Advancemame
AdvanceMAME is an unofficial MAME version for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, DOS and Windows with an advanced video support for helping the use with TVs, Arcade Monitors, Fixed Frequencies Monitors and also with normal PC Monitors
The major features are:
- Automatic creation of `perfect' video modes with the correct size and clock
- A lot of video boards supported for direct hardware registers programming
- Support for 8, 15, 16 and 32 bits video modes
- Real hardware scanlines
- Software video image stretching by fractional factors, for example to play vertical games like "Pac-Man" with horizontal Arcade Monitors or TVs
- Special `scale' effects to improve the aspect with modern PC Monitors
- Special `blit' effects to improve the image quality in stretching
- Special `rgb' effects to simulate the aspect of a real Arcade Monitor
- Change of the video mode and other options at runtime
- Support of Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) with a multiple thread architecture (only for Linux/Mac OS X)
- Sound and video recording in WAV, PNG and MNG files
- Support for up to 4 mouses in Linux and 2 in DOS
- Automatic exit after some time of inactivity
- Scripts capabilities to drive external hardware devices
Getting advancemame to run can be a challenge, but well worth the time and trouble to configure!
The install process is the same as for regular mame. Download and unzip!
You must then run
advmame -default
this will create a new configuration file called ADVMAME.RC
This is where you place your various options and more importantly, where you put your display characteristics in!
my PAL TV's config is;
device_video_pclock 5-90
device_video_hclock 14 -18
device_video_vclock 45-70
My PAL TV will actually run from 45Hz to 70Hz....not too shabby for a cheepo TV!
Place these, or your own, values into the top of ADVMAME.RC, this will enable you to tweak your display settings via the ADVV utility
Your next step in configuring AdvanceMAME is to setup your video modes to match your display and video card combination
This is done by running ADVV.EXE
When you run ADVV you will be presented with a list of video modes, some are RED and are not available
Select the video modes that are available and adjust the screen size and position to match your display
F2 to save each step...not necessary, but in my experience, ADVV sometimes crashes on some video cards or resolutions
Once you've configured all of your settings F2 and exit
Open ADVMAME.RC and look at the bottom of the file, you will see the list of video modes you have configured....your ready to run!!!
Assuming you've got PACMAN.ZIP run;
advmame pacman
MAME should be running and when you hit TAB, you will see a new menu called VIDEO MODES
You can now adjust the video mode...brilliant!
One thing to note;
Try your best to configure your video modes as close to 60Hz as possible where applicable.
If you don't, some games especially side scrollers will have some screen 'tearing' due to a mismatch in the arcade refresh rate and your configured refresh rate
