MAME - 27 inch "betson" monitor

[new_y0rk]

I am completel new to this, please be patient. All and any help is greatly appreciated.

I bought a custom made cabinet off ebay from a guy who was suppose to send me it so it was "plug and play", all I had to do was connect my computer. I was also suppose to have a coin door and a upgraded speaker package however there is no coin door and there doesn't appear to be any speakers or subwoofer for that matter?

anyways the problem is... I can't get the screen to work with my computer. I have a dell 3.06 ghz, with a AGP card, it's 64 mb card and runing xp. When I boot the system hooked up to the monitor it shows the windows loading screen but it never makes it to the desktop I get the error

 HF: 30-40 khz
VF: 47-160 hz
 
48.2khz  59hz

I boot it in safe mode and I can see the desktop but I can't make any adjustments to the refresh rate, it's stuck on default.

I have no idea what to do.  If anyone could please help I'm not experienced with mame machines, this was my first attempt at getting one and I'm kinda bummed out.

Here are some pictures of what I'm working with: (the computer shown in these pictures are with my brothers gateway, we tried both of our computers to get it to work with the same problems)



















oh yeah and the guy who sold it to me, I've been e-mailing him and calling him but it's been almost 6 months and I can't get a hold of him. I just came back from college and I really want to set this up so I can bring it back to my apartment for me and my room mates to enjoy. I also seeked help elsewhere to no avail. 

Please help :[


THANKS.

[grantspain]

just a setup issue with frequency,mind you the cab looks poor quality-looks like you need to look at  software to sort this,don't know much about mame but i don't think you have a big problem

[dabone]

ok, hit f6 while booting to get into the boot menu, then select vga mode.

After you boot goto display properties, select advanced, click on adapter and then click list all modes. After this comes up select 640x480 32bit, 60hz.
Save this and reboot.

(You can also try 800x600@60hz)


Later,
dabone

[miles2912]

Check out this article.  http://www.retroblast.com/reviews/avga2.html

Forget about the card and 15hz resolutions and force your card to do 60hz.  Run the resolution tool to remove unwanted resolutions and then use the mame res tool when you want to force a specific resolution for a game that will not come up.  We should sticky this info for everyone that wants an arcade hybrid monitor.

D-

[Ghoward]

Replace your videocard with ArcadeVGA card.

[divemaster127]

you need to go to a arcadevga
dm

[MonMotha]

Why would he need an ArcadeVGA card for this?  If it's actually the 27" Betson/Kortek (it looks the same as mine from the picture, but I can't actually see the chassis board), it should do anything from standard res (15k, ~480 lines) up to about 600 lines progressive at 60Hz.  From the message being displayed, he's just overranging the horizontal and it's locking the video signal out to prevent damage.

The message says it wants 30-40kHz, so feed it 640x480@60Hz (progressive, which is why you don't need anything special - this is well within the capabilities of any video card on the market today).  Note that the default for WinXP is 800x600@60Hz and in fact the normal GUI won't let you go below this (Win98 and 2k will), so you'll have to do advanced and pick from the "all modes" dialog...or just take my solution and run Linux.

In theory, newer nVidia cards (5000FX series and newer) are supposed to be 15kHz capable again, but I've not had any luck getting them to actually do it, but that shouldn't matter for this anyway unless he wants native modes out of MAME.  For just getting graphics on the screen, he just needs to set his resolution to 640x480@60Hz and it will be within the ranges the monitor is asking for in the OSD.

Again, if I (and others) could get a picture of the chassis board (maker of tube and neck board pictures don't hurt of course, but shouldn't be required in this case) to verify that it really is the normal 27" Betson/Kortek (KT-2914), I can tell you quite a bit about it as I've tweaked the heck out of mine.  It should handle up to 800x600 (60Hz only, 640x480 should be able to go up to 75Hz for VGA text mode), but it won't quite pull off 1024x768 (interestingly, HDTV 1080i is within its capabilities, though it would have the wrong aspect ratio for most content).

[Ghoward]

If it is the same Betson monitor as I have and I guess you have then you are right he would not have to have an arcade VGA card. I run my betson without a arcadevga card.

However we do not know what monitor that is, I was guessing that since that cab is not really that great that the person who made it was not going to spend $500 on a monitor and would try to use an old arcade monitor instead.

[Lilwolf]

If its a vga/cga monitor (I believe it is) then getting an arcadevga card will allow you to run mame at native resolutions, but more importantly, at native scanrates (ie, CGA).  So you will get the original output in games, but VGA in your frontend (if you choose).

but without it, you basically have a 27" VGA monitor.  Look at http://www.oscarcontrols.com/monitors.shtml to see the differences... between #1 and #7... especially look at the bushes...  The main thing to realize is there is a difference, even on arcade monitors, going between vga and cga

[new_y0rk]

sorry guys I've been really busy, I'm going to tinker with what the guy with the silent bob avatar said (sorry forgot the user name) and I'll see what I come up with, otherwise I'll return and re-read what you guys are talking about and see what else I can get you guys to help me help myself not be bummed out about something I was really excited to get.

=( 

I sort of wish I could just go back in time and not go through this lame guy to get my mame.
he's totally ignored me and wont get back to me.

I don't even have speakers set up for this, assuming I get it to work I don't even know what I should do about sound. =(


anyways this is becoming more of a gripe post than a hopeful post

my greatest respect and thanks for your dedicated help of this forum community!

=)