New Project - Where to start

[beerbarrel]

Picked up these two arcade cabs recently. They are wired for jamma and contain standard arcade monitors. I want to make one of them a mame machine just for older arcade games. Both of the machines work as is and the monitors work and have zero screen burn. At first I thought about replacing the monitors with a flat screen monitor but them decided against it. I guess my question is as follows: If I install of of the Jpac style cards and use a pc for mame will I be able to retain the 15khz monitor? Or is there a better option? If this is not the correct thread to post this please let me know.

thx

[pbj]

Just get a Pandora's Box with CGA output.  They're like $50.

[beerbarrel]

Those look very interesting...thx. They might be the ticket I need.

Just get a Pandora's Box with CGA output.  They're like $50.

[mourix]

The Chinese Pandora boards are plug and play but the upsides kinda end there because the emulation is so horrible. I stopped playing mine as 90% of the game roms are hacked roms, duplicates or play like crap. Like when you play Sonic and find out it's the infinite lives one after a while.

I can recommend RGB-Pi or the compatible hardware if you want better and more accurate gameplay.

Personally, I went going with GroovyMAME and CRT Emudriver and an old office PC for the ultimate solution. It's just a lot of hardware hassle if you are not technical.

[beerbarrel]

The rgb-pi looks very interesting as I have a few pi's lying around waiting for a job. I also have a few i5 nucs lying around too. They are what I would like to use. Lucky for me, my son has an IT job and they go and upgrade office systems for companies and they retire a lot of these nucs so I get them from time to time. I was thinking that I could use Mame with some sort of interface card to connect straight to the jamma harness that would also make use of the factory monitors.

The Chinese Pandora boards are plug and play but the upsides kinda end there because the emulation is so horrible. I stopped playing mine as 90% of the game roms are hacked roms, duplicates or play like crap. Like when you play Sonic and find out it's the infinite lives one after a while.

I can recommend RGB-Pi or the compatible hardware if you want better and more accurate gameplay.

Personally, I went going with GroovyMAME and CRT Emudriver and an old office PC for the ultimate solution. It's just a lot of hardware hassle if you are not technical.

[mourix]

That sounds like a nice couple of options then CRT Emudriver is what you need to get the proper arcade monitor signal out of a PC. Just do keep in mind it's AMD/ATI GPUs only.

[beerbarrel]

Due to the fact that I dont think these Intel Nucs have ATI graphics so that is an issue. I went ahead and ordered the jamma pi card. I have a spare  Pi5. I think Im going to give that a shot first....

thx guys