Start first cab tommarow, What to get?

[AtariYoungin]

I am starting work on the cabinet for my first mame project tommarow morning, and am going about ordering all my parts tonight. I have figured out all my parts besides video interfacing. What would you guys recomend for best cost for quality? A used arcade monitor? A TV with VGA in? or a Comp Monitor? And if I use the Arcade monitor, do I need an ArcadeVGA? I won't be touching windows, all will be done using DOS.

[SirPeale]

Get ye the arcade monitore.  And an ATI Rage card too!

Oh, you'll need either a video amp or a J-PAC.

[AtariYoungin]

Get ye the arcade monitore.  And an ATI Rage card too!

Oh, you'll need either a video amp or a J-PAC.

I have an ATI All In Wonder Pro I can use in it, that runs on the RAGE chipset. What kind of video amp are you talking about?

[talem]

he means a convertor from arcade monitor to your ATI card. Jornk is what hes talking about

[SirPeale]

he means a convertor from arcade monitor to your ATI card. Jornk is what hes talking about

No, I really don't.  I mean an amplifier.  

Video cards output a signal @ ~.75V.  The signal should be ~5V.  The signal will have to be amplified.

Ultimarc sells a video amp for ~US$15.  Or you can build your own.  

http://www.mameworld.net/pc2jamma/hardware.html

The J-PAC comes with a built in video amp.  I think this is the best solution, since you take care of your keyboard encoder and your video amp solution all in one convenient package.

You still have to get the signal @ 15KHz, and if you're going to run DOS that ATI card *should* do it.  If you want to run Windows you have three solutions:

1) The ArcadeVGA.  Runs @ 15KHz all the time.
2) Cards based on the Trident Blade T64 chipset.  There have been drivers written to use these cards in Windows.
3) Write your own video driver.  There is enough information on most chipsets to do this (but no one has.  want to step up to the challenge?)