CRT PC monitor for Arcade Cab - Does resolution matter?

[SlainbytheBrain]

I recently picked up a 19" Viewsonic to use with my arcade cab I just finished.

See: http://www.lynchjim.com/Pdf/monitor_VieSonic_pf790.pdf

I am currently at 1024x768, which is what my smaller LCD monitor was at. I can go to a much higher resolution with this new monitor (up to 1600x1200).

My question is, does it matter what resolution that I set it at? None of the games are going to even approach that high of a resolution. What benefits or drawbacks are there to changing the resolution (eg. "looks better" or "affects fullscreen in some emulators," etc.). I am using Hyperspin if that matters.


Thanks!

-Matt

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Short answer: It depends!

Long answer: There are (at least) two paths for displaying games in mame..'pixel perfect' and 'enhanced'. Some people, such as myself, prefer to see games rendered as closely to their native display mode as possible. This includes refresh rates (which are far more important than you might realize). The other route is to go for 'enhancements' such as blending, smoothing, scanline emulation, etc. This includes techniques that attempt to make up for the differences in native resolution and displayed resolution by increasing the pixel count and 'filling in' the missing parts. Some people like the look of this, others don't.

Going with the approach of 'pixel perfect', the ideal solution, as I see it, is to set up many many different resolutions on your system and let mame pick between them. My current solution is to use GroovyMame and a set of modified ATI drivers (at the moment, there are none for nVidia cards, or Intel graphics). These modified drivers increase the number of resolutions the system can have assigned, and a tool along with them generates the resolutions based off of the games in mame, adjusted for what your monitor is capable of displaying. For a standard PC monitor, you can take the original low resolutions (eg: 320x240, 386x480, etc) and exactly double them (eg: 640x480, 772x960). The GroovyMame build addresses the other part of the problem, refresh rates, by dynamically re-writing the windows registry for different refresh rates before switching video modes. Games like Mortal Kombat that ran at ~54hz either play too fast at 60hz, or stutter and skip frames as it tries to emulate at one speed and display at another. For me, the difference was quite impressive what such seemingly small numbers made.

Check out the discussion on this here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=112869.0
For your monitor your ranges are 30-97kHz horizontal, 50-180Hz vertical.