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Arcadevga and Mortal Kombat II Monitor

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leapinlew:
I recently purchased a Mortal Kombat II with a 25" monitor and a ArcadeVGA 2400 PCIe card. I've done the following:


* Downloaded the drivers at: http://www.ultimarc.com/avgadrivers.html for Windows XP. There were no previous drivers installed.
* Plugged the monitor into the VGA port and booted up the computer. Once booted into windows the screen has a flicker and reading any text is difficult. Windows says it found new hardware and I cancel out of the found new hardware menu and install the setup from the ArcadeVGA file
* ArcadeVGA drivers install fine and after a reboot I have the galaga icon to change resolutions
The flicker is still there at 640x480 and 800x600. If I change the resolution to 1024x768, the windows desktop is so large it will not display properly on the screen.
At any resolution the text is very difficult to read in Mala
About 2 inches on the Right and Left side of the monitor are not displayed. It's like black bars on the sides. Using the adjustments, it won't fill in that area. Top and bottom is fine.

So what am I doing wrong? I just recently started on this and I'm fairly new to arcade monitors. The flicker looks like a hertz issue, but I am unable to change the hertz from 59.

Nephasth:
Could you post a video of the flicker?

RandyT:

--- Quote from: leapinlew on May 22, 2011, 07:32:32 am ---The flicker is still there at 640x480 and 800x600. If I change the resolution to 1024x768, the windows desktop is so large it will not display properly on the screen.
At any resolution the text is very difficult to read in Mala
About 2 inches on the Right and Left side of the monitor are not displayed. It's like black bars on the sides. Using the adjustments, it won't fill in that area. Top and bottom is fine.

So what am I doing wrong? I just recently started on this and I'm fairly new to arcade monitors. The flicker looks like a hertz issue, but I am unable to change the hertz from 59.

--- End quote ---

You probably aren't doing anything wrong.  The flicker you are seeing is likely interlace flicker.  MKII uses a standard 15kz monitor, which means that in order to get resolutions above 320x240, it needs to use interlace.  The card you are using may have an interlace flicker reduction feature, but even so, this tends to muddy things up.  Small text is just not easy to read on standard res monitors, but you may be able to improve it a little by tweaking the focus control a bit.  Also, set your colors to something that is contrasty, but not too much.  A very dark grey background with very light grey text, for example, helps readability by cutting down the "bloom" you might experience with bright text. 

The 1024x768 resolution may be using "panning".  If you can move the screen around with your mouse, then it's "panning" and mostly useless.  Honestly, I have never seen any standard-res monitor which could be used at resolutions above 800x600, and even that would be pushing it.  Usually 720x480 is the highest usable resolution, except when using technology which "approximates" the image (upscalers, etc).

The odd thing, if I understand you correctly, are the black bars on the side. Is this experienced with every resolution?  Have you ever had this monitor up and running properly on a gameboard?  You should be able to adjust these away with the horizontal size control.  If you can't, then there may be an issue with the monitor.

RandyT

MonMotha:
Anything above ~288 lines on that monitor is going to be interlaced.  Interlace causes flicker.  Even worse, at 800x600, the refresh rate is only going to be about 50Hz.  This will flicker quite badly (it's like European TV - high res but flickery).  The sharp, thin lines common to PC graphics can make the issue quite apparent where the smoother lines of photo-realistic images found on e.g. TV can serve to hide it.

1024x768 is well outside the capabilities of the monitor, even interlaced, and so it is going to have to be a "virtual" desktop size, and you pan the viewport (which is probably 800x600 or 640x480) to view part of the screen at a time.

This is just the way these old arcade monitors are.  They're not nearly as high res as people want for normal desktop usage, but they look beautiful when displaying the low resolution arcade games they were originally designed for: way better than a crisp, sharp PC CRT does.

That said, someone was just mentioning something about 640x480 being inordinately flickery (even more so that should be expected) on the ArcadeVGA 3000.  Apparently Andy has a driver update that makes it somewhat better.  It may apply to your model, as well.  You might want to contact him and ask about this.

Malenko:
change the res to 320x240 and tell me if the flicker is there

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