Bentson Imperial + arcadeVGA understanding questions

[big daddy]

I'm thinking about the Bentson Imperial.  From my understanding it would be beneficial to have the arcadeVGA for this monitor as well?  Am I right to say that to get "perfect" resolutions you need

advanceMame + Imperial (or d9200)

arcadeVGA + Imperial (or d9200)

1) And advanceMame can be kindof hard to configure so a lot of people think that arcadeVGA is easier?  
2)  Is there any need for AdvanceMame + arcadeVGA + Imperial (or d9200)?  If so, why?
3) If I just go with regular mame and Imperial there would have to be hardware stretching on certain games?
4) Does arcadeVGA act as a normal 3D card? If I was purchasing a PC, does this mean I wouldn't need to get a 64MB graphics card or similar? Can I use it to play other 3D PC games at 800X600 resolution?

[wpcmame]

"Perfect" is a difficult term since it depends on what you mean.

With advancemame you can generate modes that exactly matches the properties of the original game hardware with many different graphic cards (including ArcadeVGA).

ArcadeVGA got a lot of arcade resolutions built into its BIOS which means that you don't need advancemame to display arcade resolutions. But ArcadeVGA card doesn't have all possible arcade resolutions built in so you can't match the original game hardware for all games (without using advmame).

If you use a mode that matches the original game hardware it might still not be a "perfect" display on the monitor (and the other way around).
- The montor settings affect if the game image fills the entire screen or not. Some monitors can autoadjust the image but it might not work for all resolutions. If the game doesn't fill the entire screen it can be tricky to get correct proportions.
- The monitor doesn't care about pixels or interlace. This means that doubled resolutions will look exactly the same on the monitor.
- Real arcade monitors got very low resolution in terms of display elements. Modern multi-sync monitors that can display "high" resolutions (e.g. 800x600) got higher resolution which results in a sharper image then the original.

1) And advanceMame can be kindof hard to configure so a lot of people think that arcadeVGA is easier?  

advancemame will not be any easier with arcadevga but with arcadevga you can use the normal mame versions.

2)  Is there any need for AdvanceMame + arcadeVGA + Imperial (or d9200)?  If so, why?

see above

3) If I just go with regular mame and Imperial there would have to be hardware stretching on certain games?

You will always need stretching for some games regardless of mame version and monitor. Depending on the setup you might need it for vertical games on horizontal monitor, 224 line games (e.g. neogeo), 25KHz games etc.

4) Does arcadeVGA act as a normal 3D card? If I was purchasing a PC, does this mean I wouldn't need to get a 64MB graphics card or similar? Can I use it to play other 3D PC games at 800X600 resolution?

The arcadevga is a Radeon9200 so it will work fine. By default arcadevga will display only 15KHz (i.e. 800x600 interlace) but I think there is a patch to fix that.

[big daddy]

thanks for the info..very helpful.

per your quote
"By default arcadevga will display only 15KHz (i.e. 800x600 interlace) but I think there is a patch to fix that."

I notice the patch is for Wells Gardner monitors.  Would this same patch work for Bentson Imperial?