The monitor

There are basically three possibilites what to use as a screen.

-You could use a TV, but I don't like the loss of sharpness that you'll have with many graphiccards, also it is not that easy to fit the picture to fullscreen. Although some seem to have great sucess, anyway, I don't wanna have a rotating TV.

-You could use an arcade-monitor, which is most authentic, but can be somehow hard to run under windows, which I plan to use. High resolution games (640x480 and bigger) won't show without flickering.

Update: If you've a scart-TV (like mostly all european TV's have), check out Andy's Arcade VGA graphicscard. With this specialized card you can easily use a TV as a realistic looking arcademonitor, without the losses descriped above! This is also the save way to drive an arcademonitor. If this great card were available before I might have gone this route.

-Last but not least -there is the WellsGardner. Although it has the same connections a PC-monitor do, it looks most likely than the original arcade-monitors due to his distinctive tubemask. Have a look at the pictures below!

Sorry, some pictures turned out to be big in size, but it shows very nice the "arcade-screen-effect"!

Say hello, Blinky! Left you see it on the WG, right on a regular Sony-monitor. My camera doesn't support that high resolutions, so the picture turned out smaller.

Well, I remembered Little Red Riding Hood  a bit more innocence. Thanx for these pictures to Frobozz! The screen is actual turned wrong at this picture 'cause the monitor was still vertical on this horizontal fighting game (Vampire Savior 2), the "scanlines" shall be rotated 90°.

I photographed this scene from a Sony G400, a very nice 19" monitor that would be much to expensive just to rest in an arcade cabinet. Its a very good screen for your PC, but have a look at this picture, it looks absolute non-authentic compared to the above, doesn't it? The graphics are much to clear and blocky with absolutely no scanline-appearance.
Hardware-stretching and scanlines were turned of at this picture - you can simulate scanlines with MAME, but I wasn't able to find a satisfying combination yet.

While speaking of hardware-stretching - you would get the best result to run the games in their native resolutions. E.g. Centipede wants 240x256, so how to obtain this resolution instead of 800x600 and get loss of picture quality 'cause of stretching? Jeb mailed me about this, so if you are interested (and you should!) look at  http://www.trouble-makers.com/kami/emulation/

This wouldn't work though on my monitor, as it has only a small frequencies-area.

Please don't look to much at the colors above, I didn't manage to play the same scene for your enemies are picked up more or less randomly, and unfortunately MAME turns the screen darker when pausing, which is normaly a sensible feature, but sucks when you wanna make a photo! (At least with my camera) Also Buletta looks somehow stretched, 'cause I didn't adjusted the monitor to the right size.