MagicEngine

slizzap · Visitor Joined: 10 Sep 2002 Posts: 3

Well, I finally got Magic Engine working properly since I'm now able to use Windows on my arcade cabinet thanks to my new ArcadeVGA card (http://www.ultimarc.com if anyone's interested).

Just wanted to say it's great finally being able to support this great emulator by purchasing it. Hopefully more command line support will be implemented in the future...but I'm pretty damn content for now. Can't wait to get my key Smile

Jabberwok · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 2:30 am Post subject:

Humm, the card looks really good. Can you tell us more about this card? How you like it, the way it behaves, how various emulators/games run on it, good/bad points ect...

Im interested because I got an old ( don't laugh ) Lee Trevino's Fighting golf machine at home & the PCB is almost dead but the monitor seems ok. Maybe I could do something with it? Cool

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If you translate Pole Position in French with babelfish you get 'Position de Polonais'... I think it's hilarious... from a French point of view.

slizzap · Visitor Joined: 10 Sep 2002 Posts: 3

It's pretty nice, I'm using it along with their JPAC which is what you'll want to use if you convert your Golf cabinet. The JPAC routes the VGA display from your PC video card to the arcade monitor and the keystrokes from the keyboard to the standard controls on your cabinet via the JAMMA interface. But just using the JPAC doesn't allow you to display a stable screen on the monitor since they're lower frequency than standard PC monitors. You need special software (something like AdvanceMAME) that can output to an arcade monitor running in DOS or Windows.

The ArcadeVGA card is basically an ATI Radeon 7000 but configured specifically to drive an arcade monitor at the lower frequencies and as a result you can display a stable picture with pretty much any OS, but it only has drivers for 98 and XP. I basically bought this just so I could use the windows based emulators on my arcade cabinet. Before I only could use DOS based emulators like MAME and NESticle. Now I have those running plus Windows emulators like Magic Engine, DAPHNE (Dragons Lair), U64Emu (Killer Instinct) and some others. I'm still doing my own testing to see what's going to work best, some of the emulators don't look the greatest because not all run at lower resolutions. It seems that most windows emulators are only set to run at 640x480 and higher which causes flicker and the image doesn't look the greatest. But the emulators like Magic Engine and certain Nintendo emulators that run at the original lower resolutions like 256x256 and 320x240 look PERFECT on the arcade monitor.

Prophet (Retrogames) · Visitor Joined: 02 Jul 2002 Posts: 17

That card is great if you already have a good working monitor and don't want to spend much money, but if you want total versatility I highly recommend the Wells Gardner u3100 and d9200 monitors. They have arcade style screens but are completely VGA compatible, so everything looks awesome and works without tweaking.

In fact, in my ArcadePC review (http://www.retrogames.com/misc/arcadepc_review.html) I have a photo of Magic engine running Dracula X on it. Here it is, see the player 1 and 2 start buttons below the screen:

Arcade cabinets/monitors really make games look extra cool! =) And you can't beat the controls IMO, I never liked pads as much as sticks.