When I first got into building my cabinet, I knew that the display would be of utmost importance. When I first used my GeForce3 Ti-200 card as well as my friend's ATI Radeon 8500 to see the results, I was +/- on the whole thing. Yeah, I could have dealt with the picture quality had I used the TV-Out from either one of the video cards, but it was obvious that the games didn't look as good as they did on the monitor. Heck, even the monitor made the games appear too crisp-looking because of the high resolutions used when playing the games. An arcade monitor would have worked nicely, but they are expensive, dangerous to work with, and I would have had to tinker around the resolutions/refresh rates to get it to work properly. I don't have the time or the patience to play with those things. All in all, I needed to find a way to get the maximum picture quality out of a television set with my video card. So....
Of all places to find a perfect solution for projecting a PC signal to a TV, I found one in my Pschology II class this past week. All semester long, I had been taking notes from the professor's 42 inch television screen, but the thought never occurred to me that I could use the same device she was using on my television at home. Here I have been all this time trying to figure out the perfect solution for transferring the PC signal to my TV with good quality and the answer was sitting was under my nose! Well, to make a long story short, I was finishing up a test last week when my mind started to wonder. I started to think about my unfinished cabinet sitting at the house. Well, I looked up and saw the instructor's TV and well...I put the two together and you know the rest of the story. The device she was using is something known as an "AverKey". Before you go off on a search for an "Averkey" and leave the rest of this post in the dust, let me finish telling you about it. Using this device is going to save you a lot of time and money, and your friends are going to love the quality that it puts out on your TV.
If any of you are using TV-Out on your NVIDIA/ATI card for your cabinet, you really need to get one of these things to augment your card. Even if you have a video card that doesn't have a TV-Out slot on it, you can still use the Averkey to project the standard VGA signal on your card as a TV-Out signal. An "Averkey" device allows you to connect devices with VGA and S-video right up to your TV with minute signal loss. In fact, the picture quality from the "Averkey" is superior to that from a standard TV-Out card. I have tried gold-plated S-video cords coupled with the TV-Out on my friend's ATI Radeon card before and even the quality of that card ALONE didn't match that with one coupled with the Averkey.
An Averkey has every feature you would want on TV-out including zoom, stretch, higher resolution that what the regular TV-out offers. Images fit perfectly on the TV. I was playing some NeoGeo games on one of those and WOW!. No jaggies on the TV, beautiful colors, nice and smooth image, Windows 2000 desktop looks beautiful, etc etc. Samurai Showdown and Bust-A-Move(puzzle game) retained all of their vibrant colors like they had in the arcade.
Another cool feature is that no software is needed and you don't have to be switching between TV and monitor since it displays whatever is on your monitor on your TV at the same time. Meaning also that it can be used on any OS, Linux, Dos, Windows as well as ArcadeOS, and any other DOS or Windows emulators.
What makes the Averkey so special is that it is designed for teachers, instructors, or anyone that wants to display computer information on a television screen. Those kind of people don't have a lot of time to be fooling around with display settings or trying to adjust the contrast on the television screen. The picture quality delivered by the Averkey is unmatched in today's market of TV-Out in my opinion. I have tried a lot of devices in trying to find the best output to my television screen and this is the one device I have found that actually makes the picture crystal clear.
This may be old news to some, but I just wanted to tell you about this thing I stumbled across this past week. If you have an exisiting video card and want to up the quality on your TV or if you are considering buying a card, make sure you use this thing with it. The cost for the standard Averkey is $99 and it can go as high as $299. I will tell you now that I don't have a lot of money to go blow on devices so I opted for the $99 model. I don't think there is a difference in the quality between the $99 and $299 model except for some extra features and perks that usually don't apply to any of us. The main website that sells these is located at http://www.aver.com
The page on that site that contains the $99 model is right here:
http://www.aver.com/products/averkey_imicro01.htmlFor average users such as you and I, the $99 model is way more than enough. There are too many features for me to list right here so I'll let you do that at the above links. I saved a lot of time, money, hassle, and hair by using one of these.
-Alienreb