betson imperial and arcadevga

[big daddy]

Just wanted to post an update.  Earlier I had posted a question on whether the arcadevga driver that supported the wells gardner 800x600 non-interlaced would work with the Betson Imperial.  I emailed andy about it and he had said that it "should".  Just wanted to confirm to those of you that may have the same question that the driver does work..I have no flicker in windows!

And man, that card + monitor looks superb! (I got the 27 inch).  It was expensive as hell, but man is it worth it.  I can't say it would have looked much worse without the arcadevga card because I've only tried it with the arcadevga card, but  I just "played" about 15 games last night and they looked amazing.  After only having played mame on a computer monitor, last night gave me the real arcade feel for the first time.  The most recent game I've played in an arcade was the simpsons (with my daughter) so I fired that one up and it looked identical to the one in the arcade.   And that monitor is HUGE!  I can't wait to finish my control panel to really get into it now.

I still haven't worked out all the kinks, nor read the FAQs (on a couple of the games the game wouldn't display...I would get this message flicker in the middle of the screen showing the resolution/frequency instead of the actual game...I'm sure I just have to change the resolution that the game is displaying in or something similar).  

If I've loaded the arcadevga driver does it automatically run most games at the recommended resolution/frequency or do I have to set them all up individually?  I'm using mamewah and haven't run it's little config utility to change the games resolutions yet, but like I said..the few games I ran looked spectacular so I'm assuming the presets in arcadevga are already setup for most games.  that true?

But overall, I highly recommend this monitor! (and the arcadevga card!)

[Jakobud]

Well thanks for the recommendation, but you never even said what monitor you are talking about.  I am going to assume you are talking about the Betson that Kev Steele recently reviewed.

[DYNAGOD]

how about vertical games?
say dodonpachi,19xx etc
 are those games displaying correctly?
ie sideways?

[big daddy]

it's the betson imperial multisynch (http://www.retroblast.com/reviews/betson.html)

as for the vertical games they are displaying vertical (up and down) with some stretching I'm sure, but I still haven't figured out how to set the correct resolutions on the games..still tinkering with the restool.

[theziggens]

Quick noob question--  Can you use any video card with that Betson monitor, or do you have to use something like the Arcade VGA card to get the right settings (refresh rates and stuff) on it?

Thanks,
z

[big daddy]

I'm a bit of a newb myself, but my understanding:

You can use a regular video card with that monitor, but to get "arcade realism" quality for most games you would need to use advancemame which allows mame to send 15MHZ frequencies.

So to get resolutions close to what was in the original arcade game you can
1) use Betson imperial + regular video card + advance mame (which I understand to be difficult to configure)
2) use Betson imperial + arcadevga + regular mame

Basically look at this review..the 2nd page talks about the wellsgardner monitor, but that applies to the betson as well.  
http://retroblast.com/reviews/avga.html

[theziggens]

Cool!  Looks like I'll be picking up an ArcadeVGA card...  Thanks for the info.  

z