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I've always thought dos mame was the rage, with my old P2 and ati video card the quality of the video was always excellent. But i can't seem to get the same video performance out of dos mame as regular official mamew with my new nvidia/amd based computer. Case in point

http://marp.retrogames.com/inp/phl_open ... mame55.zip

this recording looks fine full screen no scalines when i use official mamew55. but when i play it with dos mame i still get the same 13-6 score but the screen is scanlined and the resolution is twice the size but mame only uses half of the space screen, a small box in the center. It's like dos mame is either not reading my "scanlines=no" in the mame.cfg or it's ignoring my "double=no" or maybe nvidia just can't handle the small arcade type resolutions required to have a 300x200 pixmap be full screen.

When i play this recording using my old ati video based sysetm i get dos mame in full screen just as official mame and it works faster of course. Anyone know how to tweak dos mode to make nvidia cards to play mame with no scanlines and low resultion big pixel video modes? I've tried using vesamode=vesa21,vesa3, still dos mame not nice with nvidia.

NVidia cards (at least those from TNT and up) can handle virtually any resolution that's a multiple of 4. 300x200 shouldn't be a problem, nor should others, but it's BIOS doesn't by default use low resolutions (except maybe 320x200 and 320x240). If you are able to use VESA modes (ie: you're not using WinNT/2k/XP) then try the recently released Scitech Display Doctor 7. Of course, there are the regisry hacks to allow any video mode you want, but I doubt that those will affect DOS apps.

Also, with the Win32 version of MAME, mame.ini must match the exe name (eg: mame.exe uses mame.ini and mame55.exe uses mame55.ini). Maybe it's now the same for DOS MAME now?

eek, i hope i wouldn't have to use sci doctor, but that might be the only way. Notes:

1) my regular win32 mame works cool with low reses and same machine (in win98 and winXP) even when i use mame55.exe it must manage to read the mame.ini, since i always get nice low square pixel resolutions. but dos mame is a different story (even in win98 nvidia doesn't like dos mame, where my ati card never cared what resolution it just ploted it out.)

2) dos mame gives large lame resolutions even with older dos versions (mame36), but some games it actually yields the small resoluiton ok which is why i thought it was an nvidia issue (some low resolutions are possible while others are not.)

3) I can use vesa21 with dos mame in winXP (not that dos mame actually utilizes it) but at least it doesn't crash as long as i don't use sound.

i guess i'll have to try sci doctor...

If I remember right, 320x200 and 320x240 will work in DOS, but the VESA BIOS by default won't do resolutions like 400x300, 512x384, and 640x400. Scitech Display Doctor should override that though. DirectX as it is has no problems with these resolutions. And of course, you can add resolutions like 304x224 (MVS), or 384x224 (CPS1/2) to the registry.