TV with Svideo hard to see?

[hellothere123]

I have a 27" TV on Svideo from my PC...My games look EXCELLENT!

BUT, when I look at my PC desktop on my TV with Svideo I can barely make out windows...I need to see the screen clearly so i can do updates on my emulators and stuff...


So Mame looks awesome when it is running games, but desktop and windows is blurred...what to do?

[fixedpigs]

what resolution are you running for your desktop...?

[ahofle]

Try 640x480 for the desktop.  800x600 or higher is simply more resolution than you can feed a standard def TV.

[MPTech]

Yep, I agree. I'm running a 25" TV and experience the same thing. For older MAME Arcade games, it looks fine, but any newer games or PinBall Tables (Visual Pinball and Future Pinball) the quality really deteriorates.  And like you said, when I'm in Windows, I have a tough time reading the screen.  (I had to re-register XP last week (added a new video card (GD MS!!)) and I could barely make out the numbers they provided, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to register it without pulling it out from the wall and hooking up a monitor to it!
For whatever reason, my video card (just bought last week, Nvidia GeForce 6200, 256mb) only allows me to run 800x600 or 1024x768, with the TV(?).

I love the size, but the quality definitely suffers.  I've been strongly considering a 26" or 28" LCD mounted vertically, but the things are still too expensive to rationalize the purchase.

I'd really be interested in hearing a solution.

[rhuel]

Do you have your cabinet pc networked with any other pcs? Or do you own a laptop? You could remote desktop in to the cab from another pc and manage everything that way once you set up shares and such on the cab.

I'll be in the same boat pretty soon I believe. I'll be putting a TV in a cab and have experienced the same issue with the desktop looking like poo on the TV. I'll be able to remote in via remote desktop if I go windows or ssh if I decide to use linux. I plan to have a crossover cable connected to the cab pc and either laying inside the cab or wiring a drop to the outside of the cabinet so I can plug in a laptop and remotely configure the cab pc. This way I don't need to worry about updating my cab, running AV or exposing it to the internet. It won't have explorer or X loaded anyway, so I won't have a desktop to look at anyway.

Might be something to consider, might not be an option for you.

[Turnarcades]

I had the same problem with my first arcade. Mine was an 'internet TV' which was supposed to support higher resolutions, but I found that the picture was blurry on desktop whatever the resolution. I found I had to alter the refresh rate and loads of settings on the NVIDIA control panel every time I used the desktop.

My advice? Set it up your PC properly, set the display good for games then leave it like that whenever possible. You won't find a setting that works well for both; at least I never did!

[ahofle]

I'd really be interested in hearing a solution.

Sometimes, you have to go into advanced settings to set a mode lower than 800x600.  Go to the desktop and right click, select properties, settings tab, advanced button, adapter tab, then click the list all modes.  You should see 640x480 there to select.

[hatrick]

I had the same issue with my arcade machine and s-vid TV. What I did was go into the settings in Windows and change the fonts on all of the windows to be HUGE clear fonts. It looks a bit rediculous, but all but the littlest of text is now readable.