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Arcade monitor do vs PC or TV?
ahofle:
shorthair, just out of curiousity, how big is your arcade monitor? I'm guessing it's rather large if you are noticing (and annoyed by) scan lines. 240 lines on a 27" CGA monitor is going to have bigger scanlines than 240 lines on a 19" or smaller monitor (which is what most of the classics used). To test this, try shrinking the image down and you should see them get smaller.
--- Quote ---I'm not talking about ahofle's pictures, but the pac pics.
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Which pac pics are those?
tetsu96:
--- Quote from: shorthair on April 22, 2007, 04:31:11 pm ---Actually, I think I've been too involved in caring that much about and exploring native resolutions, when I already liked what I had, but you know it's hard at times just to sit around not knowing of other things. A lot of hassle it can be finding out, though. In any case, below are some pics I took last night. I'm curious what people think. (I'll disclose the technical details, later.)
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It's hard to tell from the pictures since the fact that photos of displays don't usually look near as good as the display does in person tends to make it difficult to be objective, but they don't look like they're native resolution to me. At a native resolution, you should see natural scanlines in almost anything MAME. With the larger monitors the scanlines become a bit more harsh to look at, but if you're using advancemame you should be able to double up the resolution and use 50% scanlines to soften the effect.
Here's some pictures from my cabs (big pictures too, right click and view image to get the non-resized impact). They don't look quite as good as they look in person (no moire effect, no image tearing from the refresh, etc), but maybe they illustrate how scanlines might look if done properly.
--EDIT--
Can't link images from MAMEWORLD directly anymore, but you can view the pictures of the cabs from the website. Cabs #1 and 2, the pictures near the bottom of their pages show some hi-res closeups.
http://tvmame32.mameworld.net
RayB:
On an arcade monitor, scan lines become really obvious if you set the focus too sharp. You're supposed to set it so it's a balance of pixel clarity AND blending with the neighboring pixels a bit.
Basically, an arcade monitor has "round" pixels, whereas PC is a square. Why would anyone want to display a nice soft blob into a hard square instead?
;D
shorthair:
No, those images aren't native, of course. I just wondered what people thought of the quality (in a neutral sense) of them.
Ahofle: might be another similar thread I'm thinking of. Yeah, it's 27 inches. 19 is just too small, anymore. Fun, but not really fun. Remember when you were a kid and saw a 13"?...and thought it wasn't anywhere near as cool? I did, at least. Same kind of thing, though I'm sure there's a distinctive difference between a lower res and a tri-sync. Still, I'm not shrinkin - at least, not yet - so the monitor has to be bigger.
Tetsu: ....what happen to da pic-chures?...
RayB: I can see your point, there.
Zebidee:
Nothing can beat the colour depth of a good CRT, especially the Sony Professional Video monitors I am using at the moment. Handles cga and ega modes well. They also have a super trinitron screen with their special tri-phosphor coating that makes the colour jump out at you. Simply beats the pants off everything.
I reckon that cga games simply look bad on vga monitors, for all the reasons outlined above. Advancemame does some neat stuff to make them look not so bad though.
Reckon I'll stick with cga/ega CRTs until their capacitors wear out.