computer to arcade monitor help

[quadrider1]

Do i have to buy the video card from andy at ulrimarc to hook my comp up to a crt or other monitor? Is there another way?

[Gray_Area]

What do I see above?.....Oh, links. One says, ah, wiki. Another says......monitor/video.

[Nephasth]

If you don't go for the ArcadeVGA you could give a VGA to CGA adapter a try.

[BobA]

With the right video card you can use soft 15 to do the conversion.

[NoBullMAME]

Soft-15 (http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Soft-15khz) is not for the faint of heart. It's possible to fry your monitor. If you go that route, make sure you read everything before trying it.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Has anyone ever actually, verifiably fried a monitor by feeding it a bad signal? Somehow I doubt it.

[NoBullMAME]

Has anyone ever actually, verifiably fried a monitor by feeding it a bad signal? Somehow I doubt it.

No, I've only played around with Soft-15 once. But I have seen boards fried when fed the wrong signal, nothing spectacular, just a pop, whiff of ozone and $150 down the tube.

I did see a monitor catch fire once (actually I didn't see flames as the cabinet was closed, but tones of smoke). It was from a board really damaged by a shipping company. It was pretty cool, except it was my arcade =-(

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

The worst Soft15Khz could manage to do is send the monitor a 31kHz or 25kHz signal instead of 15, which is what pretty much what it would do if it weren't installed. I'd venture you'd actually be safer tinkering with it than not.

[NoBullMAME]

Has anyone ever actually, verifiably fried a monitor by feeding it a bad signal? Somehow I doubt it.

No, I've only played around with Soft-15 once. But I have seen boards fried when fed the wrong signal, nothing spectacular, just a pop, whiff of ozone and $150 down the tube.

I did see a monitor catch fire once (actually I didn't see flames as the cabinet was closed, but tones of smoke). It was from a board really damaged by a shipping company. It was pretty cool, except it was in my arcade =-(

Update: I thought the Soft-15 website said it could damage your monitor? Maybe just CYA, though.

[Jack Burton]

Has anyone ever actually, verifiably fried a monitor by feeding it a bad signal? Somehow I doubt it.

I have done this.  

I had a Nokia workstation monitor that would only accept a few resolutions.  I had advancemame set up on it playing in double refresh/native mode.

If I left Super Street Fighter II turbo setting in attract mode for too long it would crash.  It's a glitch in advancemame with that particular game.

I left the room and the game crashed, sending the OS back to the desktop.  In this case the desktop was set to 1024x768@120hz.  This was the resolution I was using on on my main pc.  

I had switched the video cable from my dekstop monitor to the nokia one to test the monitor at high refresh rate/low res modes.  

When it switched back to the desktop the monitor would squeal and show squiggly lines.  I usually caught it and turned the monitor off and then switched the cables back to the desktop monitor.

but one day I forgot that Street Fighter could crash and just left it in attract mode.  When I came in the room after a while my monitor was off and had a blinking orange light.

When I hooked the pc back up to my desktop monitor I could see the game had crashed.

The Nokia monitor never worked again.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Wow. That's awesomely horrible. Sorry for your loss / thanks for the warning. (:

[NoBullMAME]

A lot of it has to do with the monitor. The one I fried was on a candy cab with a cheap Chinese board. But I feed out of range signals to Makvision monitors all the time, no problem (it gives an out of sync message). If I feed one to a Kortek (Betson) monitor, they get real upset (Buzzing, fuzzy picture, etc) I change it back right away.

[Gray_Area]

Any PC CRT should be able to turn itself off when fed incompatible signals. Also, a lot of recent vintage 15khz monitors will give a screwy image when fed signals above 15khz. They just don't sync to it.

[Osirus23]

Soft15kHz shouldn't run 25/31kHz output unless you specifically load them.