MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Pics of mame running on CRT tv?

> can anyone tell me if emulated games will
> look authentic on a CRT tv without any HLSL enhancements etc?

Yes, it's possible with the right signal type and settings..

> how it will look when
> output from my pc which has no option to match the original resolutions of arcade
> games (without additional software). 640x480 is the lowest I can choose.

The biggest hurdle with this approach is that modern video cards no longer have analog TV-out, and CRT TVs, being analog, don't have digital inputs!

In any case, if you can't do 1:1 (or exact double resolutions) you get the best results if you run MAME fixed at the highest resolution supported by the TV, and disable all visual effects and filtering.

My old Nvidia 9800 GTX+ has component out. Most games looked great on my old TV. Maximum resolution I could get was 720x576 at 60Hz (weird Brazilian PAL 60Hz standard). But with this approach you can't get smooth scrolling in all games because you have no control over the refresh rate - TV-out is normally locked at 60 or 50Hz depending on which resolution you choose.
Worse, older video cards with a dedicated TV-out chip have the signal fixed at 50Hz if the video card was bought in Europe. This could be remedied by flashing them with a US BIOS. Then, after rebooting and connecting everything, you'd pray that your European TV could do 60Hz..

If your TV doesn't have a European RGB SCART input (which basically makes it a 15Khz arcade monitor with a TV tuner) then the next best thing is component video at the highest available resolution.

> Will any SD CRT be able to display a 640x480 image through a VGA to svideo adapter or
> do I need to get that software that allows you to output lower resolutions? Do I need
> a hi scan model instead?

An SD Television will not work with VGA, VGA is double the scanrate, if you manage to cobble something together and get a signal through, at best you'll get a squeezed double image split down the middle. You'll need something that converts the signal from 31Khz to 15Khz, in software or hardware.

VGA to S-Video depends on the adapter but I'm sure it'll look crummy no matter what.
You want to avoid scaling and conversion of the image as much as possible between the PC and the television. A VGA to S-Video adapter would have to have some sort of active circuit that converts the signal and this is bound to make it worse. Any equipment that does analog video signal conversion well is usually very, very expensive. It's better to avoid conversion and image processing and provide the right signal to begin with.

"hi-scan" TVs will not necessarily accept a VGA signal. Normally "hi scan" in this context means that the TV does some kind of image post-processing, it has nothing to do with what type of signal the TV will accept.

I'll bet you have some new questions now.

S