This might be the wrong forum for this...I just have a quick question. Can Daphne be made to run on a standard resolution arcade monitor? I have been the happy user of ArcadeOs for a long time and wonder if it would pay to upgrade my cabinet with a ld-player.

Thanks!

Evry cab's monitor can accept the vhs signal with a little modify, i've made it and all function well with my plastation, if u are really interested in that i can ask it to a friend of mine that's an Electroni Ingeneer, but it 's a very simple mod!
Aloha!

Right now I have a homemade vga plug wired to a jamma fingerboard. Since this is a standard res monitor I need to know if Daphne can be forced into resolutions lower than the 640/480 I see in the docs. Hmmm.. maybe I just answered my own question.

What about an adapter that uses my tv-out?

If you are going to put a REAL LD player in the cab, then the resolution Daphne runs in is irrelevant as you will need to take the LD output instead!
This is easyer because its already the right resolution/freq for the monitor.
However it is only a Composite output on some players so you will either need,
A. A player with RGB output
B. A player with Composite + comp2RGB converter board from a real lasergame.

If you use MPEG from Daphne instead of a player you will need a lo-res output in the form of RGB. (this is harder to do than you think)

Thanks for the info. Aside from using a real ld player then, what would be the best way to output the video to the cabinet? Or is 640/480 the lowest resolution Daphne can run at? If that is the case is support planned for future versions?

I cant be the only one with a working Mame cab that wants to do this am I? After seeing medium res games like the Midway titles stretched and tweaked a bit with AdvancedMame fill the screen perfectly. I gotta believe there is room for Dirk and Dexter there too.

Thanks

What kind of resolution do you need?
DAPHNE could actually run at pretty much any resolution under 640x480 in mpeg2 mode but the user would have to know what they were doing in order to avoid crashing daphne, which is why I imposed an artificial lower limit at 640x480. If someone can explain to me why a lower resolution is needed, and what that resolution is, that would help ...

Also, what's wrong with using TV-out?

My graphic card is hooked straigt to the jamma harness via a fingerboard. I used the vga tools included with AdvanceCab and with vga.exe I could start Daphne with the command line, but the monitor couldnt handle it. I am not sure what the highest resolution of the monitor is but I was able to get a good picture with some "newer" games like Nba Jam.

I have nothing against using the tv-out, but like I said the vga plug I made is wired to the harness. Using the composite tv-out would need some kind of adapter wouldnt it?
Thanks again for the help

The problem isnt the resolution as you are thinking of it, but the display frequency.
VGA is 30khz Horizontal while arcade monitors use 15khz Horizontal.
PAL is 50hz Verticle, NTSC is 60hz And most arcade monitors can do both, VGA usualy can handle somewhere around those frequencys.
You need to convert the 30khz to 15khz to display it on an Arcade monitor.
ALSO although VGA has a similar verticle rate it is NON-interlaced, so unless you interlace the picture you need to half the verticle resolution. 30 to 15 is half the freq so half the resolution is needed. Hence 320 by 240 is the standard resolution for Arcade monitors. You CAN display 320x512 if you interlace the picture but it gets flickery in general then.
Basicaly you need to HALF the horizontal freq to 15khz (hack the GFX card driver) and half the resolution to 320 (or you lose pixels) and drop half the verticle res to 240 so as not to need interlacing.
Ive used the arcade output mode on dosmame, its unreliable at best. Not all cards support it either, and I dont know if its possible in Windows.

There are only two ways that I can think of to get a VGA resolution on to a 15KHz arcade monitor.

1. Go from the tv out of the graphics card to a Composite->RGB converter (like the converter card that comes in a DL cab)

2. Get a JPAC (http://www.ultimarc.com/). It has a divider that lets you run 31.5KHz on an arcade monitor

I haven't tried out either of these so I don't know which would look better. I'd guess number 1 but who knows.

Dos Mame and other such programs have to do some hacking of the video registers to get the 15KHz frequency and it's not compatible on all video cards. I'd imagine that to do this in windows someone would have write a custom driver for the video card you were going to use but i've never heard of anything like this. So either it's impossible or no one has ever bothered.

Mark

I am speaking from an ignorant perspective here, BUT, although I suggested using TV-out, I think avoiding converting to and from NTSC would be desireable mainly because NTSC sucks

One of these days I am going to attempt to build a daphne cabinet, although I was always planning to use a 19" TV and using the PC's tv-out.

there is a way to run windows on a arcade monitor ....

http://www.mameworld.net/dosmame/arcademonitor.htm

Ok, I have found a way to get Windows to work on a standard res monitor (I'm using a J-Pac converter), and therefore Daphne should be playable within Windows as well. I haven't purchased the DVD-Rom version of Dragon's Lair yet (I unwittingly bought the DVD player version 6 months ago... DOH!!!), so I obviously don't know for sure. You can use the Windows utility VGATV at:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/ ... vgatv.html

However, I've only found 1 video card that worked out of 7 that I tried. It was a 7 year old S3-based Number 9 PCI 2meg video card. I used Windows98's default S3 driver. After running VGATV, I hit auto detect and selected positive sync polarity. After applying to the video mode, it gave me a 640x480 interlaced image on my arcade monitor!

If anyone installs Daphne and gets it to work on their arcade monitor using this approach, please let us all know.