Ultimarc ArcadeVGA PCI-E - Was I the only one who missed this?

[ddw]

Hay Andy I know a TV is not ideal but will it make a differance if one used a ati dvi to component adapter with your arcade vga 2 card. Dont really want to buy a new monator.

 Thank you.

[AndyWarne]

When you plug in the adaptor, all it does is tell the card to send a component signal at a TV resolution. So no difference to any other card. There will not be any arcade resolutions available.
Andy

[elvis]

I have spend ages trying to get pictures of the LCD screen running Galaga but just simply failed to capture the quality. I have given up on this now. Seems taking pics of anything that emits light as opposed to reflects, is not possible without blurring. Unless anyone has any ideas..
Andy

You need a camera with a fast shutter speed.  If the shutter is slower than the refresh of your monitor (ie: 1/60th of a second) you'll capture more than one frame per photo.

A cheap digital camera won't cut it.  You'll need something more professional.  If you know someone who does any sort of high-speed photography (sports photographers do this sort of thing for a living), see if they can help you out.

Likewise you will need manual focus.  Auto focus cameras rely on the light-bounce, as you mentioned.  Light-emitting surfaces play havoc with cheap cameras.  With cheap cameras you can try focussing on a near by object by pressing the camera button half-way down, and then turning to the screen and taking the photo.  But again, a better solution is a good manual-focus camera with fast shutter.

And now a question for you Andy:

Without asking you to give away business secrets, will you ever be consideing making a TV cicuit to allow true arcade resolutions to be sent to a television over S-Video in proper progressive modes?

As you have said, all TV-out chips built into modern video cards currently resample the input picture and scale them to an ugly interlaced picture.  If you ever made some sort of device that could convert your low-res RGB output to a S-Video signal, complete with low-res progressive scan modes, I know you'd have a lot of buyers.  Maybe something that plugs straight into the DSUB15 output of the AVGA, and has an S-Video or component connector hanging off the back?

Currently such things do exist on the market, but typically require quite a bit of hacking to attach to a video card, and cost a fortune to boot.  Do you have any plans to make something like this in the future?

Again, if it's all hush hush, feel free to tell me to bugger off.