Anyone tried a 15kHz RGB video card for emulation?
 

Has anyone tried using a 15kHz RGB output video card on a PC? The one thing I can't stand with emulation is the output on a VGA monitor. Putting in the scan lines helps, but the color suffers, and there is always those blocky looking pixels. I wonder how an emulated amiga (and other machines) look on a "real" display.

try your tv output and connect pc to tv :-)

That's an idea I never thought of. But composite video sucks. Well at least it does once you get used to a large RGB monitor.

Use SVHS instead of composite?

It's still nowhere near the quality of RGB!

ArcadeVGA
 

Take a look at the ArcadeVGA from Ultimarc. It is designed to be used with MAME on an arcade monitor or a TV with SCART (RGB) input.

It's based on the Radeon 9200 chipset but has a modified BIOS and special drivers that allows it to run 15Khz modes. It comes with a breakout cable so you can put your own connector on it depending on what type of display device you will be using. Or you can make your own cable. I'm sure it will work fine with WinUAE at native Amiga resolutions.

www.ultimarc.com

Still, depending on where you live, you could probably pick up an A500 with a 1084 monitor for around the same price or just a little more...

Or, you could do this (this is what I have done - i need my main 5900XT AGP card for gaming, so i'm doing it with a Radeon 7000 PCI. For now, its just for movies though): http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/
New revised version: http://ryoandr.free.fr/english.html

Just a clarification. S-Video is actually pretty good. Not quite RGB, but fairly close - you would have to look carefully to see the difference. The problem with PC's is that the TV encoding chips on the graphics cards generally suck very badly, and most will not allow native PAL *input*. It has to be usually 800x600 or 640x480 which the graphics card does overscan and interpolation to get it to 720x576 (PAL) *output*.

I think the best solution is the one Sune mentioned, and drive your display using the VGA-out. I built this one to drive a PC-based PVR, and it works very well! The circuit even fits inside the SCART connector if you are careful. However you will need to make sure you output native PAL/NTSC otherwise you could break your TV (not very likely on newer models, but still...).

I'd have to agree - s-video is much nearer to RGB than it is to composite.

Anything radeon based is the one to go for, thats why Ultimarc went for the rad 9200 as a cheap base! ATi cards have excellent tv out, they can even output direct to a tv without having a vga/tft monitor connected! none of my nvidia cards can boast that feature.

I have a radeon 9600 all in wonder hooked up to an 100hz widescreen tv using rgb scart! I can quite happily use the pc for browsing, games and emulation :)

EDIT: Does anybody here own one of these arcade vga cards? I just had a nose at the site and the card looks like a standard 9200SE.. possible Hercules or Sapphire with a jumper for NTSC and PAL. If this is the case I wonder if the bios can be modded on a normal card turning it into an arcade vga :D

depending on your hardware, you can force a pc gfx card into 15khz.
It's been a while, so I dont remember specifics. Just search for arcade emulation and you should find some good sites with the software.

Not according to the MythTV lists (PVR for Linux), but not having one, I couldn't say how it matches nVidia's. I'd certainly be surprised if they could get any worse. Also note that Linux people don't seem to like ATI very much because their Linux drivers barely work, so there may be some predudice there.

Ummm... So can both my GF2Ti and my GF4MX. You just boot it with only the TV plugged in... Is that what you meant?