Screen shimmer but only in MAME... ?

[vertigo]

Haven't got a clue why this is happening, but here goes.
I've played a few other things as a test, but this seems to only happen when running MAME and I've tried a few version of that too.
I get a horrid shimmer to the screen, really bad shake, same as if you hold a mobile phone that's active next to a badly-shielded screen.
It's definitely not just happening on the MAME window itself, coz it makes the whole screen wobble, right to the edges so it's a whole screen thing. Weird thing is the very second I press escape to get out of MAME, it stops.
No other apps or games do it, even really VRAM hungry ones. I've got a GeForce 5600FX with 256MB VRAM.
I'm stumped as to why it's only MAME that's doing this.
Are there any apps I can get that will do a full test of every byte of my video card's RAM and tell me if some is faulty? Don't recommend me 3DMark, it's a crock.
Does this mean my video card's on the way out, or what?
Any ideas at all, anyone?

[babs]

I'd say it was more likely to be if you are running the games at their native resolution, especially if you haven't set refresh rates for those resolutions.

Try either forcing the resolution in-game up to what you normally use, or setting refresh rates for lower resolutions.

[in5ane]

Yeah, make sure in the Default Game Options that MAME is not changing your resolution, refresh rate and colour depth to match the game. Make it match your current desktop settings. Also tick 'wait for vsync'. I would untick Direct3D options, as this made Mame look worse for me.

I'm assuming you are using mame32 and not the oild school CLI!

[mid]

You might want to do what I do, and get Mame32fx rather than the default build. It seems to be better at scaling, so I set the default video options to play every single game at my monitor's native res and refresh, and let the emulator sort out scaling and timing questions.

You can probably do the same in 'normal' mame32, but fx certainly used to be better at it.

[in5ane]

I tried mame32fx and it didn't seem any better or worse whatsoever for me? Did you switch to mame32fx for any specific problems with normal mame32?

[babs]

I normally use Mameplus which has the usual extra video blitters you'd expect from modern emus, no complaints from me.

[mid]

in5ane - when I switched, the scaling options in normal mame32 to fill the screen despite my having forced it to my LCD's resolution were pretty rubbish; I'd end up with borders on all four sides. I'm entirely prepared to believe that it's no longer a problem, though.

[vertigo]

No, see, you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
The WHOLE DAMN SCREEN gets shimmer at certain times when running MAME, even when it's in a window.
I've just tried it for a while to see if it'd do it again but it's not doing it for now, but later on when it starts doing it again I'll take an actual photo of it and up it for you to see.
It might be heat-related, hence why it's not doing it now but did last night after the comp had been on for a couple of days, but that still doesn't make sense that it's only MAME that does it.

[mid]

You're right, that really doesn't make sense if it's only running in a window.

All I can think is that there's something very odd going on in the code, so switching to a different build might be an idea anyway.

[Commander Marklar]

If it is an overlayed window, it still kind of makes sense as the overlay is screwing things up. You could turn off any hardware acceleration or tweak the overlay settings through the nVidia desktop app (assuming that's what you're using).

[in5ane]

in5ane - when I switched, the scaling options in normal mame32 to fill the screen despite my having forced it to my LCD's resolution were pretty rubbish; I'd end up with borders on all four sides. I'm entirely prepared to believe that it's no longer a problem, though.

The current, normal mame32 fills my screen as best it can, altho there aren't many widescreen games are there I don't know whether this is a new or old thing, as my interest in MAME dropped in about '99, and I've only just got back into it. Surprised they made it past build 1.0, I think my last proper one I played was .14 or something!

[vertigo]

For scaling, you might want to try going into the options and turning 'Use Direct Draw' off, which will at least stop the ugly filtering, although you'll need 'Use Direct 3D' on still otherwise you'll be running from software acceleration only, which will quite often be a welcome to frameskip land. The main problem I've found is that even though I can get the ugly filtering to go away, I have to put up with the odd extra line double here and there as it stretches the game to a windowed resolution, because there aren't enough window size options to be able to just happily pixel double something that comes in a weird size like 320x224.

[roobarb]

How about this one....

I have a dual monitor setup with 1 crappy TFT as my primary display and my plasma TV as the secondary (for media centre mainly).

MAME32 runs fine on the TFT but when I drag it to the big TV (which is where I want to play it of course) it slows down and goes all jerky, making it unplayable. This happened also on my old CRT TV which I connected to with SVideo - these days I use VGA to the plasma and it's the same.

What can I do about that then??

[vertigo]

Sounds like some sort of sync problem, have you checked that your tv's set to the right settings? I don't know much about plasmas as I don't have one.
One other thing, it may be the moving to another window that's causing the problem. In MAME32 in the Display tab there's an option called Screen at the bottom. Try telling it to open on display 2 (your TV) by default and see if it works it out from there. Also check your video card's settings to see if they're different for the second card output.