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Is it safe to assume then, with or without an ArcadeVGA card, that forcing the interlace switch in the modeline as you have it is only necessary if the monitor doesn't natively do this (like a standard computer monitor), or should it be done regardless?
You can use the interlace option for a variety of modes. It effectively doubles the vertical resolution at half the refresh rate. (You get twittering lines instead of the whole screen flickering.) For example, the original IBM XGA card did 1024x768 at 87Hz interlaced (43.5 Hz effective). For practical purposes, though, there's no need for this anymore -- monitors can now handle much higher refresh rates than they used to, and LCDs would need to deinterlace it, which they don't generally do. Interlace is really only appropriate for duplicating the old 15 KHz interlaced standard.
It's the timing values that set it to 15 KHz, and these can
only be used with monitors that support this frequency, which, as you know, most computer monitors do
not. Most standard arcade/console games didn't use interlace, so you'd use 640x480 or 640x400 non-interlaced. Laserdiscs used full interlaced NTSC, so in Daphne's case, interlaced is the way to go.
I suppose the
most authentic display possible would need a capture from a less-than-perfect laserdisc, using a capture card that resembles as closely as possible the decoding artifacts of the original NTSC->RGB decoder board in the game -- dot crawl, rainbows, etc. I haven't tried to do this yet, but someday, someday...
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Would you (or any other Linux user here) happen to know which Micro-ATX motherboards are compatibile with Linux (Debian, specifically), or maybe know of a website that may list such information?
I was following this a while back in the Home Theater PC forums, and you are correct that some uATX boards have problems with Linux, mostly with the video. The VIA EPIA is a great little board, but I'm pretty sure people have had trouble getting the right video timings for HTPC use, and enabling the TV out. It has some hardware mpeg and acceleration features that AFAIK can't be used at all.
A friend of mine has an EPIA board he wants to set up in the shell of an original NES console, so I will have a chance to play with it soon.
As for what to use
today, I'm not entirely sure. If I find out anything interesting, I'll be sure to post about it. As HowardC says, the BOYAC forums are where most of the action is for this kind of stuff.
-Warren.