New Cabinet Tried and True monitor selection

[JolietBob]

Greetings,

I'm building my first cabinet and was hoping to get some expert opinions on the monitor.   I would like to purchase something that is tried and true.

I was looking at the 29" makvision over at x-arcade as a solution (http://shop.xgaming.com/collections/arcade-parts/products/27-29-inch-makvision-crt-arcade-monitor)

Does anyone have experience with this monitor?  If not this one, which would be the smartest to go with?  Which video card should be paired with it?

I will setup my os to be windows 7 64bit

Thanks for your help!

[lilshawn]

it's a decent enough monitor. it's certainly tried, but not necessarily "true". CRT overall has it's pluses, sure....but it also has it's minuses. Some parts are becoming obsolete and cannot be found anywhere. I got a quote for some specialized replacement capacitors to fix some monitors. I had to have a manufacturer in china do a special run of them... and I also had to buy 10,000 of them.

this monitor in particular has some common faults (mainly due to the chosen parts being ran at their absolute maximum.) while not bad for occasional usage, it's not reliable for ME to be run 24/7 environment as intended in a commercial game setting.

that said, with shipping though you might be looking at close to $700 to a grand all in. If money is no object, fly at it. but if this is truly your first time, perhaps start smaller and consider perhaps an LCD monitor based build first, then go for the "authentic" arcade experience later once you've decided you want to jump all in.

[JolietBob]

Yes, I'm a bit on the fence on this.  I have had 3 different arcade games in the past.  The last one which is still at the house is space duel.  Nice to have the stand up arcade console but I think it may be just as nice to have a flat screen mounted and large 4 player controller bar.  Mame seems to run fine on my computer monitor, any drawbacks to using a lcd/led tv?  I heard that mame guns do not work well with lcd/led.

Thanks for your input.

-Bob

[lilshawn]

no, optical guns won't work with LCD/plasma displays due to the way the screen is drawn on them.

pluses for LCD/plasma:

easy to obtain.
plentifull and cheap.
if it breaks down....1000's of others out there to switch it with.

minuses for LCD/plasma:

some graphics don't look quite right (due to no scanlines)
optical guns don't work
depending on LCD technology, the view angles at the edges could start to distort the colors off axis.
LCD resolution is so high it can make look kinda bad (fixed using a scanline generator)


otherwise LCD is fine if you aren't into the "purest" arcade experience. (gotta be at original resolution on a CRT blah blah blah)