21" High Res Monitor - Will it work for Mame

[Retro_SA]

Hi all

I'm finally starting with my cabinet after wanting to do it for years.  My girlfriend bought me the Project Arcade book and I'm currently looking for parts   

Anyways, I'm getting a 21" Ibm monitor for really cheap that I want to use for the cabinet.  Only problem is, the guy said only high resolutions work on it.  Since most (all?) older Mame games runs at lower resolutions, will I be able to use it? 

Thanks

[ahofle]

Should be fine for MAME.  Use a high resolution (MAME will scale everything up), Direct3D, and try out some of the filter effects which simulate some of the CGA effects.  Vector games also look better on a high resolution monitor than a CGA CRT.

[SirPeale]

As long as your PC is beefy enough to support the higher res, you should be okay.  The higher your resolution, the harder your PC has to work to upscale the images.

[northerngames]

is it vga?

[richms]

The fake crt effects in mame look great at 1600x1200 on my 21" trinitron

[Retro_SA]

Thanks for the replies guys.

The pc I'm planning to use is a P4 2ghz, 512mb ram & a crappy 16mb vga card. Will that do?

[Stobe]

That computer should be more than sufficient.  I'd look into spending a couple bucks on a slightly less "crappy" video card, though.

I'm a little confussed on the "High Res" description of your monitor.  It's all relative.  800x600 could be considdered "high res" when talking about arcade games.

[Retro_SA]

I'm a little confussed on the "High Res" description of your monitor.  It's all relative.  800x600 could be considdered "high res" when talking about arcade games.

According to the guy I bought it from, the lowest resolution it works on is 1024 x 768.

[Namco]

I'm a little confussed on the "High Res" description of your monitor.  It's all relative.  800x600 could be considdered "high res" when talking about arcade games.

According to the guy I bought it from, the lowest resolution it works on is 1024 x 768.

All your boot screens like the BIOS screen are at most 640x480  in resolution, maybe 320x200. I'm using Mame .82 on my 21" CRT and I can play Street Fighter at 384x224 resolution. The video card puts out the 384x224, but I read that the monitor scales it 2x so what you really see is 768x448. Whatever the case if your monitor is VESA compliant it will handle those low resolutions no problem from 320x200 all the way up to a maximum of most likely 1600x1200.