Hi,
I gave a try to Groovytime over the last few days. I felt like to share my experience, in case it may help others.
I had previously an arcade cabinet built with EmuCRT built on windows 10 from scratch. The problem was that over time the boot time became longer and longer (not sure of the reason why). Some time the cabinet would not even boot properly. I was dreading touching the cabinet again as setting up windows with a CRT TV can be very finicky. But I reached a point where I had no choice but to dive on the subject again.
Story short, I managed to reconfigure fully my arcade cabinet using Groovytime. Thanks for posting this tool. It is great. The cabinet boot in less than a minute and I believe it will stay so over time.
For information I have a Radeon 6450 and I use a consumer NTCS TV that I RGB modded. It accepts RGB and S (for composite sync). The cable I used is VGA to RGBHV for which I use only one the H/V connection (Not sure if composite sync go through H or V, but hey it is the grey cable that carries the composite sync signal. The other one that I don’t use is black. The precision matter for later)
The only difficulty I had was to setup the composite sync. It appeared to be very tricky and here is my findings:
I think by default composite sync is not enabled. I tried to enable composite sync before flipping to 15kHz. It did not work and I had to reinstall from scratch.
What I did is to do the 15kHz changeover without messing up with anything. I swapped my LCD with the CRT TV. Unfortunately on the next boot I got the screen flipping (15kHz but out of sync).
The way for me to make it work was really odd. I have a multistandard NTSC/PAL: CRT TV (Sony Trinitron). I disconnected the grey cable, I briefly connected the black cable. Then I disconnected the black cable to plug back the grey cable again and …. Magic!!!! I got a useable picture, flipping only slowly and therefore readable enough to complete the install. I completed the install to the end. In particular I let Groovytime install the modelines.
Then when the install was complete, I went back to use vmmaker and then enabled csync and …. Magic!!!! I got a perfectly stable picture.
I have no idea how this trick worked (For info it does not work with my Samsung TV).Here are my remarks and questions
- I would be glad if someone could explain me what made this cable swap trip improve the sync signal.
- Is it possible in Groovytime to put an option for enabling csync on reboot, some people will need it, some (with PVMs or BVMs) will not. I will be glad to help
Thanks again for this great piece of software. I now have a robust cabinet that should be working for a very long time now.