You're saying that it "works much better than soft 15khz" because you can just plug it in and get a picture. In that sense, yes it works. In the sense of getting a picture of the full quality the CRT is capable of, no it doesn't work. Not even close. There is a world of difference between the native resolution, native refresh, scanlines intact, etc., and a scaled and interlaced approximation in 480i which is blurrier, lacking scanlines, has interlace-flicker, wrong refresh rate, etc. There is also the possibility of added lag which you don't seem to be addressing, both from the MAME work-arounds to prevent tearing when running the wrong refresh rate and from the converter itself.
As far as accidentally putting out a 31kHz signal, that won't happen with CRT_Emudriver/GroovyMAME if it is set up properly for your monitor. As for the output prior to Windows loading, you could either wire a computer-controlled relay to automatically turn the monitor on after Windows loads, or just listen for the Windows start-up sound before turning it on manually. I believe there are also hardware solutions which will block any non-15kHz signals.
This is not meant to be a "pissing contest," it's about providing accurate, useful answers. I believe boranes stated that native res was important:
the arcade vga make the lower res games look so good with mame. and i dont want to loose out on that.
It's frustrating when people ask questions and someone comes along and says "here use this dirt-simple solution, you just plug it in and there's
nothing wrong with it." That's blatant misinformation, and a disservice to anyone following the thread. If you must recommend something like that you ought to say, "the benefit to this solution is simplicity, the downsides are..."
When running MAME on a CRT, there is rarely a solution that is both very simple to setup and performs well. These two things are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and the various solutions lie at different points on that spectrum. Different users have different levels of time, money, and ability to devote to a complex setup, and different expectations of quality. So, they may end up choosing a solution from anywhere on the spectrum. There's nothing wrong with that, but if they've come to the video section for answers they could at least be given a full explanation of the options so they can make an informed decision. Just saying "here plug this in, it works good enough and there's nothing more you need to know," is just disrespectful to the people asking the questions. I consider it a disservice to try and keep people in some kind of "ignorant bliss."
(Also, this isn't to say that the best performing setup can't be just as simple to use
after the setup is complete.)
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boranes, the Radeon HD4890 is the most powerful card that's compatible with CRT_Emudriver. It's way more than enough for MAME, but you should see how that performs with other emulators you want to add, like Demul. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to optomize both native res MAME and newer 3D/31kHz+ stuff in the same cabinet.
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Topic: arcade vga alternatives (Read 5376 times)
