Just switched out pc lcd for a tv, now i have some issues...

[animatorJustin]

so i wanted to replace a 15inch lcd with a much larger 22inch tv.

After fighting to figure out how to get the computer(s-video) to the TV (composite video), and buying the right cables i got the computer to show up on the screen.

Wow is that a low resolution!!! the resolution works well with the games, blurring the pixels, but now all the text in my frontend looks awful, next to unreadable

if anyone knows how to combat this that would help me out alot

[lilshawn]

if all you have to work with is composite you don't have much to work with, composite is really terrible resolution to try and see text and whatnot on, (unless you change the windows resolution to 640x480) and use "large fonts" in the video appearance tab in the display control panel.

otherwise i'd continue to search for a tv with s-video input or even VGA (very unusual but still possible) to match the computer.

[animatorJustin]

darn, that sucks, if anyone has any other ideas that could help me out, id be glad to hear them

[lilshawn]

you could hack directly into the video amplifier and feed the RGB signal direct. an overzealous task at best, even if you know what you are doing.

I'm thinking a new(er) TV or a used arcade monitor might be your simplest (read: best) options. a newer TV will have an s-video or maybe even VGA input, and a cable can be hacked to connect to an arcade monitor with fairly decent picture quality.

you could always go for BROKE and go digital arcade monitor then all your bases are covered. but be prepared to spend some serious $$$'s


of course you can always live with what you have right now, and wait till something better rolls your way. great aunts and uncles are always getting rid of old TV's "gettin that digitl tv stuff" put the word out there your looking for something. Someone probably knows someone who's got something to get rid of.

[Jack Burton]

The easiest solution is to redesign your front-end to use larger fonts. 

A better solution is to find a TV that supports S-video or composite input and then buy a converter to change RGB to S-video/Component.  This way you can play games in their native resolutions, and have progressive video to make text very easy to read as long as it is big.

The downside is you will still need to redesign your front-end.  A font of 36-48 should work really well. 

[MonMotha]

If you're using the included video out on a PC video card, that's part of the problem.  Those things are giant pixel mashers that do all sorts of nasty scaling to "just make it work".

If you bypass all that by using native TV timings on the VGA port and an outboard RGB to NTSC converter, you can often get much better results, but it takes a lot more set up.  You'll also then be limited to 640x480 (and interlaced, at that), but the TV just can't do any higher.  Even if you have your resolution set higher right now, it's scaling it down to 640x480.  It's also probably underscanning it quite a bit which just further crushes it down and reduces usable resolution.

S-Video will look much better than composite still, especially on stuff with lots of sharp edges.  Right now, though, go in and check to see if your drivers have an option to switch the TV out from S-Video to composite mode.  Properly generated composite (with all the right filters) does a better job than passive S-Video to composite conversion like those little cable dongles do.  You'd still use the dongle as an adapter, but it would be doing no conversion since the card would already be outputting composite.  This may help a little, at least.

If you can find a TV with component inputs, then that's a great option, though a GOOD S-Video input (emphasis on the GOOD part) can attain comparable quality.

[animatorJustin]

Thanks, i was able to make the frontend text larger and that worked well

[Blanka]

I don't know how it works on PC's, but the mac DVI-S-video adapter turns any resolution from 480x640 to 768x1024 into PAL 576i.
So in MAME you can set it up to output blocky 640x480, while in the frontend it can do 1024x768, which is smootly scaled down to the video resolution.

[MonMotha]

The onboard S-Video output on most PCs works the same way: it takes whatever you feed it from 640x480 to 1024x768 and mashes it into NTSC 480i or PAL 576i (TV standard is usually user selectable).