g450 Clone Performance

[anteck]

Hey guys/gals

I've got a g450 (actually marked a g45+ MDHA32D)
and set it up so my second display is a tv in the loungeroom.
DVDMAX is great, apart from the occasional frame skip (1 every three minutes or so), and i tried out clone mode last night.

I did some reading on this forum & pretty much knew what to expect from clone mode.

I tried colin mcrae rally 2, on 800X600. It seemed fine!
(i have a celeron 700)
I couldn't believe how well it performed. After reading stories about MAME skipping frames, i thought it would be absolute crap!
I've tried it with and without clone, and i don't see much diff (maybee a tiny bit)

What i want to know is every here refers to the scaling done in software. What exactly is meant by scaling, and is scaling always used in clone mode? I mean if you have both the same res on diff heads, no scaling is required?

Another thing, now mame won't work with the new drivers. Gives directdraw error mode no available (or something like that)

Anyone figured out diabling macrovision on the tv-out yet?

Thanks.

Ant.

[Maggi]

Re: g450 Clone Performance

Originally posted by anteck
...

What i want to know is every here refers to the scaling done in software. What exactly is meant by scaling, and is scaling always used in clone mode? I mean if you have both the same res on diff heads, no scaling is required?

...

native TV resolutions are 720x576 for PAL and 720x486 for NTSC, so any resolution that differs needs to be scaled, which can either be done in hardware by a dedicated chip, such as the G400s had (Maven) or in software, while the latter could either use part of the gfx processor or the main CPU, depending on the priciple of given drivers.

I have no idea, which software path G450/550 are using though.

[anteck]

Thanks for that.

Any ideas why mame, or ccs64 (commodore 64 emulator) just don't work when clone mode in enabled. MAME gives direct draw errors, CCS64 just stuffs up. Disable clone mode and it's fine again! Wierd.. any ideas, please???

Thanks

Ant.