Anyway, I'm back home and I've been wanting to get down to some major games testing with 4.3. I figure one of the better ways to do this would be to live-stream my cabinet on Twitch while I go through the roms list one-by-one while taking notes in a Google Doc on how each one does. It'd be more fun for me to have a bit of interaction.
However, there's a problem with this: trying to do video capture in-line using my HDMI capture card doesn't work so well. Behold these fine examples of OBS captures from SSF2T:
https://imgur.com/hW0AMnJ
https://imgur.com/wndN50a
Yeah, it sort of vertically quad-ifies? I think this is because the capture floor of the HMDI capture card is 640x360 and it just freaks out, but I'm honestly not sure. I don't seem to be able to find much data on HDMI capture devices capturing as such low resolutions since that's not normally a thing? I know an ideal solution here would be a dedicated JAMMA-to-VGA splitter and then using a separate VGA capture device, but that's a significant equipment investment and we've already got an unused video port on the Pi 4.
So as I think I'd mentioned in 4.x discussions before, I'm interested in getting the second (normally unused) HDMI port going as a mirror of the main HDMI that outputs to the DAC, for a couple of reasons:
1. I could theoretically change the resolution of this output independent of the cab monitor resolution as a dedicated capture output
2. This could easily enable dual-cab setups for 2-player games (like the linked fighting game cabs you used to see everywhere)
3. You could have a "spectator feed" for in-person tournaments
I know in the 4.0 thread there was some mention of utilizing the second HDMI output of the Pi 4, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere just yet:
Just on a whim I ordered another HDMI adapter to be able to feed "big" HDMI out of the 2nd port and started playing around with the 2nd port plugged into a 720p Smart TV. So far, here's what I've found out:dee2eR wrote: ↑Sun Jun 07, 2020 11:49 amFrom my experimentation with two monitors so far it's promising but not there yet. I was running two unique displays (arcade Punchout style) and was forced to run X11 to make it all work. Hopefully when the video drivers are more mature it will be possible without X as the performance hit is huge. I wasn't able to get MAME to display to 2 monitors at once without X when I tried.
For just screen mirroring it may be different than when running two unique displays, I haven't tried it. You can set the two outputs to different resolutions, I have no idea how that may or may not effect screen mirroring though. I was running two 240p outputs when I did it.
1. The ARpiCADE splash screen mirrors on startup, but once it disappears no more mirroring happens natively.
2. The 2nd display is getting some kind of signal but it's blank (i.e., the TV doesn't display a "no signal" warning or blue screen; it's just black).
3. Uncommenting the "experimental" lines already in config.txt that allude to enabling dual displays causes both display ports to go/stay blank.
4. Running the 1st port to the TV works just fine; either the TV is successfully upscaling better than my capture device or the RPi is adjusting to the detected device resolution?
So that's where I'm currently at with that; I don't really know much about this sort of display stuff or RPi 4 display configs to go much further.
On the plus side, the Naomi stuff seems to be working pretty great in 4.3 so far. Virtua Tennis 2 has some jittering/slowdowns during the "replay" segments but the gameplay is just fine. The only thing in the Naomi catalogue I've found so far that doesn't work is Triggerheart Excelia but this is apparently a known issue with Flycast.
One last thing I've discovered (to my minor annoyance) is that there seems to be very large volume disparities between game platforms - Flycast/Naomi games in particular tend to be MUCH LOUDER than, say, .172 CPS2 games. I haven't looked into this closely enough to determine for a fact it's based on the emulator/backend and not just the game roms themselves, but I think it's worth examining to make life a bit more pleasant for those of us who like to switch games frequently.