Official MAMEtopia PCB support/upgrades

[Xenepp]

So here be the place you lucky fellas with MAMEtopia boards should post if you have any technical queries on software or hardware issues or upgrades. I will try my best to reply promptly and feel free to post your own findings that have helped improve your experience.

Here are a couple of mods that pubjoe has made and will help out a lot of you guys:
More resolutions for Namco games: http://www.arcadeotaku.com/forum/viewto ... 150#p20428
Naomi support via nullDC: http://www.arcadeotaku.com/forum/viewto ... ldc#p24030

I'll update the main post with these sort of tid bits as they are posted so as to keep some sort of index.

Might be good if this could be stickied too, quite a lot of forum members have these now!

-Joel

[pubjoe]

This is great Joel nice one. I started writing a few bits I thought would be helpful the other day... When I finish it, I'll edit this post with it.

[charlie chong]

went to play my mametopia last night and i noticed it seemed to just be resetting itself when it gets to the black screen and trys to load windows.. i plugged in a lcd screen and it gave me the choice of loading safe mode ,last known good configuration and normal windows.. the problem is all result with the machine resetting as soon as it trys to load mala/windows.. a blue screen of death flashes up but not long enough to see what it says!

i was playing sf2 that morning and just powered down with the first button on the header while it was in the game as normal

i've messed up the game lists and controls before by pressing the reset button but this was just a power down.. weird
anyone got any hints or tips or will the hard drive need reimaged or something.. i can manage to fix things in windows but this sort of thing is probably beyond me..
thanks

[Xenepp]

That's an odd one. I never managed to get mine to blue screen.

I take it nothing on the board was touched and it's not been knocked or moved? Is it off the floor of the cab?

Blue screens usually mean hardware/driver problems, it could be the USB leads, have you tried jiggling them at all?

If all else fails I could always reimage the HD for you.

-Joel

[pubjoe]

I've managed to add proper (native resolution) support for the namco (288x224) games!

Code: Select all

modeline "288x224@61" 6,050909 288 304 352 384 224 236 254 260 -hsync -vsync
modeline "288x224@60" 6,03648 288 304 352 384 224 236 256 262 -hsync -vsync
modeline "288x224@60" 6,052147 288 304 352 384 224 238 257 264 -hsync -vsync

Just wanted to say thanks for this. I'm setting up my non-mametopia system and this was a big help. Unfortunately I'm using an nvidia card, which only allows for 32 custom resolutions because of some buffer problem, so I had to remove a different resolution to fit in the top one, but it works like a charm.

I'm not sure if this is relevant for the mametopia hardware, but if you can somehow upgrade the video hardware, the nvidia 7 series works pretty well and is pretty powerful (series 8 and up doesn't work at all unfortunately), but you'll probably need this fix to keep some resolutions from line doubling:

Code: Select all

remove 288x240
remove 296x240
remove 256x256
remove 240x240
remove 321x256
remove 352x256
remove 352x264
modeline '288x240@59,305' 6,2 288 320 352 396 240 243 246 264 -hsync -vsync
modeline '296x240@59,305' 6,2 296 320 352 396 240 243 246 264 -hsync -vsync
modeline '352x256@59,697' 7,47 352 352 405 450 256 257 260 271 -hsync -vsync
modeline '352x264@59,697' 7,47 352 352 405 458 264 265 268 279 -hsync -vsync
modeline '321x256@59,014' 6,45 321 336 368 414 256 258 261 280 -hsync -vsync
modeline '256x256@60,436' 5,3 256 272 296 352 256 260 263 277 -hsync -vsync
modeline '240x240@60,436' 5,3 240 240 280 336 240 244 247 261 -hsync -vsync

I also have a SNES 288x224 resolution modeline which is necessary if you want to run ZSNES without any filtering or stretching. I don't have the modeline handy, but I can post it from home. Turtles in Time looked amazing.

[pubjoe]

Just wanted to say thanks for this. I'm setting up my non-mametopia system and this was a big help. Unfortunately I'm using an nvidia card, which only allows for 32 custom resolutions because of some buffer problem, so I had to remove a different resolution to fit in the top one, but it works like a charm.
-cut-
I'm not sure if this is relevant for the mametopia hardware, but if you can somehow upgrade the video hardware, the nvidia 7 series works pretty well and is pretty powerful (series 8 and up doesn't work at all unfortunately), but you'll probably need this fix to keep some resolutions from line doubling:
-cut-
I also have a SNES 288x224 resolution modeline which is necessary if you want to run ZSNES without any filtering or stretching. I don't have the modeline handy, but I can post it from home. Turtles in Time looked amazing.

Thanks a lot for all that... Yeah the 32 limit thing is really annoying I haven't added enough resolutions to push it yet, but combined with the standard soft15khz ones, I imagine it only leaves room for a couple more .

I can't remember, but is the mode support for ati cards limitless? If so I will go for one of them instead I think.

The soft15khz thing, I have been meaning to look into a bit further and that has delayed me updating my post on the mametopia FAQ thread.

I was going to post a link to a resolution/vsync calculator thingy I found to work out other modelines, but SailorSat (author of soft15khz) has posted up an very useful list here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... #msg805796 which covers pretty much every mode you could ever need I think.

Why are the 8+ series nvidia cards no good? Does soft15khz just not work at all with any of them at the moment? I was thinking of getting a newer card for mametopia. I currently have a 7300LE in there, which was easy enough to install, provided a nice boost for nullDC and cost only £15 over a year ago. ...But for the PC version of SF$, I was thinking of upgrading it to something more modern (if it needs it).

Xenepp, could you possibly give your opinion on the below paragraph?
I had an idea to more easily upgrade mametopia's graphics (probably enough for nullDC) when I also installed a bit of extra ram i had lying around. I don't know if the additional ram, in itself, was even worth it... But with 1GB+ ram installed and the onboard GPU still being used, maybe I could have got away with simply going to the motherboard's bios interface and dedicating more of the ram to the graphics chip. My 7300LE only has DDR2 onboard so the GPU memory speed would be similar either way. Do you think this would work out well? ...You would have to temporarily connect a monitor to be able to view the bios screen, but it would be a lot easier to install a bit of ram, than it is to change the graphics card and have to re-install drivers and soft15khz.

...And Xenepp, how much system ram, by default, does mametopia dedicate to the onboard GPU?

P.S. Dmauro, if you like, cut-and-paste your thread out of here and into the "Official MAMEtopia PCB support/upgrade thread" and I will do the same with this one... We might aswell use it

P.P.S Dmauro, thanks a LOT for the advice via PM on the newer 162.65 nvidia drivers working with soft15khz ...I will be adding them to my mametopia.

Cheers

[pubjoe]

Off topic... I just binned a £250+ (at time of purchase) 7950GTX (or whatever it was).

...It was from my obsessive tinkering and overclocking days... I increased the CPU and RAM voltage with a little soldering and pencil mod... Oh, how I was clever getting an extra 5 fps on games I never even bothered playing. A few months of me being smug followed with my old computer having green speckles appearing on screen everywhere and polygons jumping around. I put up with it for a long time and eventually got a mac as I never bothered PC gaming anymore.

I dug the card up thinking it'd be great for mametopia, I removed the mods and reflashed the firmware to default hoping it'd work properly again but it was far worse than I remembered it ever being before. I even tried underclocking it to about 50% of it's rated speed and it was still a useless pile of ****. Ahhh well.

[dmauro]

That's sad because that card would probably be about as good as you can get and still working nicely with Soft15KHz.

Geforce 8 and 9 series do something weird so that there is no way to get resolutions lower than 640x480 I think. SailorSat has made a dongle he uses to get them to work, but it's not something you can buy from him.

And the ATI drivers allow for an unlimited number of custom resolutions, yes. It's just Nvidia that has the limit. I think someone in the BYOAC forums is trying to get custom drivers with that buffer error removed, but no luck yet. Luckily there are some resolutions which I just don't need. 240x240 for instance, I don't even know what would use that res.

Forgot to post that SNES modeline. I'll try to remember tonight.

edit: When I play Galaga, it rolls. I'm not sure which resolution that is, but I guess I'll have to work out the refresh rate. (Galaga 88 works though, and I've actually never played that one and I LOVE it now )

[charlie chong]

That's an odd one. I never managed to get mine to blue screen.

I take it nothing on the board was touched and it's not been knocked or moved? Is it off the floor of the cab?

Blue screens usually mean hardware/driver problems, it could be the USB leads, have you tried jiggling them at all?

If all else fails I could always reimage the HD for you.

-Joel

hi joel

i tried rejigging all connections (usb and power supply but no joy)
no nothing was touched till i worked out the machine was resetting and not loading up mala.. then i turned it off and removed the board out the cab so i could put it on the floor and plug in the lcd and have a play with the leads.. think it may have to be sent back to you to have a looky as i'm no pc technician

[pubjoe]

I made an egret2 wireframe graphic for my mala menu. I thought it'd be nicer than the little woody graphic that currently sits in the corner of the mala screen...



...I haven't looked at how to add it to the layout yet but it shouldn't be too hard. I can post the high res version if anyone wants to use it...

[pubjoe]

do you own that 1L4B?



I want if so

Unfortunately no. I just made it up to make the picture simpler. Sorry

...I never thought I'd care about playing single player games on the left side joystick but it is a pain in the **** isn't it? Especially for vert shooters ...and donkey kong

[cools]

/me strokes his Windy 2 SP panel.

[R2-2D]

I have some Konami games that don't run on this board, for instance the Parodius titles and Twinbee Yahoo.
When i want to start them up , i get a black and white scrambled screen. Am i doing something wrong ?

[pubjoe]

I have some Konami games that don't run on this board, for instance the Parodius titles and Twinbee Yahoo.
When i want to start them up , i get a black and white scrambled screen. Am i doing something wrong ?

It's a 15khz issue. I looked up twinbee yahoo and saw that it is 288x224 @ 60.00hz. You can add support for this screen mode by following my little guide that Xenepp linked to in the first post. Actually, I'll quote it here as the sale thread it was posted in will one day expire:

I've managed to add proper (native resolution) support for the namco (288x224) games!

(You will need a keyboard plugged in)

1. Quit mala and navigate explorer to:
mgalaxy/mamexxxx/soft15khz

2. Then rename "custom15khz.txt.txt" to "custom15khz.txt", open the file and add the following modelines:

Code: Select all

modeline "288x224@61" 6,050909 288 304 352 384 224 236 254 260 -hsync -vsync
modeline "288x224@60" 6,03648 288 304 352 384 224 236 256 262 -hsync -vsync
modeline "288x224@60" 6,052147 288 304 352 384 224 238 257 264 -hsync -vsync

3. Run "Soft-15kHz.exe" then click "Install USER"

4. Reboot the whole system (don't just restart mala) and play pacman (etc)

That will hopefully catch your other games too as I think that 288x224 is used by many Konami games and is the most common resolution that soft15khz leaves out by default. If it doesn't, you can add more modes using the same method. Look up the game's display details in mameworld.net then in step 2, add the relevant modeline which can be found on this list: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... #msg805796

[R2-2D]

Thanks man.
Since i'm not that handy and all , can i f**k things up if i try this ?

[dmauro]

Okay, this seems like a good place to ask. On my tri-sync chassis, the 288x224 res works fine, UNLESS I'm using this VGA splitter I have. I noticed the VGA splitter wasn't carrying all the pins across when I found it didn't carry the +5v on pin 9, but I think it's also not carrying pin 4 and probably some others. I thought these pins were unecessary, but if I run the video signal through this splitter, 288x224 rolls, but the other resolutions are fine o_0 The only major difference I notice right off the bat between that resolution and the others is that it has numbers in smaller orders of magnitude for the pixel-clock. Any ideas?

Also, this one's for pubjoe: these resolutions are rolling on my monitor regardless:
512x288
800x600
1024x768
These are with the standard soft15KHz defaults. Any ideas how to fix that?

[pubjoe]

Not 100% sure about 512x288 but 800 and 1024 actually work fine on my 15/25k dual sync monitor ...obviously in interlace mode only though. Due to my monitor, I only connect through the jamma converter and I know nothing about VGA splitters.

I don't know, but I always thought soft15khz installs interlace modes for 800 and 1024. You do mean you have the display fault when connected through jamma in cga/ega (whatever?) mode don't you? Wierd! No idea why it's working for me and not you, sorry.

/longest "don't know" post ever!

[dmauro]

Yeah, I've got the VGA out on the computer going straight into the Wei Ya VGA in and those resolutions roll. If they're supposed to be interlaced, maybe that's the problem? I haven't tested any other interlaced resolutions, and maybe this driver/card is having trouble with interlacing.

[pubjoe]

Yeah, I've got the VGA out on the computer going straight into the Wei Ya VGA in and those resolutions roll. If they're supposed to be interlaced, maybe that's the problem? I haven't tested any other interlaced resolutions, and maybe this driver/card is having trouble with interlacing.

Don't know mate ...Strange though because 800 and 1024 should be no problem at all over VGA, with or without soft15khz. Maybe mame or the game is expecting (and outputting) interlace but windows is forcing progressive over VGA ...I dunno, this stuff is well out of depth. But can I ask...

So you have VGA-only connected and the low res games are (otherwise) looking good? I ask this because I'd kinds like to upgrade my chassis to one supporting multisync. I don't know why, but I always imagined that you'd have to change the input method for the different modes. ...But if I'd just be able to leave it connected through VGA and have all resolutions displayed correctly then that will be far more convienient than I thought.

[dmauro]

Oh no, that's what's so great about this chassis, is it just handles everything through the VGA in, so it's very simple to handle lots of inputs. That's why I'm looking at swapping out my other MS8 as well because I'm having trouble getting it to work with all of the consoles that I want it to work with (I've got 4 systems crammed into my cabinets right now), and the Wei Ya makes it so easy, and it looks totally decent.