TV-out and screen resolutions

[Stephen]

Can someone confirm that TV-out will work fine for the various screen resolutions that the games use?

I intend to use xMAME or AdvanceMAME in Linux along with a video card with tv-out. The documentation indicates that valid tv-out resolutions are 640x480, 800x600 and possibly 1024x768. However, the games are sometimes 320x240 or other (often lower than 640x480) resolutions.

Using DGA, the screen should change to the appropriate resolution (using the appropriate modeline in XF86Config). What happens when that resolution is not 640x480 or 800x600?

Or am I making a big deal about nothing?
(I have not purchased the hardware for my cabinet yet - computer, video card, etc. and I want to make the right decisions from the start)

[mattv]

That would be a no.

Most TV-out cards will only output in certain resolutions, for example my voodoo 3 3000 (boo hiss) only outputs in 640 x 480. Thats all. If whatever I try to send to the TV is not in 640 x 480 nothing shows up on the TV.

So how does this work for for games that don't have a resolution of 640 x 680 (which is just about every arcade game ever made)? Mame and most other emultators / frontends will let you force a resolution for games, so I have to force all games to play in 640 x 480 which often chops the top / sides off.

More expensive cards give you more options in terms of working resolutions so you can choose the one that looks the best for each game.

So the short answer is - make sure the games you want to play look OK when scaled to one of the resolutions your TV out card can handle before you go laying down a big chunk of change for it

[Agent Davis]

You might want to also look into SciTech Display Doctor which gives you the ability to output to many more resolutions not normally supported by your vid card.

I think PowerStrip does this also.