Your Macintosh is probably working really hard! If your computer is slowing down, MasterGear tries to compensate by lowering the framerate. This speeds up emulation, but at the expense of smooth graphics.
A few ways to smooth out choppiness:
- Disconnect from the Internet. (A modem connection can slow down a Macintosh by as much as 20%!)
- Turn on "Skip Every Other Line" in the Preferences dialog. This speeds up video a great deal in full-screen mode, but looks a little darker.
- Put the video in a small window, or set your Full Screen Preferred Size to "Single."
- Lower the output quality of sound.
- Quit background applications and/or the Finder.
- Make sure "Suspend Background Tasks (in Full-Screen Mode)" is activated. This is turned on by default.
• The video is flickering and the game seems to have stopped.
Using a Language Kit with floating windows, or third-party extensions that generate floating windows or toolbars, can cause this. If these windows overlap the video portion of the display, MasterGear will become confused and video might not be updated. Simply close the floating window (disable the language kit, or deactivate the extension) and the problem should go away.
• The colors are all screwed up, but the game plays.
This is normally because the game you're playing is a Game Gear game, but the emulator mistakenly guessed that it was a Master System cartridge (or vice versa). Choose Cartridge Type from the MasterGear menu, and change its type from Master System to Game Gear or vice-versa.
• This cart glitches out, or doesn't get past the title screen before crashing.
Most problems of this sort can be cured by going to MasterGear's emulation settings in the Preferences dialog and altering the values of "Cycles/Vertical Blank." Some carts will work best with this setting placed at the default, but a few require higher or lower values. Experiment!
Less common, but still a possibility, is that some carts require a change to the value of "Delayed VRAM." This occasionally fixes problems with glitchy displays (but causes most games to go nuts).
• If I register MasterGear now, will I be forced to register again when future versions come out?
Certainly not! Once you register, you're a registered user for life.
• My computer is running MasterGear really slowly right now. If I register and set the speed above 100%, will this fix the problem?
No. Your computer is too slow to run MasterGear at full speed. Sorry.
