Best display possible with

[MadMike]

Hi All

Im a total newbie with this area so bear with me.

I'm trying to get the best display possible with a normal PC monitor.  I hope to build a simple bartop in the future.  I have a CRT at the moment, but its likely I will use a LCD in the bartop.  Is it true that a CRT monitor (its 17" 1280x1028) will give me a "better" picture than a 17" LCD monitor?  Just curious. 

Anyway I have been experimenting with things not knowing what I'm doing.  I have bought a CGA to VGA scaler (gbs-8220) from eBay and also a ASUS HD4350 graphics card for soft15khz. 

I think I understand now that both of these are useless for what I want?  I won't be using a arcade monitor anytime soon.  Heres the story anyway.

I got my Scaler first, but couldn't get it to work, I figured out I needed to set my desktop to 640x480 but when I detached the VGA cable it would go back to a higher resolution.  I did get it to work a couple of times (can't remember what I did though)

Then yesterday I got my HD4350, installed catalyst 9.2 and soft15khz.  Started up Mame and nothing happened.   I installed a program called multires too to get into 640x480 easily. 

So I thought I would attach my scaler too, it worked and found a signal for once!  But I didn't really notice much difference to normal 640x480 except the colours were not as vibrant.  I was using ddraw and had hardware stretch on in Mame.ini, so I turned it off and was disappointed the scaler didn't scale it to full screen.

I downloaded Groovymame and tried that, it worked but it was a small display in the top left hand corner of the screen. 

I read that with Arcade VGA 3000 you could use that to get authentic arcade resoultions with a normal PC monitor, at least thats what it says on the webpage, is there any truth to that?

I have the T-SLG on order too, I'm hoping this will make the picture look a little better.

Thanks!

[ark_ader]

 Personally, I dont get it.

 No LCD monitor will ever look like a true arcade display.  (not without something like HLSL.. and even thats not accurate)

 As for CRT, its better in that it usually has greater color range, contrast ratio, faster complete refresh, and they can last +20yrs longer. 
But more importantly, CRTs can scale down to lower resolutions without looking funny.   LCD's tend to get blurry and distorted at non-naitive resolutions.

 However, even a modern CRT looks different than an older arcade monitor.  The dot pitch is too high, the shadow-mask too small... and so theres
no color mixing and pixel 'smoothing'.

 

[Gatt]

 Personally, I dont get it.

 No LCD monitor will ever look like a true arcade display.  (not without something like HLSL.. and even thats not accurate)

 As for CRT, its better in that it usually has greater color range, contrast ratio, faster complete refresh, and they can last +20yrs longer. 
But more importantly, CRTs can scale down to lower resolutions without looking funny.   LCD's tend to get blurry and distorted at non-naitive resolutions.

 However, even a modern CRT looks different than an older arcade monitor.  The dot pitch is too high, the shadow-mask too small... and so theres
no color mixing and pixel 'smoothing'.

I agree with everything you said,  except color range.  My understanding is that modern LCD's support a wider color range than any CRT did,  or am I off on that?  I'm not sure it's really a factor anyways,  because arcade games were largely limited by their processors,  which were at best 32bit and through the golden era were only 8 or 16bit.  So,  for a sizeable chunk of Arcade games,  the color gamut is likely 64,000 colors or so.

Regardless of the academic discussion there,  everything the quoted poster said is correct,  a CRT will outperform an LCD in every meaningful way for Arcade Emulation (And console emulation,  since anything you might be trying to emulate is going to be SDTV resolution.

[MadMike]

Hmm Perhaps I may make a case around a CRT instead of a LCD then.  I recently got a brand new CRT monitor off eBay, its HP 17", it was £29.99.  Even though I thought I wouldn't use it I still wanted it because it was brand new.  Apparently they were stock HP were holding back for warranty replacements which they no longer need.

I think the colours are better as the viewing angle is so much better, it may have less range of colours but it uses them better.