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