MAMEWorld Forums - Ultimarc - Re: Arcade VGA 5000 with HDTV display rotated

> Please excuse my ignorance. I have never understood how any LCD/LED monitor has a
> native resolution, but also displays other resolutions.
>
> Say for instance if I put it down to 800x600 that is exactly what it looks like. The
> HDTV gives me the same kind of range as my old LCD monitor..except it is bigger and
> actually frames the game better.

Yes you can do that, but the TV (and your old LCD) is not actually changing resolution, it is scaling up the image so that it fits the screen. It's still doing 1080p or whatever its real resolution is.
Then you get a domino effect where scaling and stretching causes artifacts which are then compensated for by filtering, which blurs the image and in turn adds control lag because of the extra time the TV takes to process the image in order to make it "look good" (of course the more expensive the TV, the better it should be at doing that).
That's why it's advantageous to always drive a modern digital display at its native resolution. You'll want it to display an 1:1 image and do as little else as possible.

> On Andy's website it says:
>
> "On PC monitors, all the native game resolutions are available, plus conventional
> Windows resolutions."

You have to read that in context...that particular blurb has been up on the Ultimarc site since way back when the first ArcadeVGA came out and everybody had analog CRT monitors.

> Is there any advantage compared with normal cards on a PC monitor?

Not that I know of. Besides the ability to easily drive a real analog arcade monitor, there is no special sauce in the ArcadeVGA, no special post-processing tricks. Any video card from green or red camp lets you add custom resolutions somewhere in the driver control panel, if that's what you want, and that's not a new thing either. Before you could do it from the driver control panel there were external tools such as Entech Taiwan's Powerstrip that let you do the same thing. I used to have a standard ATI Radeon 7000 driving a 15Khz monitor with Powerstrip. Incidentally, the same card that the first ArcadeVGA was based on. It took a lot of tweaking, sometimes blindly, to get a good image and I only ever got a few resolutions working. If I'd had the money at the time I would have bought an ArcadeVGA and saved myself the trouble.

But again, it's pointless to do that on a fixed resolution flat panel that will scale, filter and stretch the image anyway at any time it is not being driven at its native resolution. If it didn't do that, you'd see a tiny image in the middle of the screen surrounded by black nothing.

You'll always get a better experience if you let your video card do the work instead. Which is what you're doing now with the settings I showed you.

The main idea of the ArcadeVGA is that you can use it with a real 15Khz arcade monitor and enjoy the MAME side effect at raw 1:1 resolutions with no image post-processing at all. That's its intended purpose and it's great for that.

> If you say that multiple pixels isn't representing one...then how are big dots made
> with a smaller dot pitch? Wouldn't it be mathematically impossible to show the same
> kind of look without it being multiple pixel? Maybe Andy's card isn't doing anything
> special, but my understanding is that it is forcing the the PC monitor to display
> resolutions through and emulation process.

No, there is no emulation or even simulation. Basically the ArcadeVGA has a bunch of lower resolutions added to the list of available resolutions and is tweaked to sync at 15 and 24KHz when used with old analog arcade monitors.
But that doesn't matter at all in your case because you can't force a digital display to run at any other resolution than its native resolution. Again, depending on how your monitor is configured, it will either scale and stretch a lower resolution image to fill the screen or, if you deliberately disable scaling, display a tiny but perfect 1:1 image surrounded by black space.

> That said, I know if I am seeing a low Pacman resolution and however many pixels are
> being drawn (or phosphored..I guess is what you call it on a old CRT monitor) it
> again would have to be some multiplier of the large resolution of a new display.
> Again, is this not logical thinking?

Yes but with the right settings MAME does that for you already, on any modern video card. You don't need an ArcadeVGA for that.

> I thank you so much for your help on the rest though. Your settings gave me what I
> needed. I am sorry if it isn't the popular vote, but for me I don't like Pacman
> looking blurry. I know it isn't the same as having a CRT monitor, but I swear it
> doesn't look like that in arcade either(that blurry).

I don't like it blurry either, I use either prescale 2 with no filtering and a .png overlay, or HLSL.

> If nothing else, again THANK YOU.

You're welcome, glad to help.

S