Is GDI Rendering The Way Forward?

[lettuce]

(Didnt know if this was best suited to either the Software or Monitor/Video forum so have posted in both)

Am considering starting work on another cab (this will be my 3rd in the space of 4 years) and this time strongly thinking of going with either a PC LCD monitor or LCD TV! You may ask why id want to steer away form a traditional CTR arcade monitor or (in the case of my 2nd cab) a CTR TV using scart!?. Well here in the UK its damn hard to get a CTR multisync aracde monitor, with only really 2 companies, Hantarex & Pentranic, supplying us with anything that we can use in a MAME cab, there are others but are stupidly priced or not large enough, saying that Hantarex  just quoted me £415 odd for their 25" (rought $850 for you US forumites) Multisync monitor and they are running down their stock of CTR monitors now , which seems to be a trend happing all over? Also along with Scart TVs not being quite as versatile as a multisync arcade monitor, (though i will add that using the ArcadeVGA card the display results are the same as a Aracde monitor) some screen resoultions & refresh rates dont work to well on a TV, though the majority of them do, vertical games being cropped thus having to find a resolution that works (have found 352x288 seems to work best for me) add to this the lack of resolution you can get on a Frontend is also a compromisse.

Considering the above i think that i will use an LCD display of some type in my next cab alone with of course the ArcadeVGA card. I have been playing around with MameUI on my main pc which uses a Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24in Widescreen Monitor and a Nvidia 8800 GT card, now obviously this isnt a ArcadeVGA card thus cant display the low resolutions and refesh rates as a ArcadeVGA so i wasnt too impressed with the results i was getting when using Direct Draw or Direct 3D options within mame. However when i selected GDI rendering option, the display was alot clearer and crisper that the other 2 rendering mode but still looked odd in the fact that the sprites on screen were very blocky, like no AA added at all ( i know u dont want any AA added to an arcade display but i hope you know what i mean), im guessing this was due to the screen res being in 1920x1200?

With the ArcadeVGA card now being compatable with Digital PC monitors, what sort of results can i expect from an LCD display and ArcadeVGA card, will i see proper aracde display, crisp and clear with no GFX processing over it, and is the GDI rendering mode the way to achive this on LCD displays?

[Blanka]

Many PC LCD's have a low-end resolution as well. Where a PC CRT might be able to handle 240x320 at 60hz, An LCD will not. My Eizo (same panel as the Dell 2407) is working from 640x480 up, from 50-60 Hz only.
I took another approach. As it is history on new hardware anyway, I started to actually like blocky graphics  . Today we call this "Pixel-Art".
I can say it makes life much easier without looking for the best OpenGL overlays and AA modes. With blocky you can watch at the optimum brightness (backlight bleeding at too high brightness settings with dim overlay graphics looks worse than blocky on Pac-Man).

[lettuce]

But wouldnt you be able to achieve these lower resolutions on an LCD if you were using the ArcadeVGA card?

[Blanka]

No, the ArcadeVGA outputs original resolutions, thus lower than 640x480. You get a blank screen.

[lettuce]

Hmm, are you 100% sure of this?, wounder why Andy put on the his Ultimarc site then that the ArcadeVGA is now compatable with PC monitors

"The Ultimate Video card for gaming on 15Khz Arcade Monitors and now PC Monitors
Vista 32WDDM drivers now available (email for details)
YES NOW ALSO FOR PC MONITORS!
TRY CLASSIC GAMES IN THEIR NATIVE RESOLUTIONS ON A PC SVGA MONITOR IN WINDOWS!
INCLUDES CRT AND LCD (DVI) DIGITAL MONITORS."

[Blanka]

    *  I only use a conventional PC monitor. What is the benefirt of this card? My ordinary card seems to work fine with MAME.

When you run most MAME games, a process called Hardware Stretch is used. This is needed because most arcade games do not use PC resolutions such as 640 X 480, 1024 X 768 etc. They use resolutions such as 256 X 264. These arcade resolutions could not, until now, be displayed in Windows on a PC monitor. To get around that problem, MAME tells the VGA card to stretch the image to fit the PC resolution. This means that the pixel-to-pixel mapping of the original game onto the monitor screen is lost as there is no longer a one-to-one relationship between the pixels which the game designer created and the displayed pixels. As arcade game resolutions are generally low, this creates a loss of quality. It is important to note that using a PC monitor will NOT produce an arcade monitor-like picture as PC monitors have a much higher dot pitch and finer scan width than arcade monitors. But using the ArcadeVGA will give a crisper picture than an ordinary VGA card, at the lower resolutions. There are some comparison pictures on the info page.
Another benefit is that the vertical refresh rates of the ArcadeVGA modes are tailored to Mame games which means a smoother motion on horizontally moving graphics.

Does sound as similar to normal upscaling with vertical sync synchronisation and no linear filtering/opengl scaling turned on. But it won't give you true arcade resolutions.
Here is an image with the differences:
http://ultimarc.com/avgainf.html
I can set preferences of MameOSX to look like the second example. No need for an ArcadeVGA in my case I guess. Or is Windows Mame always upscaling with smooting and does a preference to disable it not exist?

Back to the LCD: It will look fuzzy when an ArcadeVGA first upscales the arcade 288x240 pixels to 640x480, and then have your Dell upscale it to 1920x1200! Better scale to 1920x1200 right in Mame or whatever other emulator. Make use of overlays/AA if you don't like the blocky result.

[Blanka]

I did two things:
First image shows blocky upscaling to 640x480 + soft monitor upscaling to 1920x1200:

Second one is my ideal, but not used yet method:
-It scales the frame a factor 4 with anti-aliasing
-It applies the Behive horizontal + scanline mask in "cover" blending mode as used in Photoshop. That to ensure the image does not get darker through the overlay
-It upscales the result of the overlayed image to the screen resolution, which is 1920x1200 in our case.
The result will look like this:

[Ginsu Victim]

Pac-man with anything other than vertical scanlines usually looks odd to me.

[Ummon]

Pac-man with anything other than vertical scanlines usually looks odd to me.

You know, I remember all games having horizontal blank lines. Recently, I've seen video close-up and you can see the vertical lines on such games. BUT, more recently, at the arcade auction I went to, vertical games did have a sort of mix of lines. If you looked really close, you could see vertical lines, or even somewhat like a grid - but from playing distance or greater, the lines were more horizontal. Henceforth, anything that isn't original hardware, I like horizontal lines.

(Didnt know if this was best suited to either the Software or Monitor/Video forum so have posted in both)

 i will use an LCD display of some type in my next cab alone with of course the ArcadeVGA card.

Um, I would bet this is more software-related. In any case, here's the deal: the AVGA's DVI out is for LCD monitors - or anything that can't do either 15khz scanrate, or 120hz refresh. What it does is run native resolutions at progressive scan - hence you get 31khz 'native' resolutions. Of course, running high refresh you get 31khz 'native' resolutions with blank lines.

I think Mame runs just fine in D3D. I see no difference between 31khz progressive 'native' modes and using D3D with bilinear filtering off. Look up one of R. Belmont's posts on running to a large screen LCD. He talks about a 1:1 ratio. If not running truly native, I wouldn't even bother worrying about the video aspect.

[Zebidee]

You can actually hook up both an arcade monitor and a VGA monitor to an Arcade VGA SIMULTANEOUSLY (using a DVI-VGA adapter)!  The same video modes are being output by both video heads, clearly.  Presumably you can do this with an LCD instead of VGA monitor, but I haven't tried it yet.  Anyway, this is a very good way for you to see exactly what looks best (BTW, CRT Arcade monitor wins for arcade games).

[Ummon]

Well, yeah, that's what I meant. I would say, 'you can see how different they look'. In any case, since this if for an LCD, I wouldn't bother with an avga.