MAME & D3D

[moosehound]

Hey guys,

I'm finally starting to get my head around a lot of the software and my cabinet is beginning to look very slick. Then I think "I know, I'll get a better GFX card to make emulation better!". Well my nVidia 6200 (My cab PC only has PCI slots... yeah I know!) turns up and low and behold N64 games rip along. I then fire up GameEx and decide to try some of those 3D heavy MAME titles. Trouble is if I launch MAME the screen goes black and then I;m dumped back at the BIOS screen and the machine reboots.

A bit of investigation leads me to discover that if I use MAMEUI and force MAME to use Direct Draw and not D3D it works fine - it looks like crap in places (fine lettering & that on-screen gear stick graphic). If I place the machine in to safe mode, then run the command version of mame.exe it errors telling me it can't create the requested resolution in D3D on display //display0 (or something similar to that message).

My questions to you fine people are:

1) D3D or DDraw - does it really make a difference for MAME?

2) Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it?

3) MAME or MAMEUI?

Thanks all - sorry to burden with woolly questions

Moose

[mesk]

1. you want d3d.if you go to your mame folder in it is a folder called "docs" in there is a txt file that explains the mame video setup.I used to have a 6200 and it wil run n64 fine,mame requires cpu power,not gpu so it depends on your processor,the more ghz you have the more games will run and games will run better.all mame uses a video card is to stretch the game to your screen size and to scale artwork

2. no,sorry

3. you are using gameex right? then mame CL is fine.

[moosehound]

1. you want d3d.if you go to your mame folder in it is a folder called "docs" in there is a txt file that explains the mame video setup.I used to have a 6200 and it wil run n64 fine,mame requires cpu power,not gpu so it depends on your processor,the more ghz you have the more games will run and games will run better.all mame uses a video card is to stretch the game to your screen size and to scale artwork

2. no,sorry

3. you are using gameex right? then mame CL is fine.

Thanks for that. My PC is an old Dell running a 3Ghz P4 processor, 2GB Ram and Windows XP SP3. The D3D works great on everything apart from MAME I will try the -video d3d -noswitchres [-triplebuffer] [-nofilter] command line parameter - I also hear that there is a outstanding fault similar to my issue in MAME that causes a similar problem when people start in full screen and then switch to windows. It's resolved by running in a window first. I'll try these things out and see what happens

Yes I am using GameEx atm. It's in a state of mild-configuration atm

Cheers.

[moosehound]

An update:

Running MAME titles in a window with D3D still causes the PC to reset. Running MAME (either mame or mameUI) from teh command line using the switches mentioned also still cause it to reset my PC. The only option I have is to run in DDraw mode. This issue is happening outside of GameEx so I shall go track down a MAME tester and log the fault with them. I was hoping someone might have come across this before but it seems to not be the case.

Running other emulators is fine (RAINE, KFusion, Snex9X, Daphne, MESS etc) as is running 3DMark 2001 SE (score of just under 8000). It's a weird one but for now I will live with the blurry nature of the DDraw mode.

Thanks guys.

M

[headkaze]

Also if you are looking for a version of MAME that has better stretching in Direct3D check out CabMAME and its CleanStretch function.

[moosehound]

Also if you are looking for a version of MAME that has better stretching in Direct3D check out CabMAME and its CleanStretch function.

Thanks matie - I will take a look