MAME Displays

Arcade monitors are technically similar to an NTSC TV's without the tuner hardware, PAL TV's run at a slightly different frequency.

I CAN NOT EMPHASISE ENOUGH HOW MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE DISPLAYING MAME ON AN ARCADE/TV MONITOR MAKES. GAMES WHICH LOOK OLD, DATED AND BLOCKY, COME TO LIFE AS THE LOW RESOLUTION OF THESE DISPLAYS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE BLOCKYNESS AND THERE IS NO NEED TO MESS ABOUT SETTING UP MAME TO EMULATE THIS "LOW RES" EFFECT BY USING SCANLINES OR OTHER METHODS WHICH ULTIMATELY HAVE A PERFORMANCE HIT ON YOUR SYSTEM.

If you need to run MAME on an arcade or NTSC monitor you will need to make up a cable to connect to your monitor from the VGA card

You will also need a frontend capable of displaying NTSC frequencies as DOS can not output to this type of display without a TSR to convert the output frequency. ArcadeOS has this built in using the incabinet=1 option.

Alternatively, you can use a standard TV (PAL or NTSC) to run MAME using a video card with TV-OUT capabilities. This has the added bonus of being able to display Windows.

Want to run Windows in 640x480 using an ordinary VGA card on a 15 kHz arcade monitor by only using software?

Using a supported card, you can set the VESA BIOS to match 15 kHz frequency needed by the monitor

To do this you must use AdvanceVBE made by Andrea Mazzoleni @ http://advancemame.arcadeheaven.com

Download AdvanceCAB from AdvancedMAME's site

Run MV.EXE to test all of the video modes with your card/monitor, plus a 640x480 16 bit-mode for Windows
Run the TSR VBE.COM which allows you to run the video modes on your 15KHz arcade monitor

Apparently Windows 98 runs great on it, with 65536 colors in an interlaced mode!

Even Andrea didn't know about it, actually he said Windows isn't supported because he never tried. I (Filipe Estima) did and he got surprised :o)

Thanks to Filipe Estima for donating this information :)

I haven't tried this configuration