Posted by bernard on 12, 2000 at 2:19 AM:
There's a guy in my area selling a Mac computer system complete with a Radius/Sony GDM-1950 19" COLOR MONITOR. Obviously the monitor is all I care about. I've been looking for a large (19" +) computer monitor to use for my arcade project for a while now. I can't afford much though, and this guy's price is reasonable. Will it WORK though? The monitor is from a Mac computer, but I found some websites that talk about the Sony GDM-1950, and it's supposedly a fixed frequency monitor with those funky RGB cable ports on the back. I would assume it would work fine on a PC, if I just get a VGA to RGB cable plug thing (what are those called) adapter. I did some more reading about Fixed Frequency Monitors and from what I found, it seems that you CAN get other frequencies on them if you have the right video card. All the sites I've seen recommend an ATI video card for a FFM. I'll be using the ATI Xpert 98 video card. I contacted the guy selling this stuff and here's what he said...
"I am not sure about the monitor working with a PC. As you know these fixed frequency monitors are a bit finicky. I have always used the monitor with the Mac IIcx so I really don't have any experience with other systems. The reason I am getting rid of it is that I just purchase an iMac which comes with a monitor. The actual viewable area is 19" across the diagonal. The input on the back are red, green, and blue plugs. It may also have vertical and horizaontal sync plugs. In the front are knobs to adjust v-pos, h-pos, convergence, width, and height. The monitor is capable of displaying true color (i.e. millions of colors). The card I have I think only allows thousands of colors. The picture is awesome as far as I can tell. I have been using it up to about a month ago when I purchased the iMac."
What do you think? Should I go for this monitor? Will it work on a PC? Will it work with my ATI Xpert 98? Will it display games of different frequencies just fine in MAME (even if I have to manually set the frequencies, etc for each game individually)? I want to run my machine in pure DOS using MAME and ArcadeOS by the way. Give me your advice, please! I need a large monitor so I can finally get to work on my project, I've had everything else but the monitor ready to start building, and this one I can afford, but of course I don't want to get it if it's not going to work. So, what do you think?
Thank you.
-bernard