I got another free cabinet, starting my new project...

[KingDiamond]

I have a friend that is awesome, he works at one of the biggest arcade distributors in the U.S. and today I drove over to their warehouse because I told him I needed a Mortal Kombat cabinet for a new project. So we go into the warehouse and he has hundreds if not thousands of arcade machines in there. Some of them are really old and some of them are brand new (the new Need For Speed machines and those 18 wheeler machines look cool). I was surprised that a lot of the new machines use PC hardware now. A lot of them had motherboards and hard drives inside. Anyway we found one Mortal Kombat 2 machine but it wasn't for sale, his company was reparing it for someone. There was another Mortal Kombat machine but it wasn't for sale either. It was actually a brand new Mortal Kombat machine from 1992, still in it's original wrapping. Well I told him my budget was $300 so he gives a call to this other guy and he comes over a couple minutes later and tells us that he has a Mortal Kombat machine at a Brunswick Bowling alley some 30 minutes away. It is in good condition and the price was right - FREE! I owe him a favor.

I'm bringing the cabinet home on thursday when I get to use my work van. The cab has a non-working monitor but otherwise it's perfect. They took out the boards so that they could have them in their parts dept, I don't really need the jamma boards anyway.

So I need help choosing a monitor. These guys supply the monitors for happ controls so pretty much anything I can get from happ I can get from them cheaper. I need a 25 inch monitor and I might run a windows emulator on it instead of a AdvanceMenu so that kind of resolution support is necessary. Is there anything like this made?

[jerryjanis]

Congratulations on a great find!  And heck, now you've got $300 to spend on parts!

If you can't repair the existing monitor, you can get a monitor with the same size specs from Wells Gardner so it will fit in your cab.

The easiest way to run Windows with a standard resolution arcade monitor is to use the ArcadeVGA from Ultimarc (http://ultimarc.com/avgainf.html).  It will run Windows 640x480 interlaced, and pretty much all of the Mame games will run at their original resolutions.

Wells Gardner also sells some large VGA monitors for a little bit more money.  I have never seen one in action, so I don't have much to say about it, except that people around here seem to really like it.  On of them is the D9200, I believe, and I THINK it lets you run 640x480, 800x600 without interlacing, and also will run at standard arcade monitor resolutions, so you might have the best of both worlds...  Again, don't take my word on that!

[Jakobud]

Wow I love it when people post "Project Announcements" in anywhere other than the "Project Annoucements" forum...

[Wulfster]

I got two of the 25" monitors from 8-liners and couldn't be happier: www.8liners.com

[SirPeale]

Wow I love it when people post "Project Announcements" in anywhere other than the "Project Annoucements" forum...

Not really.  This is more of a general help question.  He's asking for monitor advice, though, so possibly it might go in the monitor/video forum.

I'll leave it here for now, though.