Looking for some advice

[cky4987]

I'm looking to take an old cabinet, and convert it to a mame machine. I had a couple of question's, and figured this would be a good place to ask. I did some browsing on craigslist, and found a couple of games that seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Just wanted to make sure It's not a bad deal. The two games are " Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja" and "WWF Superstars" He's selling them for $150 each. From the pictures I saw they seem to be in pretty good condition, and he said there's not any problems with them. I think they both have 19" monitor's in them, and they both run a resolution of 256x240. One of my concern's was the resolution. Say I was to run a Snes emulator or Mortal Kombat on the monitor. Is it going to look terrible because the resolution of the monitor is so low? If so would I be better off just popping in a TV, and taking out the old monitor? In your opinion which cabinet do you think i should choose? Or does it even matter? I apologize if any of these questions are dumb, but I'm new to this whole thing. Thanks in advance.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Those monitors are almost certainly standard resolution monitors. They run at whatever you feed them in the 15kHz family of displays. That just happens to be the resolution of THOSE games.

[Jack Burton]

Yup, those are gonna be 15khz monitors.  They support the same resolutions as a SDTV (more or less).

SNES games can be made to look fantastic on these.  They can be run in 240p RGB mode on an arcade monitor, which is a hell of a lot better looking than the standard composite cables that most actual SNES's are viewed through. 

Mortal Kombat is designed for a 15khz monitor.  It's actual res is a littler higher than that though. 

The one thing you might be misunderstanding is that CRT monitors don't have a native like an LCD monitor does.  They have a range of resolutions that they can sync to, and when they display them they show them natively without any scaling. 

So any 15khz monitor can show all kinds of resolutions like:

256x240
256x224
320x240
334x288
640x240
640x200

and through interlacing

640x480
512x448


I would not take out the old monitor.  It's fairly easy to set up things to run on an arcade monitor, and the rewards are worth it.  You just have to dedicate a good 20 hours or so of reading/research and you should be good to go. 

Read up on ultimarc.com and the threads in the monitor section of this forum.  Read the wiki on this site. 

A final note:  There is a difference between games and cabinets.  When you're looking to buy and arcade machine you should be aware of not just the game contained within, but the cabinet itself.  Some are worth a lot more than others, and some are much more suited to a particular game. 

[cky4987]

Thanks a lot I appreciate the answers. Yeah I checked out ultimarc, and think I'm gonna go ahead buy one of the graphics card's they sell. Vga should hook right into the monitor correct? Yeah I'm not too worried about what game it is. I just didn't want to mess up a cabinet that was worth something, or that there weren't a lot of them around anymore. I'm planning on taking out the original control panel and making my own. I guess I want it to be able to play a large variety of games. Most likely for two players. Any good CP layouts suited for that? Also as far as the computer goes I'm guessing it doesn't have to be all that powerful. I have an old one lying around with a Pentium 4 in it and a couple gigs of ram. That should be good enough right?

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

You'll want to go to slagcoin.com for layout info.