MrSpiggott

Be careful about assuming all PVMs have high quality displays. A low quality display used to monitor an x-ray image or security camera and fitted with a rack mounting kit would be classed as a professional video monitor (PVM), so always read the specifications for connector details and tube quality. A BVM (Broadcast Video Monitor) is pretty much guaranteed to be high quality, but is a bit overkill considering SNES, MegaDrive, NeoGeo etc tend to run at only 1/4 SD resolution. And sometimes PVM and BVMs from the same manufacturer share the same internals, it's just that the BVM has been calibrated before it leaves the factory. RGB is the most important connection type, component (YUV) is only of use if you want to watch PS2 DVDs at full quality or you have a monitor that can scan higher; 480p, 720p, 1080i for consoles that can output those standards.

...there go my fingers. Got to figure out how to make the screen rotate neatly like a Taito egret 2 mini.

I've rescued a load of broken junk that was going to be thrown into a scrap bin with the intention of repairing it and turning it all into a minature cabinet, but I need a bit of advice. It's an Advantech ARK-1122 passively cooled micro PC with a dual core Atom N2800 @1.86Ghz. The screen's an 11" 800x600 restive touch LCD mounted on a temporary rotating stand. I've currently got Mame2003 running through RetroArch, primarily because I had all the files from when I loaded Mame onto an original Xbox many years ago. What I need to know is, what's the performance hit of running a newer Mame version with improved emulation? Is it worth me going to the effort of locating everything? I want to eventually build a cabinet surround, once I learn how to use a saw.

Update. I’ve looked at the schematics and you should be fine. You should be able to turn off your master monitor, and the slave monitor attached to it should still receive a signal. Just need BNC cables now.

That's a good question. Depends on the termination circuitry of the monitor, I'm try to find schematics and check. Worst case is you use T-pieces. Orientation of the second monitor is going to be fixed to whatever your source outputs and you'll need to fit feet or something to raise the monitor a little.

I'd stick the 14", on its side, on top of the 20". Have your main input going into the 20" and loop though into the 14" for TATE mode. That's what I've done on my setup.

I've got a feeling the SCART is only wired for composite, which was quite common on lower price TVs. (Can't find the specs online) If that's the case you can mod it to accept RGB, but it's not a simple job.

Split Second. Racing in first person with all that destruction going on around you would be fantastic.

I've read the discussions in this thread about the quality differences between RGB, S-video and composite and dvdx2 is absolutely right, there are some very large differences. I thought it would be really easy to get some objective evidence showing the differences between the systems by connecting a broadcast spec video generator outputting various sweep patterns into a PVM and showing at what point video information is lost (filtered) and obscured with interference. The differences are really apparent on the screen, but trying to capture that on a camera without moira fringing corrupting everything has been a bugger! Here's the best I could come up with, it shows the differences between RGB and composite. You can see the point at which luminance information is lost and the chrominance portion of the signal starts to cause colour interference. I also wanted to show how S-Video retains luminance resolution, but has problems with colour, but just couldn't get a good enough photo. What I wanted to highlight is that if you are only using composite or S-video then I wouldn't recommend paying extra for a PVM. It's a brilliant monitor, but can't work miracles.

One bit of buyers advice. Avoid the early ones, you can identify them by the manual 75ohm terminator switches under each of the BNCs. They seemed to suffer from a lot of image problems. Try to look for newer ones with serial interfaces, or that have the cut out where the serial BNC would go. Or if you can't see the back, they usually have a large indicator lamp right at the top of the screen. I use a few or these that are still going strong after 20 years.

There are some pretty nasty ones out there, I’ve been working with them for 30 years and have seen just about every fault possible. They are brilliant monitors, I’ve got a couple at home, but buyer beware. Just because it’s a PVM doesn’t mean it’s going to look good.

Usually I’m surrounded by more than a dozen PVM’s and BVM’s, all different sizes, some 16x9, others 4x3. If I was to plug a calibrated, broadcast spec RGB input into them, they’d all look a little bit different. They’re all over 20 years old and somewhere along the line to decrepitness. Now if you saw one in isolation, you’d think it looked fantastic, but there are degrees of fantastic. What I’m trying to say is if your current display looks good, is sharp, no dot crawl, no cross talk or ghosting then keep it. Don’t gamble on a PVM that might not be as good.

You're right, I've just looked it up, it's a medical monitor. I've gone through the schematics as well and it has a different tube and control board to PVMs of that era. £100 seems like a lot of money for something that's going to need quite a lot of work to get RGB enabled neatly. I suppose it depends on how much scart enabled 14" Sony TV's are going for today. .

I doubt it has proper pvr internals. It’s a composite monitor really, used for cameras and such, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this has a consumer tube and electronics. Still good quality though, as all Sony TVs were at that time.

Your plasma has a maximum VGA input resolution of 640x480. Whatever you're plugging into it is outputting something higher.