20" CRT and an Nvidia 8800GTX

[fibreoptix]

Sweet just scored a 20" CRT for 25 bucks. Now I'm new at all this Mame stuff. I'll be running an Nvidia 8800GTX in my PC. Is there anything I can do or anything I should know to optimize my Arcade experience.... video settings wise?

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

This is a VGA computer monitor?

[fibreoptix]

Yes it is.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Out of the box mame works pretty well on a monitor like that. The biggest issue you're going to run into is 'tearing' and 'stuttering'.

Most of the games emulated in mame did not run at 60Hz, the standard refresh rate in most OSs. There are a few ways to deal with this.

One is to run the game faster/slower in order to make it be 60Hz (Eg: MK1 runs at 53hz, so it's 13% faster). Without a build of mame that also raises/lowers the pitch of the audio, this can lead to audio stuttering as it tries to maintain sync.
Another method is to just ignore the framerate and let certain frames be skipped. This creates a 'tearing' or 'jerking' effect where movement that should be smooth has hiccups in it.
The most robust solution is to modify the refresh rate of windows for every game so that it matches the native rate. To my the best of my knowledge the only way to do this is with GroovyMame and specialized drivers that only work on ATI cards. There is work to make it available on nVidia cards using the third party program Powerstrip, but I'm not up on exactly how that's working yet. This method also lets you run the games at exactly scaled native resolutions on regular computer monitors, resulting in 'pixel perfect' displays. You can do this with some builds of mame as well, but they usually leave bigger boarders as they work with a smaller number of resolutions.

[fibreoptix]

Thank you very much for the info. Very informative. It was only 25 bucks not a big loss if it really bothers me.

[fibreoptix]

...Oh one more thing. I read something about scanlines.. what is that?

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Scanlines are the visual appearance of the electron stream passing over the phosphor of a monitor. Where the electrons hit the phosphor, they glow and create the image on the screen. The "scanline effect" is an attempt to recreate the feel of the otherwise low number of lines of an actual arcade monitor on the much higher resolution screen of a computer or LCD.

Visually they appear as the alternating bands of image and darkness. They create a subtle softening and blending of the otherwise hard-edged pixels. It is a purely personal aesthetic choice how to deal with this.

Here is an image from my 29" VGA monitor:

This is somewhere in-between a classic arcade monitor and a computer monitor.

This is a K7400 25" arcade monitor.

Notice that the little RGB cells are not in a perfectly aligned grid? This means that the classic scan 'line' is not actually a hard edged line. It's somewhere in between. Even this close you'll be hard pressed to identify a single 'pixel' because of this staggering of the phosphor.

[Jack Burton]

What brand and model is it?  You may be able to do some interesting things with Soft 15khz and custom modelines. 

[fibreoptix]

It's an obscure brand. I'll check when I get home.

[Gray_Area]

Read the monitor faq.