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Main => Monitor/Video Forum => Topic started by: billw81 on June 05, 2013, 06:08:02 pm

Title: TV Display Help
Post by: billw81 on June 05, 2013, 06:08:02 pm

Hi All,

My arcade cabinet is nearly complete, now I'm just looking for the right display. I found an old 25 inch RCA tv that looked perfect...just the right size for my cabinet. After hooking it up with an S video cable, though, it looks terrible. Outside of MAME, text is so blurry that I can barely read it, which I guess is to be expected? But games in MAME look terrible, especially compared to the 17 inch crt i was testing with. The 17 inch crt looked great, it's just much smaller than I'd like.

I'm PC savvy, but I know next to nothing about A/V stuff. The TV is an RCA, model 27R410T, and has inputs for S video and RGB. My PC has outputs for S video, VGA, and DVI. Is the bad picture just the nature of the TV itself? Or can I possibly improve the picture (significantly) by getting a converter and using a different signal? Or a different video card with different outputs? Or do I need to just give up on this particular tv?

Thanks for any input you can provide!

-Bill

Title: Re: TV Display Help
Post by: Rigby on June 05, 2013, 07:34:58 pm

If you'd like to take a picture to show us, that would help, but I'm betting it's just the nature of TVs.  It could be that there's something wrong, though.  Take a picture, so we can see what you see, and we can go from there.

Title: TV Display Help
Post by: mgb on June 05, 2013, 08:10:29 pm

Are you using regular command line mame.
I may be off but I thought for using stuff like s-video, you had to use something like groovy mame or a few years back it was advance mame that people were using for this.
It's definitely not gonna be the same settings you would have been using for the VGA.
  Are you just using a video card that so has an s video out?
It's probably interlaced.

Title: Re: TV Display Help
Post by: billw81 on June 06, 2013, 11:27:55 am

Thanks for the replies! I'm using MAME32 Plus! Plus! 0.119. After posting this, my gf went and bought a cable that goes from S video to RCA and for some reason, it looks a million times better. I don't understand why converting a signal to RCA from S actually looks better than a straight S signal (excuse my busted terminology here!).

Regardless, now it looks great! Thanks again for the responses, I'm sure I'll have more questions down the road :)