Monitor for Mame Cab

Myrddin

I think its finally time to gut my smaller Jamma cab and convert it to Mame. It has a 19" CRT Arcade monitor, which Im looking and taking out and installing a standard non widescreen 19" pc monitor. Herein lies the problem, its nigh impossible to source a decent one as most monitors are 16:9's these days.

Ive seen a few on Elara, but they seen expensive. I didnt want to use a
PC2JAMMA video card because they seem quite limited in terms of memory/processing power. I know Mame is CPU only but Ill prob run some other emulators too which do require hardware acceleration.

Ive checked on Adverts, and seen some 19" CRT's, has anybody any experience with a PC CRT monitor in a Jamma setup? Or any advice where to pick up a good quality 19" 4:3 lcd.....

o1s1n

Argh in regards to the monitor, really think about what you're doing before you proceed!

Does the monitor work? If it does, then you're taking out something this is original and perfect and replacing it with something that just won't look right.

How about modding an original xbox (Very easy to do) filling it with emulators and then getting an xbox to jamma connection for it?

That way you have the best of both worlds. Everything stays original and you can use MAME too. (And xbox games!)

\Edit- just in case you didn't know, if you are removing the monitor, make sure you discharge it properly first. They can store up to 20,000 volts. Which can kill.

Myrddin

I hear what your saying O1s1n, and must admit I love the effect of arcade screens (low res/scanlines). The xbox ideaa is interesting....how good is Mame emulation on the Xbox, does it have the horsepower for CPS3 stuff?

The original monitor is working perfectly, and the only reason Im removing it is because I dont feel the pc2jamma cards are gutsy enough.

Regards discharging, Ive already done a few cap kits on Hantarex boards, so decided I should do my homework on the subject, before I went to the great arcade in the sky

o1s1n

Haven't tried CPS3 emuation on my xbox yet. I would imagine it would really be pushing the hardware though.

Just found the following bit about it -

CPS3 is a quite powerful system and the XBOX CPU is barely enough to emulate it so you can expect some slowdowns in zoomed and graphics intensive scenes.
Also the XBOX RAM (64MB) is not enough to load the rom dumps and the rest of memory in the CPS3 hardware so the emulator uses a disk swap file to hold the uncompressed rom dumps and load from it as necessary. You'll notice some "hiccups" in the emulation in some scene changes, when the emulator needs to copy blocks of rom data from disk to memory (especially at the beginning of fights or when a super move is performed).

The Street Fighter 3 games run pretty well, with few slowdowns and frame drops. SF3 2nd impact would require twice the amount of ram to store the decrypted program roms due to having different encryption on program and data, so to make it fit in the XBOX RAM, the emulator decrypts the data plane on the fly (like the hardware does ) so in this game slowdowns are more likely.
Next to them are the jojo games, that sometimes need to copy big amounts of gfx data from disk to ram and have some framerate drop (specials, stand enter/exit).
The game with more slowdowns is Warzard, due to the abuse of zoom out (that requires the emulator to render more visible area), huge sprites and complex background graphics.

The emulation of shadows is not accurate due to the way the original hardware works. Emulating it properly requires a lot of extra CPU power and the XBOX will not be capable of running the games at full framerate. They are currently just darkening the image under them, that is right for shadows but not for other effects, that's a price to pay for playability [/I]

As for everything previous to that, cps2, neo geo, thousands of jamma boards, all runs great. So unless you can't live without CPS3 running perfectly then the xbox will do grand.

You've done cap kits? Excellent, I'll be pming you in the future when my Hantarex polo breaks

Myrddin

Thanks for that info O1s1n, it kinda rules out the Xbox as CPS3 stuff would prob mostly be what I'd use it for. So that brings me back to needing horsepower, and horsepower = graphics power = pcie card = lcd

Ah Hantarex Polo - the bane of my life!! Id be happy to do cap kits for you - but I suspect you know what your doing :)

o1s1n

EnterNow wrote: »

Ah Hantarex Polo - the bane of my life!! Id be happy to do cap kits for you

That's fantastic to hear! Nice one, I can finally sleep at night

I've messed about with everything in the cab but the monitor. It's a mix of fearing electrocution and breaking the thing. Broken mobo/psu/controls etc are fine. Monitor is a different story though. My heart skips a beat every time it powers on. Especially as I've never really known anyone around the Dublin area who would have the knowhow to fix one.

Myrddin

o1s1n wrote: »

That's fantastic to hear! Nice one, I can finally sleep at night

I've messed about with everything in the cab but the monitor. It's a mix of fearing electrocution and breaking the thing. Broken mobo/psu/controls etc are fine. Monitor is a different story though. My heart skips a beat every time it powers on. Especially as I've never really known anyone around the Dublin area who would have the knowhow to fix one.

I wouldnt say Im an expert, Ive done cap kits and replaced some transistors etc. So yeah, no hassle you know where to find me I learned everything I know from the guys on arcadecontrols.com, theres a guy there called grantspain who is a seriously good help. And it just so happens he's good mates with our very own poolchamp :cool:

So any suggestions on a 19" 4:3 Lcd?

sengoku

Would an ATI RAEDEON 9600 be capable of running a CPS3 game?

If so, try this

---

> Soft15khz

You will be able to keep your original Hanterex monitor.

Myrddin

Interesting, thanks for the link. Only cons appear to be it runs on 98-XP...and the correct signals are only output after windows loads....any boot screens are output in much highter rates which MAY damage the monitor.

So it seems a little messy...Ive more or less decided to use a 19/21" 4:3 CRT screen which seem to be quite affordable...and its just plug and play.

cynos

I use to have tonnes of 19" and 21" sony monitors that I couldn't give away but since moving office only have flatscreens now, I would have gladly swapped.
If I can get me hands on one, fancy a swap?

Myrddin

cynos wrote: »

I use to have tonnes of 19" and 21" sony monitors that I couldn't give away but since moving office only have flatscreens now, I would have gladly swapped.
If I can get me hands on one, fancy a swap?

Hi Cynos....how do you mean? Sorry for being dumb

cynos

swap a 19/21" svga crt for your 15khz monitor

Most (if not all) 19" non-wide LCDs are 5:4 aspect ratio at 1280x1024, you might want to keep this in mind.

Myrddin

Karsini wrote: »

Most (if not all) 19" non-wide LCDs are 5:4 aspect ratio at 1280x1024, you might want to keep this in mind.

Ive actually noticed this while looking at specs, how would this affect Mame etc? Ive used Mame on 17" non wides before and it looked good

Myrddin

cynos wrote: »

swap a 19/21" svga crt for your 15khz monitor

I very well may do Cynos - just bear with me a bit more till I sort out for definite what Im doing. Cheers

EnterNow

EnterNow wrote: »

Ive actually noticed this while looking at specs, how would this affect Mame etc? Ive used Mame on 17" non wides before and it looked good

Provided that the video card is set to the correct resolution it should be fine, the thing I was thinking about is that a 5:4 screen may not fit properly in your cabinet.

Myrddin

Oh I get you now....I think it should fit, if not ill modify the interior shelving to accomodate it. I may need to replace the monitor bezel, and while Im at it the control panel overlay. Its an old poker machine by the looks of it, so the cpl is quite small. I might make a photo diary of the project and post it here if anyone's interested in seeing the conversion?