Mame on TV vs. CRT Monitor

[Blackjack]

Has anyone here used Mame or it's variants on both PC monitor and on a TV? I'm wondering if I use a TV for a cabinet, what the differences will be. Any limitations or advantages?

[+remowilliams]

TVs have a limited resolution capability based on the best available output from the video card/converter you're using. Usually 800x600. Quality of the output can vary wildly in terms of clarity and flicker.

 

Modern CRTs monitors are of course higher res capable and much sharper, but more expensive than a TV solution

 

I personally use a CRT VGA monitor for my MAME cabinet.

[Blackjack]

Most of the classic games run at a fairly low res anyway though, right?

[Dones]

Has anyone here used Mame or it's variants on both PC monitor and on a TV? I'm wondering if I use a TV for a cabinet, what the differences will be. Any limitations or advantages?

 

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.

 

Good luck!

Edited September 17, 2005 by Dones

[spacecadet]

TVs have a limited resolution capability based on the best available output from the video card/converter you're using.  Usually 800x600.  Quality of the output can vary wildly in terms of clarity and flicker.

 

All the better to simulate the real arcade experience!

 

You have no idea how many hours I've spent trying to properly set up some of my MAME games to look *bad* enough on my laptop's LCD screen. They just look way too sharp and well-defined unless you get the graphics settings to approximate the scan lines and blur of a really old CRT properly...

 

Of course, many games used different display hardware, which is why those settings are in there... but the games I remember best all had visible scan lines and were pretty blurry by today's standards (unless they were vector).

[Dones]

That's a good point. People have different tastes when it comes to how emulation should look and sound. What can I say: even with all the tips I wrote before to improve image quality, you will still get some blurryness associated with the medium. There is one exception however, and that's when I tried my MAME box with an HDTV through component inputs. There you can get as sharp and clear as you want. In a geeky way it was fun to play with MAME in hidef resolutions.

 

There is one more thing about video output that is also a factor: the tv decoder chip. ATI decoder chip tends to look better and with brighter colors. NVIDIA's has stuck for a while now with their proprietary MV chip which works OK for most uses. Colors are a bit washed out with a bit of color bleeding and blurryness, but nothing too noticeable. Older or more expensive cards sometimes come with conexant chips for tv decode. They might be generic chip makers, but the quality of some of their tv decoder chips are excellent. Colors can be very bright and crisp and usually sharper without the flicker. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to determine what tv decoder circuitry a video card has before purchase.

 

NOTE: My previous paragraph is very subjective (and extremely nitpicky) and based on what I have seen. If it looks great to you then that's all that matters.

[NightSprinter]

Well, last I've checked, both MAME an MESS (the official and unofficial MAME32 ports, and MESSGUI) actually DO support full-screen output on the second display. You just have to select it in the GUI. Unfortunately, the current GUI for the Windows version of MESS doesn't support D3D.

[Dones]

That sounds cool. Are you sure that can be done in plain mame? I was just reading the docs yesterday and couldn't find it. Maybe that feature is for the mame32 version. How do you do it?

[+remowilliams]

NOTE: My previous paragraph is very subjective (and extremely nitpicky) and based on what I have seen. If it looks great to you then that's all that matters.

933704[/snapback]

Appearance is always a nitpicky subject.

 

I finally bit the bullet with my MAME cab a short while back, and dumped Win98/DOS/ArcadeOS in favor of a heavily customized WinXP and MameWAH. It took me quite a while messing about with the video and D3D filtering settings to get everything to look "just right"

 

But, since MAME is running faster under XP and I have lightgun support, it was worth the time.

[NightSprinter]

That sounds cool. Are you sure that can be done in plain mame? I was just reading the docs yesterday and couldn't find it. Maybe that feature is for the mame32 version. How do you do it?

 

In MAME32, in either the default options, or if you want it to be a game-specific option, the "Display" tab should have a drop-down box called "Screen". It should default to "\\DISPLAY1", but you can change it to "\\DISPlAY2".

[Dones]

Cool thanks for the tip. It seems that feature is for mame32 only.

[NightSprinter]

Well, for the windows version of MESS you need to use the GUI. The problem in doing so, is that it disables ALL Direct3D options.

[LocalH]

If your video card supports it, you might try using 720x480 instead of 640x480 - I know that at least on my laptop's nVidia tv-out, 720x480 is the actual output resolution, and all other resolutions are resampled to fit - I can notice some slight distortion when using 640x480. I've done this, and most games look excellent when displayed on a TV.

[NightSprinter]

Just curious, but is there a way to output the graphics from MAME or MESS to the second monitor using the commandline? I like the GUI that MESS has, but it disables D3D features. Oh yeah, plus in my "MESS Problems" thread, I posted that for some systems (mostly like the Apple II, C64, Atari800, MSX) if I leave the settings to auto-switch the resolution I get severe flickering of the picture and moreso in the menu. If I switch the resolution to be a static 640x480, though, it doesn't flicker but I have to deal with trying to get the picture stretched right.

[Dones]

Not that I know of. I was just reading the documentation for both mame and mame32 and there is no command line switch for that. The feature seems to be a mame32 only feature, accessible through the gui.