Posted by LuSiD on 30, 2000 at 6:15 AM:
In Reply to: 3 questions about tv as monitor posted by Lars on 29, 2000 at 10:57 AM:
: 1. Is a 25" tv not going to be to big when you are mounting it in a cabinet and thereby looking at it from a distance of approx. 2-3 feet?
I like the big screen personally, but I was used to playing on my 19" computer monitor. 19" would have been fine for the horizontal games, but the vertical games were too small for me.
Find an arcade & play on a 25" cabinet for a while. That'll give you a feel for the size.
: 2. What is the resolution on the tv when running games?
NTSC (TV) has a res. of 704x480, slightly higer for PAL. So the video card just scales everything to fit that res, usually scaling it down to 640x480. Running higher resolution games isn't a problem on ATI cards, but some others don't deal with higher resolutions so well.
: 3. What happens if I set the resolution (in a game or Windows) to 1024x768. Will the graphics card then automatically scale it down to the proper resolution in order not to damage my tv?
That depends on the card. My card won't let me go above 800x600 windows desktop on the TV out, but takes the higher vesa & 3D resolutions ok. Running at 640x480 actually looks better in some cases on windows games. The higher resolution detail gets discarded anyway when it's scaled back down.
: Thanks for any answers.
If you decide to go with a 19" display, I don't think a TV makes as much sense. Most 19" TV's don't even have composite, let alone Svideo. If I were building a 19" cabinet, I would have used a PC monitor (either off-the-shelf or a U3100).
In response to Dennis, I did set up both Svideo & Composite when I was testing things out on my 32" tv, & there was a visible difference. The Svideo picture was clearer & more stable. The composite feed had noticeable dot crawl & waves in the solid colored regions. I wanted to see if it was worth the extra $$ to get a TV with Svideo vs. one with just composite. It was.