Virtua Fighter Monitor 25khz help

[Tzatziki]

Hello guyz, I have a Virtua fighter cab and was wondering which GFX card to use and Ive heard the best is VGA, from what some people have said my monitor is 25hz and the card does not support that resolution monitors.

Some other people have said that my monitor can be changed with a switch to 15khz, cant check right now but will do by the end of the day cos Im at work.

so does anyone know what to do? anyone that has converted a Virtua Fighter cab?

on another thread they said I would have to choose which games to play 25khz or 15khz games. If the cab does have a switch and I can turn it to 15khz wont I be able to play all the games, only 15khz?

isnt there a way to play all games on a 25khz monitor and also a graphic card which works with 25khz?

[b3atmania]

Hello guyz, I have a Virtua fighter cab and was wondering which GFX card to use and Ive heard the best is VGA, from what some people have said my monitor is 25hz and the card does not support that resolution monitors.

Many cards do actually support that resolution. They just don't do it in Windows. Try AdvanceMAME.

Some other people have said that my monitor can be changed with a switch to 15khz, cant check right now but will do by the end of the day cos Im at work.

Although I don't know this first hand, I seem to recall Sega used Hantarex monitors for the Virtua Fighter cabinets. They are switchable to 15kHz indeed.

on another thread they said I would have to choose which games to play 25khz or 15khz games. If the cab does have a switch and I can turn it to 15khz wont I be able to play all the games, only 15khz?

If you need to set a jumper you could wire a switch to set 15/25kHz easily. I would not attempt to switch 15/25kHz while the monitor is still powered on though!

isnt there a way to play all games on a 25khz monitor and also a graphic card which works with 25khz?

There are a few ways to go about this:

• You could output 25kHz resolutions and stretch low resolution (=15kHz) games to full screen. It won't look authentic since you will notice scaling artifacts.
• 25kHz means you can display about 390 lines. You can display a low resolution game in 512x384 and have black borders around the game picture. This will look authentic but will leave part of the tube unused.
• You could wire a switch to the 15/25kHz jumper and switch accordingly. I would recommend against switching when the monitor is powered-on though!

Many people will be tempted to just set the monitor to 15kHz as it will play the most games. However, many arcade games are actually 25kHz resolution: Konami DJ Main, Atari System 2, Sega System 24, Sega Model 1/2/3, etc. Think about what you want to play. With some effort you can play both 15 and 25kHz games.

[Tzatziki]

thank you for answering my questions b3atmania,

25kHz means you can display about 390 lines. You can display a low resolution game in 512x384 and have black borders around the game picture. This will look authentic but will leave part of the tube unused.

when you say the game will have black borders do you mean the same that happens when you play your games on a normal PC? so I can leave the monitor as it is and the game will maximize on the top to bottom but not right to left (so it wont distort the picture)?

dosent MAME already stretch the picture to the top and bottom?

if it is like that I dont have a problem, right?

[wpcmame]

when you say the game will have black borders do you mean the same that happens when you play your games on a normal PC? so I can leave the monitor as it is and the game will maximize on the top to bottom but not right to left (so it wont distort the picture)?

With arcade monitors you can't change the number of lines displayed. If you adjust your monitor to display 384 lines it will do that regardless of resolution. If the game uses less than 384 lines the rest will be black. You can always stretch the game to use 384 lines but then the display will not look authentic (on some games you might not notice it).
The horizontal resolution can be set to anything you like but you normally want same amount of black borders on left/right as on top/bottom.

I think it looks better if you use the correct horizontal resolution and only stretch vertically than to stretch in both directions but it is not a big difference.