tv with windows

[flipped cracker]

i currently have a 20 inch tv in my cabinet and i'm running windows xp with mame32 plus. i'm using an ati radeon 7000 video card with the rca tv-out. the games look fine when playing, but i can barely read text in windows. should i look into getting a different video card? would a different front-end help? thanks.

[crashwg]

for best results without spending a crapload, you'll want to get a video card with s-video and a tv with the corasponding input.  You can get a decent ATI card with svid for like $70? or so

[flipped cracker]

would s-video really help? i remember a while back hooking up a tv to my laptop via s-video (and it has an ati card too) and not being able to read text very well (but it worked great for dvd movies).

[Zathras]

Even with S-video text can be hard on the eyes so I don't know if it would be worth the investment for an upgrade.

I've got mine hooked up via component and it looks pretty good - it's quite readable but even then if you are using it for more than 30 minutes or so for text it gets hard on the eyes.

To tweak your current setup I would say just make sure you are using a good quality cable and maybe try turning your sharpness setting down (I know it seems counter-intuitive but it "sharpens" things by adding additional information).

[PacManFan]

would s-video really help? i remember a while back hooking up a tv to my laptop via s-video (and it has an ati card too) and not being able to read text very well (but it worked great for dvd movies).

The differance between composite and svideo is huge. Svideo doesn't suffer from as many chroma problems, or "composite dot crawl" syndrome. If you look at a vertical line on a composite screen, do you see diagnal "stripes" in it? You may or may not depending on whether you radeon card is set to "frozen compostite dot crawl" or not, Either way, it adds a "blurriness" to every other line on the screen. S-Video is great , or a true RGB signal into the monitor is the best (Arcade monitor or VGA).

-PMF

[flipped cracker]

now, what about DVI? the card has a DVI out. i doubt i'd get a tv with DVI in (because they're expensive), but would it change anything?

[MadEditor]

just my 2 cents here...

A good idea would be to increase Fonts size in your FE ... and even putting text in BOLD...

[TalkingOctopus]

Although S-video vastly improves the image quality, small fonts are still difficult to read.  I use MAMEWAH w/ my TV and a 24-26 point font for the game list.