Hi guys;

To make a long story short I've ran into some software problems getting my MAME cabinet lined out. After years of procrastination I've finally attempted to make a MAME cab out of this generic cabinet I bought years ago that's done nothing but collect dust. Hardware-wise I've got everything assembled and working, but I've ran into some problems on the software side.

Currently my PC setup is a 2.6ghz P4 with Nvidia TNT2 16m card (66.93 N-Force drivers) and Soft15hkz. Everything is installed and hooked up without problems. I intended on using the newest version of MAME .1043b and MaLa as a frontend. For some reason this particular version of MAME will not run nicely on my PC, it stutters and skips all over the place with almost every game and I'm not sure the reason why. I have verified this isn't a monitor problem, since it does the same thing even on a PC monitor. It's not that I don't have the processing power because it's present on things like CPS1 games that it should be able to handle without problems.

I remembered that my game set is from version .103, which I had installed on my desktop PC along with MAME32FX .103u5. I put both that version of MAME and MAME32FX on the computer used in my cab for testing purposes and it worked great, no stuttering or slowdown. Keep in mind this is with whatever default options are loaded, I didn't change anything in either version.

For better or worse I decided to use v .103 since the games seemed to work without problems on it. That's when I've ran into another bug trying to get it to work on my arcade monitor. Some games work fine (Neo-Geo games, Sunset Riders) while others continually roll vertically (Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat). I can manage to get the games to quit rolling by changing the vertical hold dial on my monitor, but then everything else like the frontend and the desktop start rolling.

I noticed this problem happens when checking the "switch resolutions" under direct draw. If I stretch with hardware I get a weird color banding effect, and if I disable direct draw and use direct 3d the picture looks grainy and a bit like crap.

I've tried this PC with both my other cabs and the same games have the rolling problem even with different cab monitors. I know it's not that the monitor can't handle the particular resolution, since several of the games that roll work fine if I hook the real PCB up in the cab.

Any ideas on how to fix this? I'd really just buy an ArcadeVGA card but my PC doesn't have PCI-E slots, so that's not an option. I don't really understand why an older version of MAME would do this, and not the newer version, yet the newer version runs like crap. Any help is appreciated.