composite vs s cable?

[bigdog1977]

Ok I have a 25" RCA compsite tv. Its already mounted in my cab. I hooked it up to the PC using a S cable to composite. Works but the picture looks like ass! I have the reso in XP and Maximus arcade set to 640x480. The games dont look to bad but the type is hard to read in XP and in the game list for maximus. Also the picture isnt all that solid kinda glitchy. I tried to use soft15hz at 15 hz. Still looks the same. I want the best picture possible so what should I do? Will trying to find a 25" tv with S cable help out huge or should I save my money and buy an arcade monitor? Wish I would have found this great forum before I started my cab! 

[retrometro]

are you willing spend a few hundred $ for a vga compat plug and play arcade monitor, hook up an arcadevga or another card to a real arcade monitor, or find a huge VGA monitor?

[bigdog1977]

are you willing spend a few hundred $ for a vga compat plug and play arcade monitor, hook up an arcadevga or another card to a real arcade monitor, or find a huge VGA monitor?

If it makes my picture super clear then yes, but if I can find a tv that has S cable capability thats not to far off from an arcade monitor than no! I found this 25" tv of craigslist for 40 bucks. Im sure i can find a tv with an s cable for cheap. My main question was is there a huge difference between using an s cable or composite cables?

[MonMotha]

For fine detail, especially chroma (color) related, there is usually a VERY big difference between NTSC composite video and S-Video connections.  The difference between S-Video and component (either YPbPr or RGB) is less pronounced, but still notable in some cases.  For arcade video, I've found that good s-video (i.e. not scaled) is often indistinguishable from RGB unless placed side by side.

An arcade monitor connected via RGB video is going to look the best.  It's also the most complicated and expensive option.  A TV hooked up via YPbPr component is usually "really close" and sometimes easier to do.  A TV hooked up via s-video will likely be good enough for most arcade video, but will upset purists and the anal retentive, especially when viewing small text like you might find on a Windows desktop.  A TV hooked up via composite will pretty much always look "bad".

A couple things to consider:
1) Using an s-video to composite "adapter" usually results in inferior composite video as compared to actually generating composite video directly.  Some video cards have an option to turn off the separate chroma and engage the proper filters for composite.  Try turning that on.
2) Most PC video cards have absolutely terrible TV output.  These outputs have ugly scalers that are designed to crush high res PC resolutions down to 480 lines then interlace it.  Directly generating 480i often results in superior video, but many times the TV encoder on a PC video card cannot handle this.

[bigdog1977]

A TV hooked up via YPbPr component is usually "really close" ok not sure what this means but is there a way to hook up my tv this way? What would you do in this situation? Tv is already mounted in cab. Whats my best way to make this work? If i need to start over I will. Not worth putting in more money if the tv is gonna look like crap. Know what I mean? Thanks for the feedback,

[richms]

Are you using the svid plug to RCA adapter that came with the video card, and setting the card to output composite or using a passive combiner cable? I have found the latter is usually pretty crap, since the onboard composite generator will try to avoid dot crawl to a degree.

Also, a crap tv will have a worse chroma separator since the small screens at TV viewing distance dont realy need a good one - not that a good chroma separator exists, you just trade one set of artifacts (dot crawl) for lag and funny effects on sudden colour changes - like games have lots of.

IMO, live with this till you can afford to replace the tv with something that has component - the colours are better then svid by quite a way.

[bigdog1977]

ok lets pretend I have no idea what you just said! 

Im using an s cable to the yellow composite cable to my tv. I have it connected to a e-geforce 8400 gs video card.  What are these settings your talking about? Playing an nes emulator looks great but mame and  xp type is hard to read/ blurry. Mame games look good. its an old rca tv. I have soft15hz installed using 15hz. Could that make it look worse? Should I set it to somthing else. Isnt 15hz for arcade monitors and not tv's? my video card only supports 640x480 16 bit.

I hear vga to vga  is best picture but did they ever make an old 25" tube tv with a vga connector?  Please forgive my noobishness I dont understan the whole crawl dot and lines,  chroma seperators, hz stuff. Thanks for your help richms.

[richms]

An svideo signal is just the 2 parts of a composite signal that are seperate, so there are passive combiners that just join the signals together. Passive combining like this makes a bad out of spec signal since the svideo standard is very loose about the signal level of the colour signal, so it ends up too strong after one of these combiners normally.

The other way is when you use a cable adapter that comes with a video card, they just use one pin of the svid socket and the card itself outputs a properly balanced composite signal, with filtering to minimise the number of artifacts you see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_crawl shows what you will get with composite video in any case, its just worse IME with the passive cables.

If you go into your video card control panel where you choose your TV output types etc you should be able to choose between svideo and composite, try the other option and see if it improves at all. There will also be flicker redution, turn that down to improve the image quality at the expense of some flicker.

soft 15kHz will do nothing to the TV out since it is generated by a chip that has all the right timings in it already, and its what scales the VGA signal down to the low resolution of TV and applies the flicker filer and limited colour range that ntsc or pal analog tv support.

Windows will always look crap at low resolutions on a crappy display device.. Some tvs will do a better job then others but really trying to use composite video for anything other then low res mame games is futile.

[bigdog1977]

gotcha can you send me a link to some type of monitor thats 25" that you think is the best quality for mame and other emus like snes, up to psx that I could use? My cab is a midway KI2. Thanks.

[richms]

I just have a tv in my cab at the moment, I have being waiting for a 29" presentation monitor to come up locally to get to put in, those are the ultimate IMO since they will do 800x600 so windows will work properly, and the lower resolutions are emulated quite well in mame.

If you are going to only use for an arcade cab, then there is no reason not to use a TV out I have found, I just VNC into it when I want to do anything else (no remote desktop since I have XP home on it)

Even snes and psx are ok on a tv since thats all they are made for. Its PC games that are hopeless with illegible text and fine textures that just look like a mess.

If your video card has a 7 pin jack on it, then you may be able to get component out of it. if the tv has those (most new ones just have composite on a yellow RCA and the red/green/blue ones labled DVD, no svideo. - anyway, component out is the best compromise IMO, since you get full colour seperation, but still have it going thru the scaler on the card so you get access to a flicker filter and higher resolutions then the tv can support. Just set the card to 480i and plug it in.

[bigdog1977]

Ok thanks for the help man!