Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Nestopia Nestopia not fully synced to my arcade monitor...

Does anybody have any experience with Nestopia and a real arcade monitor (15 kHz, Hantarex 9110)? I'm using Nestopia on a AMD64 with ArcadeVGA (flashed ATI HD 2400) graphics card and I already tried vsync and triple buffer turning on/off but I still get tearing. Maybe the ArcadeVGA is not showing exactly 60 Hz but vsync should always solve that, shouldn't it? Nevertheless e.g. Kega Fusion (Mega Drive emulator) works absolutely perfect without tearing or something - totally smooth scrolling in all directions. So there must be something with Nestopia or its settings...

Any idea?

NST uses Direct3D for output and as far as I know ArcadeVGA cards can't work their magic on 3D apps. (Fusion uses the older DirectDraw API, which MS has deprecated - the replacement was introduced in Vista).

The ArcadeVGA (like I said it's a flashed ATI Radeon HD 2400) is 3D capable and fully supports Direct3D (I installed DirectX 9.0c recently). I installed several regular Windows 3D games that work perfectly. And, also as mentioned before, emulators like Fusion Kega or SNES9X work with perfect scrolling without tearing. So I think it must have something to do with Nestopia or its settings...

I found something out:

If I set "Speed" in the "Timer"-Menu to 61 scrolling is almost perfect (a thin line is moving from the top of the screen to the bottom very slowly while scrolling - this line is thicker and faster when using 60 or 62). If I could set it to maybe 61.10 or 60.90 it maybe would be totally perfect. Unfortunately it is not possible to set any decimal places.

It must have something to do with vsync - and this is the second thing I found out: in the Nestopia log file I found these two lines:

Direct3D: vsync on every second refresh: unsupported
Direct3D: vsync on every third refresh: unsupported

I do not understand this because vsync works on other emulators (e.g. MAME).

Is there a known issue with the ArcadeVGA graphics card?

I think that'd be a question for the folks who made the VGA card. It should be pretty easy to reproduce, so they're welcome to download Nestopia and repro it.

It honestly sounds like the VGA cards' drivers aren't respecting D3D vsync options.

Most video drivers have an option (usually under "3D options" or "Direct3D options") to force VSync to "always off" or "always on" regardless of what the application says. This applies to Nestopia because it uses Direct3D.

Make sure your video driver is NOT set to force VSync to "always off", and then make sure you have VSync ENABLED in Nestopia and have the refresh rate option in Nestopia set to "Auto".

Oh, and as for these bits of log output:

Direct3D: vsync on every second refresh: unsupported
Direct3D: vsync on every third refresh: unsupported

That is nothing to be concerned about. Vsync on every refresh is all you need.