question about the Wells Gardner D9500 and arcade vga

[rlemmon]

I'm a little confused on this. If I get a standard 15 khz vision pro arcade monitor and an arcade vga card it will run the games in there native resolutions without hardware stretching, scan converters or anything.

If I get the wg d9500 Will it do the same thing or is it basically just a decased computer monitor ?

 
Thanks

[AndyWarne]

Hi,
A standard-res 15Khz monitor, when run from an ArcadeVGA card will run most MAME games at their native resolutions since most games used this type of monitor. It will run Windows in interlaced mode.

The D9500 used with an ordinary VGA card will be just a PC VGA monitor and will not run native resolutions.

The D9500 with ArcadeVGA will be able to run the native resolutions at 15Khz and will also be able to run as a PC monitor so will run Windows in non-interlaced mode.

The upshot is: if you want to play only older low-res games, get an arcade monitor. If you want to play these games and also a lot of Windows apps (including PC games) then you can run these non-interlaced with the D9500 so get this one.

Hope this helps

Andy

[rlemmon]

thanks andy

[Toonces]

Hi,
A standard-res 15Khz monitor, when run from an ArcadeVGA card will run most MAME games at their native resolutions since most games used this type of monitor. It will run Windows in interlaced mode.

The D9500 used with an ordinary VGA card will be just a PC VGA monitor and will not run native resolutions.

The D9500 with ArcadeVGA will be able to run the native resolutions at 15Khz and will also be able to run as a PC monitor so will run Windows in non-interlaced mode.

The upshot is: if you want to play only older low-res games, get an arcade monitor. If you want to play these games and also a lot of Windows apps (including PC games) then you can run these non-interlaced with the D9500 so get this one.

Hope this helps

Andy

Andy, Could you clarify something for me? I have a couple of ArcadeVGA cards and am considering the purchase of a D9500 for a specific project. Don't most modern video cards still support syncing down to 15khz? Certainly a standard ATI 9250 should be able to as that's what the ArcadeVGA is based on or is software required such as powerstrip to make them actually do that because the drivers don't expose those modes to windows?

The D9500 Monitor itself isn't just a stock PC monitor as most modern PC monitors won't sync down to 15khz and the D9500 will.

Don't get me wrong, I love the simplicity of the ArcadeVGA and if it eliminates having to setup software to sync most arcade video modes properly I am very likely to use another one with the D9500 but I never quite got the ArcadeVGA/D9200/D9500 combo as the monitors themselves will sync up to whatever signal you throw at it in the monitor's range so it seems like overkill to me. Unless of course there's a real benefit such as not having to muck with software (I've never used powerstrip, only heard of it) or advancemame to get all of the benfits of the monitor.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. It's just one of those things that on the surface makes me wonder why use both?

Toonces

[Hiub1]

Using an ArcadeVGA will only aid in the simplicity of the process. The AVGA has the ability to boot up in 15 kHz mode, which you will never get on a regular video card. Also, the AVGA is basically plug-and-play,  and you can be ready to go in quite a short amount of time. Another advantage is that it will never display a 31 kHz signal to the monitor, which might damage it; when you play with powerstrip you are bound to chose the wrong resolution at one time or another, and while it hasn't ever caused any problems for me, it might for you. This would be the case if you were using a regular arcade monitor, but the D9500 is a multi-sync monitor which will not have a problem with higher refresh rates.

The whole trick about the AVGA card is that it already starts displaying 15 kHz modes right from the start, something that Windows cannot do natively. You have to involve powerstrip to get anywhere close to what we need to drive an arcade monitor. Having a D9500 without using it to display native arcade resolutions is absolutely useless, and you might as well save some cash and get a regular 19'' crt. Combining the AVGA and a multi-sync monitor means that you can run windows in its flicker-free, native resolution, and run arcade game at their native resolutions as well. Again, you could do this using a regular video card as well, it is just a bit more involved.

I have chosen not to use an AVGA just to try and save some cash, and I have gotten the process down so that it really is not any harder than using one. The results I am getting are great, and while I don't see the bios or boot up screen since I have the boot up section diverted to another PCI card, windows boots in 15 kHz mode without a problem. I want to hide the PC as best as I can, so this really is another advantage for me.

I have used Radeon 9200SE cards without a hitch combined with powerstrip, so if you decide to go this route, you should be succesful under Windows XP. In the end, I find that setting up a computer for an arcade monitor is relatively easy provided that you use the right hardware and software, but for those unwilling to venture in powerstrip and such, the AVGA is a great choice.

[Toonces]

That's pretty much what I was thinking but reading Andy's comments made me wonder. He states that using a d9500 without an AVGA you would never get original resolutions which I beleive is inaccurate. You CAN get original resolutions but may have to use powerstrip to do so though is what it seems you are saying. All of the other issues with booting up are non-issues with a D9500 since it can display the entire range.

That said, I wouldn't hesitate using an AVGA to avoid software config if it's at all difficult but for my latest project which is a Daphne machine it seems I can avoid it as all of the resolutions supported by Daphne are 640X480 or higher anyways.

I may give powerstip a go just for the heck of it with a future project if I end up using a D9500 or D9200 but the AVGA hasn't failed me yet. It's most likely since it exposes all of those resolutions to xp that it's a painless combo.

[infiniteomega]

I've only messed with configuring things for my d9500 a bit in order to make sure it works.  I've got a pc running windows xp and have a geforce fx5200 in there (sucktastic but free).  I chose to use advancemame. 

Windows runs in 31khz mode and that's all well and good for this monitor.  For games, all I had to do was set advancemame to run at 15.75khz.  I'm sure I could have set it so that different games used different sync signals, but I play mostly neogeo and cps2 based games anyway, and didn't feel like reading much further into the configuration process.  I'm sure I can do more configuring, but that worked, took all of 2 minutes to run the config utility and I was in the games.

That said, I do want to get it so that games that need 25khz will use it, and there really aren't any mame games that use 31khz, but I figure I'll make use of it somehow.