TV with composite in for Mame cabinet?

[Retro_SA]

My 21" crt screen I bought for my Mame cabinet is turning out to be way too big for the cabinet I'm planning.  I can get a similar size tv, but it only has composite in.  How will the quality be for a Mame screen?  Or should I maybe look for a tv with a s-video input?

[Justin Z]

Really the bare minimum should be S-Video.  With composite you get nastiness like dot crawl, color bleeding, and other very detracting visual artifacts.  You can eliminate most of that with S-Video, and while the picture still won't be arcade quality, it'll at least be acceptable.

[Retro_SA]

Acceptalbe... mmm, not really what I'm after.   

I take it component will be much better then?

[Ummon]

Look at de-casing your monitor.

[Justin Z]

Yes, Component is the best no-frills option out there.  People tend to agree the picture is nearly arcade perfect, especially on games that do not scroll.

I have to say though, that while you can tell the difference between S-Video and Component, S-Video is really pretty decent.  I had that setup on a big screen for awhile and I thought it looked great.

Still, once you have Component you probably won't want to go back.

[metaHipster]

i just tried using an old 20" TV I had laying around for my new cab and upon realizing it has only Coax & Composite in, I tried it and immediately threw it out as an option.  Horrible vibrating colors around anything with any detail/contrast and the FE (in my case, Maximus) was ugly as sin even after jacking up the font size to compensate.  Made me remember why I haven't used the old TV in years!

[IG-88]

Just to throw my 2 cents in....I have an old 25" samsung that I've just tried and honestly I can't tell the diff between s-vid and composite. I am probably gonna go with composite just because the audio and video cables are bundled together. I think it mostly depends on your vid card and the settings you use IMHO.

i just tried using an old 20" TV I had laying around for my new cab and upon realizing it has only Coax & Composite in, I tried it and immediately threw it out as an option.  Horrible vibrating colors around anything with any detail/contrast and the FE (in my case, Maximus) was ugly as sin even after jacking up the font size to compensate.  Made me remember why I haven't used the old TV in years!

I had an old TV with only ant in. Using a coax adapter and a rf-modulator that converted composite from the vid card to the coax adapter to the TV, didn't look all that bad I thought. Worked pretty slick with Game Launcher & running the old classics. It's all a matter of what one considers a good pic and a bad pic. Your choice.   

[ahofle]

I will add that most of the problems people find with using a TV for MAME isn't with the S-Video or Composite connection, but with the poor TV-out quality of most video cards.  By comparison, if you hook an actual console up with S-Video or Composite to a TV, it's pretty much crystal clear.  It's only when you start converting and scaling video signals to NTSC that you start to get a poor picture.

[IG-88]

I will add that most of the problems people find with using a TV for MAME isn't with the S-Video or Composite connection, but with the poor TV-out quality of most video cards.  By comparison, if you hook an actual console up with S-Video or Composite to a TV, it's pretty much crystal clear.  It's only when you start converting and scaling video signals to NTSC that you start to get a poor picture.

Maybe we should start a thread on what vid cards people have had the best luck with 'eh? My ATI All-in-Wonder 7500 is the card I've been using for the my TV's. Seems to present a pretty good picture in my opinion. What would you recommend?

[ahofle]

That's the model I had too (well it was an ATI 7500 of some sort, maybe not the All-In-Wonder).  I got it because of the recommendations here.  A friend of mine had some kind of NVidia card and I couldn't believe how horrible the TV out looked in comparison.  But this was several years ago.  I'm not sure what cards these days are good for TV out (not very many people seem to use TVs in cabs anymore).

[bleargh]

Ok, then we're three for three...

I've also got a ATI Radeon 7500.  Well, its a Sapphire EOM version, but same diff.

I'd planned on using an nVidia MX/400 based board in my cabinet up until I saw an announcement the other day about updated Radeon drivers for Linux.  Pulled my old ATI board out of the drawer, popped it into the machine, hooked it up on S-video like I had the nVidia.  FAR better picture than the nVidia board.

For fun I then tried hooking the ATI board up using component video, but all I'm getting is black and white.  Picture looks super-sharp, but its just b+w.  Haven't spent any time yet trying to figure out why I'm missing the colour, could be any one of a number of things; that I'm cheating and using a standard RGB cable instead of a real component cable, drivers, board, splitter, TV input, who knows.  Figure I'll start by picking up a component cable next time I'm into town and going from there.

Between the two, though, the ATI 7500 had much clearer S-video output than the nVidia MX/400.

[Justin Z]

As far as the cables, there's really no such thing as a "real" component cable.  Sure, they market them, and you'll probably get better overall quality from Monster Cables, for example, but you shouldn't lose all color information just because you're using regular RCA audio cables.

[bleargh]

As far as the cables, there's really no such thing as a "real" component cable.  Sure, they market them, and you'll probably get better overall quality from Monster Cables, for example, but you shouldn't lose all color information just because you're using regular RCA audio cables.

Hmm... ok.  Then maybe I'll try pulling the card out and dropping it in a machine upstairs where I can hook it up to the 32" TV.  See if that works any better.  It'd at least let me check if my issue is on the TV side or the PC side.

[Justin Z]

Yeah, you might also try swapping the cables from input to input and see if you get a different effect.  If so, probably one of the three cables is bad.

[ever1458]

Actually I'm looking for some guidance on this as well. I have a nvidia 6800GT in my PC that I am going to put in my MAME cabinet. Would it be more beneficial for me to buy a card with s-video out and then purchase the s-video to component adapter? I was looking for a dvi-i to component adapter but I can't get a solid answer on whether that will work or not.

[bleargh]

Actually I'm looking for some guidance on this as well. I have a nvidia 6800GT in my PC that I am going to put in my MAME cabinet. Would it be more beneficial for me to buy a card with s-video out and then purchase the s-video to component adapter? I was looking for a dvi-i to component adapter but I can't get a solid answer on whether that will work or not.

S-video to component isn't going to give you any extra greatness; you'll get an S-video quality signal but on your component inputs.

If I understand it correctly, an actual component output is a better quality output to begin with.  That said, I've also read a few other threads here that indicated that some TVs actually convert component to S-video on the back-panel, which kinda kills the idea right there anyways.

From what I've seen of S-video on ATI and nVidia boards, though, I'd have to say that the ATI boards give a better S-video out than nVidia.  I'd also heard that from the place I bought the board from in the first place, so I'm not finding it that surprising.  For me, though, the issue was that I'd never been able to get the ATI TV-out stuff working on Linux until recently and so I'd been dropping nVidia boards in my boxes.  Newer Linux drivers for ATI have much better TV-out support than they did even a year ago, and so now I'm switching around and putting the ATIs back in my machines.

[Justin Z]

Yes, this is essentially correct.

To go into a little more detail, here is what's happening on each of the three types of video inputs:

Composite: The signal is a combination of three signals that are referred to as Y, U and V.  Y is the luminance, also called luma.  U and V carry the color information, called chroma, which are mixed with a carrier signal.  The consequence of all this mixing is that you get interference between the signals which results in things like "dot crawl," color bleeding, and other issues.

S-Video: S-Video is basically like having two composite signals in one.  If you look at an S-video cable you see four pins.  One of those pins carries the Y, and the other carries the U and the V (they each have their own ground).  This greatly cuts down on the amount of interference and visual artifacts you get from composite.

Component: Component, also called YPbPr, takes things a step further again.  The Y cable carries Y by itself (luma); the other two cables carry the differences between blue or red and the luma signal, respectively.  Green is not necessary to be carried because you already have the blue, red and luma so you can mathematically determine what green is, and it saves bandwidth.  Since each "component" of the signal is carried independently, YPbPr has the best video quality of the three.

There's actually a good visualization of the process at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr -- I recommend looking it up if you're curious.

As an aside -- the absolute ideal would be pure RGB, where you carry Red, Green, Blue, and then Horizontal and Vertical sync.  It's completely "uncompressed," if you will, and that's why it renders the best possible picture, including all sorts of variations on Vsync and Hsync.  But Component is pretty good as long as you stick to NTSC signals (525 lines, 60 fps interlaced, etc.).