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Buying a cabinet. What to look out for????

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nigel1210:

I thought you had to put the monitor on it's side to play vertical games. otherwise the game will look like it's on it side?

paigeoliver:


--- Quote from: nigel1210 on February 12, 2004, 08:27:19 pm ---I thought you had to put the monitor on it's side to play vertical games. otherwise the game will look like it's on it side?

--- End quote ---

You can make game turn it and run it with black bars on the side (this is actually the default).

Cabinets with 25" displays often are not any physically larger than ones with 19" displays, as a 25" monitor just barely fits inbetween the sides of the "standard" sized cabinet.

20" is not a standard arcade monitor size in the US, but is common in Au (although Sega used to use 20" models on US cabs in the early 80s).

Factory cabinets with straight up rotating monitors are almost unheard of (except for generic "candy/metal/plastic" modern imported cabinets from Asia.

Cabinets with some provision for rotating the monitor are a bit more common. About one in 3 of my games have some factory provision for swapping the monitor to the other orientation. But it does take tools.

I would personally look for the nicest looking, most complete cabinet you can find that has a WOODEN control panel. With a wooden panel you can rebuild it however you want easily. Modifying metal panels is much tougher, as is rebuilding them.

kevin:

By default, MAME will scale down vertical games so they fit with the correct aspect ratio on a horizontal monitor.. Imagine a widescreen movie turned on its side, I guess. MAME also has options to display on a vertically oriented monitor at the proper size if your cab is built that way. If you're planning on using actual game boards, I don't know of any that are compatible with both horizontal and vertical monitors.

As paigeoliver said, most cabinets do not have the ability to rotate the monitor easily enough that you would do it regularly. I have a Dynamo cab, and it's built so that the monitor can be rotated by unscrewing 2 wingnuts, pulling the monitor forward out of the cab, rotating it, and sliding it back into place. I'd say it's a 2 person job, and after doing it once I plan on leaving it in vertical orientation for the rest of its life.

-Kevin

paigeoliver:

Something else that is semi-common in early 80s IMPORT cabinets (read "Made in Japan" or "Made in China") are ones that allow you to rotate the tube without taking the actual monitor out of the machine.

On these the monitor either doesn't actually use a frame, or it has a weird frame, on either kind you can undo the bolts that hold the tube, and rotate it 90 degrees and bolt it back in place without pulling the entire monitor. I have seen this on Artic/ATW cabinets (Made in China) and on SNK cabinets (Made in Japan). Of course all that assumes the cabinet actually has the original monitor, which is often not the case anymore.

I personally think rotating monitors are overrated. I don't like going through a lot of trouble to switch games, I would rather just have more than one cabinet.

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