and according to MAME it's meant to run at 384x224 @ 59.637405Hz... pretty close to standard, but any idea if consumer Trinitrons get that precise?

this should be no problem. Neither should be MVS running at 59.15Hz, but Irem boards (55Hz) or Seibu (54Hz) might cause problems.

[cyborc]

I've used Groovymame with several different consumer CRTs (Sharp, Sony, JVC, and Toshiba to be precise) and none of them had any issues with refresh rates, even with seibu and irem titles. I'd say there's a pretty good chance your Sony will be able to handle it.

[s8n]

i can vouch that i used to use a ArcadeVGA2 X550 and in the recent Groovymame's i get a error message about direct3d not supported. So i have bought a Radeon 6450 and no more error messages , what i'm trying to say is don't get a really old GFX Card as GM will throw up a error message.

[lukilla]

From my experience, to have nvidia and ati card is waay too buggy on the same pc, at least on windows 10 (possibly windows 7 as well). Chances are very high that your 780ti can do lower resolutions just fine, my gtx950 does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvoPrFUcmzM

Looks very nice in rgb and original resolutions

[Shakunetsu]

I've purchased a 5450! A 6450 was available at the same price but the 5450 was passively cooled so I went for that. Once the transcoder and card arrive I'll be sure to put up some pictures here!

Chances are very high that your 780ti can do lower resolutions just fine, my gtx950 does

I had no idea! Are you using soft15khz? I actually tried to find out if there was a viable solution for modern nvidia cards but information is slim. I think even if this is possible with my 780ti I may just go the emudriver route since everything is so well documented. That's good to know, though! Thank you!

[lukilla]

I use only the nvidia control panel to create the resolutions, let´s see if you can get those cards to work together.

[Blair]

yeah I tested out using low resolutions on my PVM-14m2u with my Nvidia GTX-560. it works pretty well (I just made a bunch of custom resolutions in the Windows 7 control panel) I was able to output in both RGB and YUV color spaces. mostly just messed around to play a few doujin games in 240p and a few emulators. (it's also a lot easier to do if you have a sync combiner).

[Fudoh]

yeah I tested out using low resolutions on my PVM-14m2u with my Nvidia GTX-560. it works pretty well (I just made a bunch of custom resolutions in the Windows 7 control panel)

if this is so easy as you make it sound, why are people in general trying to use CRTEmuDriver with AMD GPUs instead? Just because of the added flexibility to have custom resolutions in MAME per game?

When you set the vertical output to 240p, what horizontal res are you using? I assume something higher considerably than 320 to avoid rescaling artefacts (for games using less pixels) or lost resolution (for games using higher res)?

[Xyga]

I've successufully tried a couple nVidia cards with soft15khz in the past and it worked easily and nicely (fried one though lol) but I haven't tried a million games either, only your usual 224p/240p stuff.

IIRC Calamity said nVidia drivers aren't as flexible, can't support as much stuff / would need to be rewritten from scratch or something.

So nVidia/soft15khz works, but is more limited (and since most people want a setup that works with everything, well...)

[lukilla]

Nvidia can only handle 32 custom resolutions, but it can fit all of my favorite arcade systems so far.

[lettuce]

Plus doesnt the CRTEmuDriver method use superresolutions so the picture is always centered thus no need to keep altering the picture for games with different screen resolutions

[Shakunetsu]

So I received the transcoder!

The radeon card actually was also here less than an hour before the transcoder arrived but I guess that delivery driver didn't want to ring the bell haha. So I can't pick that up until tomorrow!

In the meantime I've been trying to fiddle with Nvidia custom resolutions... I can't seem to find exact NTSC timing information anywhere, so I improvised somewhat. 320x240 fails to display no matter what I do (dot clock too low perhaps?) so I tried 2560x240, which worked, but wasn't stable, then made a 640x240 mode which is rock solid. The only predefined timing options that seem to actually even set the timings are CVT and CVT Reduced Blank. The rest, including automatic, do nothing and just leave whatever values were previously set. The CVT timings caused geometry issues, the upper third or so of the display gets shifted to the right. I adjusted a couple numbers and got very close to a square image, but not exactly.

I'll be setting up GroovyMAME later but I already had FCEUX on the PC and knew it would stretch to any res with no issues or extensive config so tried it out.

Spoiler

Looks pretty good! There are some scaling artifacts (you can see in the left bush) which I probably could have fixed by creating a 224p mode (I think?) but that's okay. I'll be using emudriver and the radeon gpu once I get it either way.

I think what's exciting about this though is the transcoder! I personally don't have experience with the other ones mentioned in this thread but there are several things I like about this one. It has a VGA loop through, supports RGBHV and RGBs through a DIP switch, and "special sync" output which I believe was meant for compatibility with some old popular RCA set top box, may not be useful for much. It's also very light and smaller than I was expecting.

I got it for $35USD + shipping and import fees which is a little insane! I think I got very lucky, but it's probably worth keeping an eye out for this unit either way. Again it's a Key Digital KD-VTCA3.

Thanks again to everyone for all the help and information I'll be updating again once I get the new gpu, hopefully with the final setup!

[Blair]

if this is so easy as you make it sound, why are people in general trying to use CRTEmuDriver with AMD GPUs instead?

I haven't personally used CRTEmuDriver or any AMD GPU's in such a configuration but I would assume that once everything's properly set up games are autodetect and run at the proper resolution and refresh rate without any necessary adjustments, similar to how the arcadevga 5000 is supposed to work.

So I received the transcoder!

I think what's exciting about this though is the transcoder! I personally don't have experience with the other ones mentioned in this thread but there are several things I like about this one. It has a VGA loop through, supports RGBHV and RGBs through a DIP switch, and "special sync" output which I believe was meant for compatibility with some old popular RCA set top box, may not be useful for much. It's also very light and smaller than I was expecting.
Thanks again to everyone for all the help and information I'll be updating again once I get the new gpu, hopefully with the final setup!

that's absolutely fantastic Shakunetsu, I've used those transcoder's for my own projects with great success. do keep us updated on your progress, I'd love to see more pictures of your setup once it's fully optimized.

I've been thinking about a retropie project, but I don't really need the small form factor or portability. and this might be a much better option as it's a more mature solution and doesn't have the same input lag and connectivity issues as the pie.

[Shakunetsu]

Alright, it's been a lot of work, but I have some things to share!

Here's a little gallery of the setup in action:
http://imgur.com/a/iF7WP
Please bear with the phone photos. It was very difficult to get the phone camera to cooperate. I think anti-flicker caused colors in most places to come out either washed out or very oversaturated. I was also unable to capture darker games (like Ghouls 'N Ghosts!) because the auto exposure was being a pain.

I'm using GroovyMAME and RetroArch running all games in native resolution. I have super resolutions set up as well but actually have not been able to tell any difference between those and their native counterparts. I suppose they would help with games that have odd horizontal resolutions but I haven't tried any of those yet. GroovyMAME generates its own modelines on the fly and runs games at the correct refresh rate by doing so. It's great to see mame reporting a game ran at 100.00% speed. In the past I've had terrible audio/video stuttering issues related to this. RetroArch unfortunately can't manage to change between progressive and interlaced modes, not sure why - what this means for me is that I need to leave the CRT's desktop resolution at 240p rather than 480i. This doesn't bother me much because I don't use the TV for anything other than playing games from this PC.

Overall I'm very pleased with this setup! The 780ti and 5450 play together perfectly! I have the 780ti driving my HDTV over HDMI, and the 5450 connected to the CRT over DVI. Extended desktop works as expected, and I've configured GroovyMAME and RetroArch to launch on the CRT while keeping the HDTV set as my primary display for things like fullscreen video or Steam games! Currently I'm manually switching audio to output to either the HDTV or CRT but I already know of a couple of utilities that can make this more convenient. I'm very surprised and happy with how smoothly the dual GPU setup worked out.

As for the actual image, after spending some time tweaking my CRTs range, the generated modelines look pretty good. I think there is still some tweaking to be done to fully correct geometry - I need to find a good control image... often I was not sure if geometry issues were related to the modeline timings or the tube itself! Perhaps I will use my Wii for this later. I think finding the correct range for your TV could and should be a smoother process - I don't quite understand why a game console for example will display perfectly fine on any TV while the emudriver setup needed to be tweaked quite a bit to get it to sync correctly and display a relatively square image on my TV. In any case, Calamity has done some fantastic work and I have learned a lot by reading his posts in the past few days.

Huge thank you again to you all for your insight!

Also, here's a little wall of text about nvidia custom resolutions:

Spoiler

When they work, output seems to be just as satisfactory as the emudriver setup. However, from my experience, it seems to be very buggy. Creating modes is not as simple as with Calamity's VMMaker (though I hadn't tried other tools such as WinModeLines, Powerstrip, etc..) but the big hold up for me was that the nvidia software randomly decides when it wants to report your custom resolutions or not. I had created four resolutions, and noticed one had randomly gone missing - if I went to the create custom resolutions menu again, it was still there. I could not select that mode. Removing it and re-adding it did not help. Later, 3 of them were missing, and only the currently set resolution was visible in the options. In general, working with the nvidia drivers was a massive pain. Also, after creating the resolutions in the nvidia driver software, they did not appear as modes accessible in Windows' display options, I had to select them through the driver software. Again, I'm not sure if these issues might have been mitigated by other utilities. Knowing I would be receiving the Radeon card soon, I had just given up on this route.

[Blair]

absolutely beautiful Shakunetsu!

as far as the super resolutions go, I believe user Bahn Yuki was able to get something like 2240x224 on his JVC CRT. With his retroarch set up on a pi. ( although something like the key digital adapter might be a bottleneck when it comes to achieving that type of signal bandwidth)

definitely an inspiring project, if you ever get time I would love to see something like a simplified guide.

[Shakunetsu]

Thank you Blair! very satisfied with how it looks for a consumer set!

I've been using super resolutions with 2560 horizontal res with no issues! 2560x240p is still less data than 1024x768p which I think is a resolution most transcoders would support so I would hope that bandwidth wouldn't be an issue.

I won't bother rewriting the instructions that Calamity has already put together, but a lot of information is segregated across posts and it isn't 100% straightforward so possibly a little later I'll summarize the process and compile the necessary information

[Shakunetsu]

Just a small update - I just gave R-Type a shot and it runs perfectly fine on my TV

[Shakunetsu]

Hi all!

I've been enjoying this setup since I last posted here, but it isn't perfect. I haven't been able to get the geometry quite right and I think the transcoder may be the culprit. At first, the top of the image was being pulled to the left, which I was not able to correct by adjusting my vertical front/back porch values. Instead, I had to reduce the vertical sync width to the lowest value. From what I know this value is standard and should not be changed. I have heard of someone correcting a similar issue by adjusting a pot on another transcoder.. unfortunately the KD-VTCA3 has no such adjustments.

I was looking for a more reputable transcoder, currently the AA 9A60, Kramer FC-32 and Retrotek VGACTV1 are available on ebay but a bit expensive. I have not seen an FC-14 or Crescendo TC1600.

I happened to see the FC-4046 mentioned around here, and saw the FC-4045 going for quite cheap on ebay, so I snapped it up. It appears to be identical to the FC-4046 but with genlock and SDI input. Probably a bit overkill for my purpose.

It hasn't arrived yet but I was buying BNC cables and my problem now is that the FC-4045 takes RGBS in and I'm not sure how to get that from my Radeon card. It looks like combining the sync isn't as trivial as I thought. Is there a cheap device that can do this for me? I would like to avoid making my own sync combiner if possible...

if anyone has any other clues about sync/timings related to emudriver and geometry, please, I would love to learn as much as I can!

Thanks and sorry for the huge post.