#CRT EMU DRIVER 120HZ DRIVERS#
You may need some special drivers to enable low resolution output and the right display timings (some people have made these). If you DO have a classic CRT television, or monitor, something like the Ultimarc (or JROK maybe? Forget what that one does exactly) is going to be a good bet. MAME should make it relatively easy to deal with this so long as the graphics card can be made to output at the right rate, though.
#CRT EMU DRIVER 120HZ PC#
One thing I should mention is this: PC video cards and displays like to use "stock" refresh rates, but classic systems and especially arcade games can be all over the place with funny refresh rates. Component can probably be used as well, depending on the system or output (I've heard that many video cards no longer make component output easy - in days past many video cards came with component outputs for use on televisions). Ditto any arcade-quality output from an emulator - most televisions just have composite input, S-Video if you're really lucky. The problem is that the RGB you get out of an arcade game or out of a (perhaps modified) classic system is simply not going to be accepted by most televisions' or monitors' inputs. Will it accept an RGB source? Judging from the ongoing CRT television survey of local thrift stores, you're lucky to get composite input (the yellow RCA jack). Well, that's really just some technical background and you needn't worry about it unless you want that information.Ī classic tube television will be 15KHz.
There is some lag involved but it is very slight. For that end I use a XRGB connected to a VGA PC CRT monitor, and the XRGB upscales images from the arcade board for the VGA monitor. What I've been more interested in is getting the responsiveness of a CRT monitor for gaming, without worrying about picture quality. It should improve responsiveness slightly (depending on how slow the LCD screen it replaces is), although gaming emulators are always laggier than the original hardware. Without some work, a CRT's ability to give a "classic" image won't give you much back in visual performance. In fact the newer display technology helps with eyestrain. Ultimately, playing games on a fast LCD monitor via emulation hasn't bothered me. These look pretty good although HLSL seems to work very good on an LCD to give the illusion you are looking at an actual arcade monitor. Some emulators should support the right timings, although the one I fuzzily remember reading about recently had some lag tradeoffs.Īnother approach would be something like HLSL or at least custom scanline masks.
#CRT EMU DRIVER 120HZ SOFTWARE#
The best approach towards preserving an arcade look without original game software and hardware would be to use a kind of 31KHz to 15KHz device and drivers to send the emulated images to an arcade monitor, like the Ultimarc (or similar I don't know which ones are "best").Īnother might be to try to find a MultiSync-style kind of PC VGA CRT monitor that accepts a low resolution image, and just use special drivers or settings to output low resolution from the emulator. There are a variety of attempts to bridge the gap, some more successful than others. All VGA-capable monitors use it.And in turn, almost every CRT monitor (that is going to be widely available these days) uses the 31KHz scan rate (for higher resolutions), and is basically incompatible with the 15KHz of (most) old arcade tubes and televisions for classic consoles. While RGB is technically a form of component video, it is not what you are thinking of.Īlmost every CRT monitor ever made uses RGB video.