Med Res Arcade Monitor to Mame?

[talex]

Hi All... my first post!

I recently picked up 2 cabinets, 1 is NFL Blitz 2 player, the second is NFL BLitz 2000 Gold 4 Player.

I wanted to turn 1 of the cabinets into Mame (the Blitz 2000 board does not always boot so that was the candidate), however upon reading more I am confused as to the monitors these used. They are "med" res monitors. The Ultimarc Arcade VGA claims to have limited supports and soft15hz seems to also offer some degree of support. A couple people have told me these will work "ok" others have said I should get rid of monitors in favor of either a TV, LCD or "standard" arcade monitor. There will definately be some Mortal Kombat played on these as well as some other newer games.

My thought is if the monitors in there will be decent, then I would get a j-pac, but if I am better off replacing the monitor, then I might as well get an i-pac and jut gut it and re-wire it from scratch so I could label everything.

I do not know enough about the monitors and how a med res would work in a Mame cabinet, thus the question.

Please lend any advise / experience you have had... I cannot wait to get started but want a fairly well laid out plan before I do anything.

Thanks ahead of time...

[Jack Burton]

Just for fun I once set a tri-sync arcade monitor to medium resolution and attempted to play standard resolution games on it.  The image was actually pretty good, and very playable.  A little soft from the scaling though.

If the monitor is in good shape I would keep it in lieu of placing a TV or LCD monitor in there.  The medium res screen is going to be better than either of those in my humble opinion.  It might not be 15khz but it's still RGB and it's still a tube.  Those factors will go a long way towards looking arcade-y.  

Standard Res UMK3


Medium Res UMK3

[talex]

Thanks for the info, I am brand new to all of this... I know computers very well but not the "arcade" side of things.

Can you tell me if all I would need to get mame going (except for the pc of course) inside one of the cabinets would be an arcade vga card and a j-pac?

[Jack Burton]

you might need a couple of odds and ends.

The Mortal Kombat series uses five or six buttons per player and includes an extra harness for those buttons.  The J-pac will have screw terminals for those, so you might have to unplug whatever harness Blitz 2000 was using and run wires from your extra buttons to the J-pac.

Blitz and Blitz 2000 use a 49-way optical joystick.  I'm unsure of how to get those to interface with the J-pac.  It would probably be easiest to just replace them with a more compatible joystick of your choice like a Competition Joystick.  

Also, you might want to look closely at your monitor and find the model number because according to klov.com:

Blitz 2000

Manufacturer:  Midway Games
 Year: 1999
 Type: Videogame

Class: Wide Release
Genre: Sports
Monitor:
Orientation: Horizontal
Type: Raster: Medium Resolution
CRT: Color
Monitor resolution can be changed between Standard and Medium Resolution via Dip Switch setting.

Now, yours is a Gold Edition, but it's still worth looking into if either of your cabinets might have a Dual-sync monitor in it. 

[talex]

Hi,
Thanks for all the info! How do I tell if they are dual-sync? If I post picture of them could you tell?

Thanks again, you are a great help!

[MonMotha]

The GAME BOARD supports outputting standard or medium res with a DIP switch setting.  However, that only changes the signal from the game board.  You'd also have to switch the MONITOR.

Dedicated Blitz cabinets seem to have two different monitors depending on era.  Some are a WG U5000 (switchable) while others are a Hantarex of some kind (which is not switchable).  If you look at what monitor you have, you may be lucky and have a switchable one.

Also, if it's a conversion from another game, it may be a standard res monitor with the game set up accordingly.

As for the sticks, they cannot be hooked up to a JPAC at all.  If this is a 2 player cabinet, the sticks are hooked up to the player 3 and 4 inputs on the board, and you could use something like a GP-Wiz49 with them.  If this is a 4 player cabinet, you've also got the I-40 board to contend with which basically nothing supports.  Conversions may just have 8-way sticks.

[talex]

I cannot find either of those names anywhere and I see no switch anywhere... 1 tube is Zenith, the other RCA is all I know at this point. I will take some pictures of these witht he boards... I am hoping you will be able to take a look and identify these and it will be appreciated.

Thanks

[talex]

I tried to take some pictures but they did not turn out very well.

Where would I look to determine if the monitor is switchable? I see all the v-sync, color knobs etc... but I see no where to switch. I also did not see any brands other than the tubes which were zenith and rca but I am pretty sure it would be somewhere on the board feeding the tubes?

[MonMotha]

Switching on most dual frequency switchable (non-auto-switching) monitors is usually accomplished by moving a plug with 4-6 largeish wires between a couple different places on the board.  Those connectors are usually labeled 15k or 24k/25k as that's where you move the plug to for that frequency setting.

The brand name of the tube doesn't say much, but Zenith is probably a Wells Gardner of some sort (no guarantees).  There's some links in the stickied topics in this forum to pages that have pictures of a bunch of monitor boards to help you identify which model you have.

[talex]

I have decided to just gut the cabinet and put an LCD in, between replacing the joysticks the partial jamma compatibility, adding buttons and now the monitor, it will be eaiser...

[talex]

Ok, hopefully some one can help, I finally got the numbers off these.

The Blitz has a model # CGM-2500 and the Blitz 2000 Gold has a model number of 69x1712-100

Does this help in determing what resolution these are and if they are switchable?

[Jack Burton]

Well,

69x1712-100 is a Wells Gardner K7000 according to this thread:

http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=114742

and K7000 is 15khz according to this pdf:

www.wellsgardner.com/pdf/Spec/K7000.pdf

So it's possible one that at least one monitor is a replacement and is a standard arcade monitor. 

[talex]

short of buying an arcade vga card and j-pac, how do you actually tell?

[Jack Burton]

I suppose a person could just -look- at them and tell what they were running.  The medium res is capable of slightly higher resolutions than the standard so if you could get a very good quality image of the screen running the game on here we might be able to figure out the resolution and tell you.  

Before you do that though wait and see what Mon Mothma says. lol.

[MonMotha]

There is a k7000 medium res series.  They're not overly common, but they're out there.  Is there a number beginnign with "WG" anywhere around?  That would be a serial number or model number.  Wells Gardner is unfortunately terrible with their numbering stuff...


That's a k7500, which is medium res (25kHz).  If it doesn't look like that, then it's probably standard res (15kHz).

The CGM-2500 is a part number apparently used by a company called QNIC that I've never heard of.  I've certainly never seen one of these monitors in any Midway cabinet (or at all, for that matter).  It's probably either a replacement, or the cabinet's a conversion to begin with.  This appears to be a standard res (15kHz) monitor.

Neither of these monitors would be switchable, which means that you can also check the DIP switches on the boards to identify what the monitor can do based on what the game is set up to output.  For the "Seattle" hardware, which is probably what you have for both (and definitely have for the original Blitz), I'd need to know what the DIP switch settings on bank U8 are.

Switches 2 and 3 control the game's output resolution:
2 ON, 3 OFF - Standard Res (15kHz)
2 OFF, 3 ON - Medium Res (25kHz)

[talex]

Ok,
I have posted some photos of both machines, both screens and some images of the monitors...

http://hammax.homeserver.com:8081/blitz/blitz.htm

[talex]

There is a k7000 medium res series.  They're not overly common, but they're out there.  Is there a number beginnign with "WG" anywhere around?  That would be a serial number or model number.  Wells Gardner is unfortunately terrible with their numbering stuff...


That's a k7500, which is medium res (25kHz).  If it doesn't look like that, then it's probably standard res (15kHz).

The CGM-2500 is a part number apparently used by a company called QNIC that I've never heard of.  I've certainly never seen one of these monitors in any Midway cabinet (or at all, for that matter).  It's probably either a replacement, or the cabinet's a conversion to begin with.  This appears to be a standard res (15kHz) monitor.

Neither of these monitors would be switchable, which means that you can also check the DIP switches on the boards to identify what the monitor can do based on what the game is set up to output.  For the "Seattle" hardware, which is probably what you have for both (and definitely have for the original Blitz), I'd need to know what the DIP switch settings on bank U8 are.

Switches 2 and 3 control the game's output resolution:
2 ON, 3 OFF - Standard Res (15kHz)
2 OFF, 3 ON - Medium Res (25kHz)

whrer are the switches in that image?

[MonMotha]

whrer are the switches in that image?

Neither of these monitors would be switchable

The monitors in question are single resolution.  Your CGM-2500 is standard resolution (15kHz) only.  The cabinet is probably a conversion from something else, or the monitor has been replaced.  Your k7000 series is probably standard resolution (only), too, but if it's the monitor pictured above (a k7500) then it's medium resolution (only).

MOST monitors are NOT switchable.  SOME are, and the monitor used in SOME Midway NFL Blitz dedicated cabinets is one such monitor.  You do not appear to have such a monitor.

Since you are wanting a standard resolution monitor, you're in luck.  You probably have them in both cabinets.  Check the DIP switch settings on your NFL Blitz board as I described above to see how they're set.  Since your monitors are NOT switchable, what they're set to is what the monitor can do.