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| Why the LCD TV hate? |
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| Paul Olson:
It is easy to add new images as well. Of course I would prefer the game be centered, but this is OK for an example I think. Edit at 12:30: Still playing. :) |
| Jack Burton:
--- Quote from: nitz on November 20, 2011, 12:00:54 am --- I do hear ya on the no 4:3 ratio though. :angry: This is the only thing that really bugs me about LCDs, especially for a cab. To get about the equivalent of a 25" 4:3 you've gotta go 32" 16:9 which means your cab is gonna be in the neighborhood of 28"-29" wide even if you decase. That sucks. That's why I'm going rotating monitor in my cab. I will refute your other 2 points to some degree though! :lol ;) I think it's only TVs that have lag, not computer monitors, though someone please correct me if I'm wrong, because I only fairly recently learned about the lag problem on TVs. And I believe you can get TVs where the lag isn't a problem, but you've gotta do your homework before you buy. As far as the graphics not looking right, well, that's what HLSL fixes. ;D But this comes from someone who was too young to be there during the classics era, so if you grew up on the CRTs, I could understand why you would want to replicate that as much as humanly possible. I want to replicate that as much as possible too - only I'd like to use an LCD to do it. --- End quote --- HLSL is still just another kind of filter and does reproduce the image from a CRT. It is nice though. Not sure I'd use it. I think I would be more inclined to just let the image from an LCD be what it is and play in blocky mode. LCD monitors can have input delay. The older ones especially. Additionally, even the best ones still have miniscule amounts. Enough to alter gameplay? Unlikely, but enough to cause me to steer clear of them. |
| Jack Burton:
--- Quote from: jekbrown on November 20, 2011, 01:30:53 am ---In not a single moment of my 32 years of gaming in arcades and at home, have I once gave a crap that a games graphics were blurry CRT crap OR the crisp display of a modern HDTV. It's ALL about the game play, that's all that matters. Blury color-bleed-laden low res wouldn't help HALO.....nor would ultra-crispness "hurt" black and white space invaders. Not for me anyway. I realize other people disagree, and that's just fine. My next cab will have an LCD, because it's lighter, more flexible with respect to cabinet design and simple-as-all-get-out to connect to a modern PC that will be the brain of the system. I might fiddle with filters at some point, but I doubt I'll ever put much time in it. The priority is reproducing the game play, after that everything else is just backround noise. --- End quote --- If all that matters to you is the gameplay then you're going to want to pay attention to your monitors and your video modes. You used space invaders as an example. That's a shmup. Those types of games are notorious for requiring pixel perfect spacing at the highest levels of play. Well, let's say you fired up MAME in whatever random resolution your desktop is configured for and switched to full screen. Now your screen has been scaled, and then probably blurred. It's likely the scaling was not an exact duplicate, and now extra pixels have been added to the image that were not previously there. Those extra pixels don't really exist. They're just part of the image you see, but aren't being considered by the game's programming. So that single pixel move you have to make to squeeze through the bullet pattern on the final boss of a game like Do Don Pachi is now actually divided between the real pixel and the new "fake" one and blurred, making completion of the level nearly impossible. Sure, you can 2x, 3x, 4x etc scaling, but those may not fit the screen right either. The game's resolution might not be a multiple of 4:3. Some old games like SFII did this. In this case you will have to squeeze it or stretch it anamorphically via software or your LCD monitor controls, and that adds scaling. Unless you have a CRT. A CRT monitor can "automagically" stretch a non 4:3 res into full screen without scaling the image. It can also sync to multiple refresh rates, something even more important than pixel spacing. Anybody who uses an LCD monitor is going to be locked into a single refresh rate among a variety of arcade games that used different ones. The solution to that is to use V-sync and triple buffering, or simply play your games at the wrong speed. But if you use V-sync then you get that damn input delay again. So, yeah, gameplay can't be so easily divorced from video software or hardware. |
| lettuce:
Speaking of HLSL, anyone got a good setup for Vertical games? Whilst im happy with my settings for horizontal games when im playing vertical game it just doesnt look right, unless i got into video options (tab) and rotate the display 90 degress |
| MonMotha:
The vast majority of the "problems" people cite with LCDs (unsuitable aspect ratio, input delay or "lag", viewing angles, fixed refresh rate, bad colors, and probably some others I'm not remembering right now) can be solved by buying a good (not just overall quality but also suitable for this particular purpose) LCD. We're already starting to see dedicated arcade LCDs hit the market, and as these see more development, it's possible we'll see the support electronics develop to cater to the peculiar needs of this market. There's nothing inherent in the LCD technology itself that causes these problems; it's simply the nature of the available panels as well as the support electronics that are generally made for television and PC monitor applications. Unfortunately, "good" LCDs are hard to find since the specs you care about in this application are rarely published in any accurate or detailed form, and when you finally find one, it's bound to be fairly expensive (think $500+ for a ~20"). Given that you can buy an honest to god arcade monitor for about this price, that kinda puts a damper on the enthusiasm for going LCD, aside from the fact that they're smaller. As CRTs become harder to find new and LCDs continue to be refined, this tradeoff may shift. I'm not sure any manufacturer is still making the actual CRTs (bare tubes); all that's left are new old stock that are being put into the arcade monitors still on the market. One thing you can't get around is the need to scale, since no panels are made at the sizes desired in the low resolutions the old games used, and, even if they were, you'd need a separate panel for each game, or you'd have to put up with small bars surrounding the game on the lower res stuff. Fortunately, the relatively high resolution allows you to scale with some neat effects like the HLSL effects already mentioned. A naieve bilinear or similar scale will indeed look pretty ugly in this application. Hopefully, the MAME HLSL effects may eventually get tweaked enough to provide a good experience on a "good" LCD (see above). They already look pretty impressive. Now, none of this is to say I'm an LCD fan. I'm not, at least when it comes to gaming. Every arcade game I own has a CRT on it except for my beatmaniaIIDX which has a plasma as CRTs at 40-42" 16:9 were never made (the original monitor was an LCD projection set that died long before I acquired the cabinet and was problematic in other ways, anyway). I even "stock" several new-in-box arcade monitors for the inevitable death of some of the ones in my games, and I repair whenever I can. My PC gaming setup uses 3x24" widescreen CRTs. I love the look of a good CRT, but I'm not going to be oblivious to the fact that they're going to be essentially impossible to get new within a few years. |
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