Arcade monitor or PC monitor?

[skybluestav]

hmmm where to start....

I bought an fully working arcade cabinet about 6-8 months ago wanting to to convert it to a MAME cabinet, but never got the time or space to do it...

now i do,

anywayz, I am nearly setup ready to just put everything into the cabinet to get it to work. The cabinet has a 25" arcade monitor which is realy nice. But I thought I would take the easy way and take the monitor out and add a PC monitor (21") to cut through all the funny bits with installing the real arcade monitor and getting it to work with a PC.

but recently, looking back I found a manual whihc someone wrote for ME for using the actual arcade cabinet.

http://privat.bluezone.no/per/mamecab/Mamecab.htm

so now this is where I need your help.

Is it worth keeping the arcade monitor and ditching the idea of a PC monitor (which i already have ready to in there) all i have to do is mount it. The guy in the tutorial says that I have to switch from 25khz to 15khz which I have found.

The other question is that the PC i have ready to hook up to the cabinet is working with MAMEwah front end and also plays megadrive and nes games, do they need a different sync to work or will the 15khz work on everything?

what do u think is the best option? pros and cons?

from what i think I would go with the PC monitor as its used to changing resos and easy to connect to the PC.

please help...

[M3talhead]

I've always thought that cabs with 25" monitors look silly with a 19 or 21 in them. It just doesnt look right. It really depends on what you want to play on the arcade. If you just want old-school games, stick with the arcade monitor and get an aVGA card/cable splice. If you want to play the more recent PC based driving games, go with the PC monitor.

Look around and see what people are putting in their cabs. Browse through the "Projects thread" and see how people are rigging their machines. You'll get a better idea as to how hard certain path are and which are for those with deeper pockets.

[skybluestav]

I mean I am no good at wiring things so one reason not to use the arcade monitor, and also I want to play as many games as possible, do NES and SEGA genesis games work ok on arcade monitors?

21" and 25" dont have much difference in size, the PC monitor is quite big!

im more on a 70% to 30% in favor of using the PC monitor, the only thing drawing me back is:

1. I like the size of the arcade monitor
2. wont have to mount a PC monitor
3. will have to wire stuff
4. From the looks of it not all games can be played on a arcade monitor
5. will have to buy the arcadevga gfx card

[StephenH]

I heard many console games can run at 15Khz, if you set their resolutions low enough.  If you want to keep the original cab, and it is a JAMMA cab, you can buy the JPAC and ArcadeVGA card from Ultimarc.com, and connect your PC right to the existing JAMMA connector, and the ArcadeVGA card will output 15Khz for the arcade monitor.

[AlanS17]

Second vote for ArcadeVGA & JPac.

[richms]

I mean I am no good at wiring things so one reason not to use the arcade monitor, and also I want to play as many games as possible, do NES and SEGA genesis games work ok on arcade monitors?

All consoles that run on a standard NTSC/PAL TV are 15kHz, the problem you will find with the NES is that there is nothing other then a composite output on it. The french one had RGB out, but none of the rest of the world ones did.

If you want the NES on a arcade monitor, you will need an NTSC to RGB decoder. I am not aware of any off the shelf ones outside of pro av gear (read expensive).

For the others, you just need a sync seperator, and possibly the video amp to get the video levels up to what the monitor expects. All depends on the monitor. Also, since you are starting with an NTSC signal, it will look as crap as it does on a TV with all the inherent dot crawl etc

[RayB]

He was probably referring to NES emulation...

That aside, I've used a SNES (hardware, not emulator) with a real arcade monitor and it was BEAUTIFUL.

[jdsony]

I would have to say that the Arcade monitor would be worth the extra work. Personally I wouldn't think of using a PC monitor in a cabinet, I would rather a TV using S-Video out. Reason? Console/Arcade games just look far better on low resolution displays. PC monitors with their really small dot pitch and high resolutions just make everything too clean and jagged. Using a TV/Arcade monitor gives everything a softer look, rounds harsh edges and gives the impression of 3D objects. On the PC monitor a sprite might look like a flat 16 colour object but on an Arcade monitor Sprites will almost look 3D and the colours tend to blend together slightly giving the illusion of more colours.

A few days ago I made a cable from VGA to RGB (you don't actually need any third party hardware but it can be much easier, costs $ though). The difference with RGB is amazing over S-Video. I can actually read the text in Windows easily and all games look really good. I tried Arcade games and Console games through emulation (NES, Genesis, SNES, N64). All of them looked far better than I had ever played them before. Most look pretty bad on my HDTV with the exception of N64 which I can crank out at 1776x1000 resolution but even then it was nearly as good in 640x480 through RGB. I still need to do some tweaking to get rid of the overscan (fine for console games but Arcade games were obviously not made with that in mind). Also need to do a bit of tweaking to get more custom resolutions to display (everything works fine in 640x480 but I'd like to try and get actual Native resolutions working for everything).

If it's going to give you headache's or break the bank then I would recommend sticking with the computer monitor for now (you can always use Scale2x, scanlines or some other effect to make the games look better on a PC monitor). Keep the RGB monitor for a time when you have the money or technical skills to get it working in your cabinet. The cable is the easy part check the pinouts of a VGA connection to find out the Red, Green, Blue and H-Sync wires (Pin 1, 2, 3, and 13) and then connect them to the same connections on the monitor. The hard part run the software "Powerstrip" and set it up to use 640x480 resolution at 15.7khz check composite sync and interlaced (probably need to do this remotely). There is some good info here http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/ you can skip the info on connecting to SCART and view the powerstrip info. If you were using a DOS based MAME only you can get away with only needing the cable and use ArcadeOS or the other route is to buy the hardware to make it easy like it said in the previous posts.

[mamerocks87]

get the knowledge and use the arcade monitor. it will be worth it.

-kyle