Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego :: Coin-op Video Game output

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]Over on Jolt Country there is a discussion about a video game and how over time, burn-in occurs. And buying CRT TV sets these days to try and replace a burned-in monitor is difficult and expensive. I'm not allowed to post a response over 10 lines so I've moved it here. The original discussion is at <a href="http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=74253">this link</a>. This is the remark I was replying to, and my reply: [quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]Ha, you know what, the only burn-in that really bugs me is when it is burn-in for a different game... was different when we used to be able to get new 19" CRTs for $145... Just because we could... Now, though, to go through the trouble of finding a CRT is such a goddamn pain (and expensive!) that we make do.[/quote]That brings up a related question, if they're even going to make commercial coin-op video games any more (you can ponder that point separately), what would they use for output? There are several choices: * Theatre-style display. Bought one of these once, for $60. Was nice. Since cable boxes generate just one signal - Channel 3, or where Channel 3 is in your area, you use the switch to use Channel 4 - hooking it up to a cable box is fine, It then allows you to display a television signal on a wall, and it's fine up to about 6 feet diagonally. Disadvantage: the ambient light in the room must be low; dark is best. * VGA. They'll basically run this stuff on PC computers with a coin counter, and it will put output to a standard VGA connector. Plus, if your video driver supports it, you can do landscape instead of portrait. My monitor does, so when I'd be working on writing documents, I rotate the monitor 90 degrees and I can view a page as a page; if the game is more vertical than horizontal this might be a solution. (I never found out if the Mac supported screen rotate; I only just thought of it.) * DVI. As it turns out, my monitor has ports on it for both VGA and DVI so I was able to do that directly from the Macintosh. Does DVI have advantages over VGA (can you run it at higher resolution, do TV sets support DVI directly)? [/quote]