As I've just opened up sale of the JVS-PAC 2, I figured it's time to get a modern mame setup for 31K JVS gaming
Ordered a refurb Dell Optiplex 9010 SFF, Quad Core i5-3570 3.4GHz / Radeon 6450 1GB / 8GB RAM which should be here next week.
Current plan is to use windows 7, attract mode and GroovyMame.
Did a dry-run without an ATI card, and all works pretty snappy except windows 7 steals focus after attract mode is launched. Not going to bother with replacing explorer as shell, but read somewhere that a batch file with a delay will do the trick.
Anyone got any lessons learned about a setup like this? I just want the games, and don't really care if you can tell that windows is booting when windows is booting
I make and sell cool Arcade stuff, check out https://irkenlabs.com/ - In The Name of Science!
See if the monitor works all the way from boot to Windows for you. I've never had that with my 29E31S with an ATI HD4890. The boot screens would work, but as soon as the Windows boot logo would appear, it'd lose sync. To this day I need to boot it with a 17" LCD, then swap VGA cables and turn my cab on to get a stable image. That's definitely not correct but I'm not sure what to try otherwise. Attract Mode has always worked well for me though. I just added it to the startup programs in Windows and it doesn't lose focus for me, which is odd, but a bat file with a delay sounds like it'd work just as well.
Got the PC yesterday and had a brief play, cpu wise it looks very very good. Not really super intuitive to get the super modes etc working. One issue I experienced though, is that it seems to refuse to generate modes >480 lines - monitor definition? Also, want to avoid ALL interlaced modes as it picks those even for games that are not interlaced.
I used the arcade_31k preset.
I make and sell cool Arcade stuff, check out https://irkenlabs.com/ - In The Name of Science!
Learned today that windows ships with a program called timeout, and with 7 seconds before attract-mode is launched all is good. Changing the arcade_31 monitor definition from 480 to 512 vertical lines and setting 0 0 for interlace fixed the modes, so afaik all is good now
Had another issue when switching from desktop CRT to cab, the 640x480 desktop resolution didn't 'stick' - this was most likely due to the monitor being PnP, and the driver discovering something 'new' when I plugged it into the cabinet.
Fixed this by jerry-rigging a small adapter that only carried RGB, sync and GND so the PC couldn't detect the difference between my PC crt and cabinet.
I make and sell cool Arcade stuff, check out https://irkenlabs.com/ - In The Name of Science!
