MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Re: Intel Centrino Duo 1,8Ghz VS Intel Pentium 4

Yes yes, I know the that composite is not component

I was digging an found the article about the MAME-Monitors again, here you have it, its from the September 13, 2009 and can be found at:

www.forum.arcadecontrols.com

I can't tell you how important it is for you to read the PC2JAMMA section about monitors and TV displays related to MAME. There are a ton of different formats of arcade monitors (historically speaking if you are looking to upgrade an old already existing arcade game) and you can pick some very different types of displays. I would recommend trying to get a 25-27" display for the best overall play on all of the various vertical, horizontal, and newer NeoGeo style fighter games. Galaga (vertical) looks fine on a 27", even though you are not using a lot of the side area, while horizontal games also look fine (size and aspect ratio-wise).

Computer monitors offer the highest resolutions, crispest colors, widest PC support with various video cards, and are also, unfortunately, the most expensive, and generally you have to settle for a smaller size. They also tend to exaggerate the "jaggies" in the older lower resolution games under MAME. Basically, the same thing that delivers high resolution and clarity on a computer monitor, kills the whole "feel" and look of an older arcade game. There are ways to get MAME to insert "scan-lines" to emulate some of the nostalgia, but you just can't get the same look out of a computer monitor, IMHO.

Arcade monitors come in vastly different flavors. Most of the new styles are simply RGB 19, 25 and 27" TV picture tubes, and will run you from $250-$600 for even a fairly low-medium resolution monitor. Also, from the PC2JAMMA, it looks like there are only a couple video cards (namely the ATI) that support native register level programming of the chipset by MAME for all of the lower frequencies needed by arcade monitors.

Finally, there is the TV option. This is the path that I chose, and I'm very satisfied with it. A 27" color TV can be found these days for around $250 (that article is from the year 2000, now a TV is some bucks, even the 100Hz).
Even cooler, is that you can pipe CATV into the coax and switch between watching TV on your Arcade box, and the S-Video input from the computer.

Make absolutely certain that whatever you do here, you get an S-Video capable video card and TV.
Side-by-sides of the two TV's and the computer monitor

I didn't think it would make a huge difference...it DOES. With the normal old RCA Composite video, the screen was blurry and washed out. Straight lines, and text were wavy and undistinct. Many of the smaller images (like ships and bullets in Galaga and the main character in Guantlet) were very poor looking and smeared. Text Scores and Initials were almost unreadable (especially bright white or red colors). I was extremely disappointed. Switching to S-Video made all the difference in the world. I had two 27" TV's available, and could drive both the Composite and S-Video (as well as the PC monitor) all at the same time, and did side-by-side comparisons. There is a huge difference. I actually like the S-Video TV mode the best. Even better than the PC Monitor, just because a lot of the jaggies that are present in lower resolution games ends up getting sort of averaged/smeared together in an analog anti-aliasing way...grin. So, just make sure to go with S-Video. You also want to make sure that there are audio inputs (and I wanted audio outs to be able to run to the separately powered computer sub woofer and satelites for watching TV).

Now, I did have to play around with the options a while to get the BEST display. Right now, the important ones that seem to give me EXCELLENT aspect ratios and size for ALL of the games (vertical, horizonal, even the NeoGeo type games) is to be sure to run with the -ntsc option and -640x480.

Mame on TV vs. CRT Monitor

It can look great with a little bit of tweaking on your part. Quality of image will depend on TV image quality, video card, its settings and connection used. Even on the most crappy TV you can make it look great. What looks blurry or blocky on a monitor usually looks fine on a tv. On a monitor you can have many resolutions, on a tv you are limited to a few. On a monitor you can see the entire screen, on a tv you will have either too little or too much tv realstate used.

What I learned:

* You don't need the greateast and latest video card to run MAME or other emulators. As long as it's not 3D you'll do fine. Even with that caveat, I found Project 64 to run flawlessy on a geforce 2 with the most resource intensive games (eg, Perfect Dark).

* Image screen will never "fit" the TV realstate like a normal tv signal. Either you get a bit of black bars around your screen (underscan) or you have the image overscan a bit outside your tv's viewable boundaries.

To get the best possible tv image you need to do a few things:

For a normal TV with S-Video or RCA inputs:
+ Set the resolution to 640 by 480 (32 bit). This is the best most compatible resolution for TV signals.
+ If possible use S-Video cables. It looks a tad better.
+ Play with the flicker and sharpness settings (if available) on your video card driver. I found you can trade off a bit of flicker for a bit of sharpness with considerable improvement.
+ Like said before, blow up your image size so that the screen overscans the viewable boundaries of your TV to a comfortable compromise.
+ After you are done setting up your cab pc, set your TV as the primary and only display. That means no clone mode and no dualview (in nvidia's case). Emulators are usually programmed to display on the primary monitor. Also games that use video overlays (eg. Daphne) usually will display to primary only.
+ If the emulator provides it, activate a "Double pixels" filter. This can go by names (eg. "Scale 2x") so you need to play with yout emulator settings. MAME does this automatically btw.

That only gets you halfway though. You need to tell MAME a few things:

(The following tips can be achieved with the command line version of MAME)

+ Add the parameter "-screen_aspect 4:3" (without the quotes) to your MAME command line. If you are using an HDTV in widescreen mode, make it "-screen_aspect 16:9". This eliminates black bars around MAME's game screen.
+ Play with the "-d3deffect sharp" parameters to sharpen the image a little bit. There are other filters (read the mame docs for more info). To run the previous parameter you also need to add "-d3d" switch also.

For example: to run Alien Syndrome on a TV I would use the following mame command:

mame.exe c:\mygames\aliensyn.zip -resolution 640x480x32 -joy -d3d -d3deffect sharp -screen_aspect 4:3

One last thing:

+ If your card is an older nvidia card, try TVTool. It can improve the svideo output considerable, removes blackbars, and disables macrovision. It doesn't work on newer cards though.