The Right Display for a DIY Arcade Machine
Monitors, LCD, or TVs… What’s the Best Choice?
Sorry for the infrequent posts lately. There have been two main factors that are currently keeping me from moving forward with the DIY Arcade Machine. The first being financial because the economy has been so crappy lately and the other biggest factor being the difficulty in finding a display.
Now normally this would not be an issue, but remember that for the first arcade machine I wanted to go with something compact to build a miniature arcade machine. Because of this I have been having a really hard time finding a small display.
Now I know I said my next post would incorporate some of the plans I have been working on so that people could use my designs to work off of if they wanted to. The only problem is without the display I can’t really work out any measurements on my designs.
So I wanted to post an article about what I have been running into with different considerations people should make when they are choosing a display for their arcade machine. So let’s take a look at the differences in CRT monitors, LCD monitors, TVs, and the pros and cons of each in deciding what is best for each individual project.
CRT Monitors
CRT Monitors are the standard boxy displays you find on older computers. CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube which is the technology that drives a CRT monitor. A CRT works by shooting electrons at the screen to create images. Because of the way CRT monitors work they were well known for having a faster response time than LCD monitors. This is no longer the case as LCD technology has improved quiet a bit in the past few years.
The benefits of using a CRT monitor would be that because most people are replacing them with LCDs you might be able to get one for free from someone if they are getting rid of it. They would be more “authentic” in their design to what is actually used in arcade machines and with older units it was not uncommon to find them in sizes smaller than 15”. (Which would be nice for a miniature design.)
The cons with some older CRT monitors are that older units may not display as high a resolution as newer monitors. This would affect your system more in Windows than while using your emulators as older gaming system utilized lower resolutions and the emulators run at these resolutions unless you change your display options in the settings. Another con is that older CRT monitors display fewer colors than new monitors, although once again older systems used fewer colors, so both these considerations would mainly be noticeable in Windows and not while your emulators are running.
The biggest con is that finding a new CRT monitor now a days is a difficult task and finding one smaller than 15” inches is next to impossible unless you are looking into a specialty monitor. A lot of these are used in medical or industrial applications and are outside of a reasonable price range. (Although these seem to have the best response times, color depths, and small size ranges.)
Another con with CRT monitors is their weight. Because a CRT is a giant glass tube, they usually weigh anywhere from 25-50 lbs adding to the overall weight of your system.
PROS
- Fast response times
- Good color depth
- Varying sizes
- Might be able to get one for free from Craigslist
CONS
- Weight: They are heavy!
- Specialized small CRTs are expensive
- It’s hard to find “new” CRTs in stores
- Older CRTs do not support higher resolutions and color depths.
- Do not support DVI video connections.
LCD Monitors
LCD monitors are the standard display most people use as of this article. (2008). They have many advantages over CRT monitors because they are inexpensive, most have a great response time, the color depth is rich and vibrant, and they are light weight.
The only problem with an LCD monitor is finding sizes smaller than 17”. Because LCDs have become the norm and most consumers are looking for bigger and bigger displays a lot of manufacturers have stopped producing smaller units. Finding a 15” is very difficult and anything smaller is next to impossible.
I have come across a few smaller LCDs online, but once again these are used for specialty applications like displays in cars. Because of this they tend to use connections other than standard VGA or DVI that is commonly used for computer displays. They can also be fairly expensive because they are designed for special uses.
Cons with LCDs are mostly found in older units, and these are commonly response time, contrast ratio, and dead pixels. If the response time is low you will get something known as ghosting where you see trails on the display when objects are moving fast. This is a real bummer in games where it is most noticeable. A low contrast ratio affects how accurate your colors are display, and how true “blacks” are. With a low contrast ratio blacks can look more like grays and colors feel washed out.
Dead pixels can be a real drag because it is when pixels in the display actually burnout and display as black on a colored screen, or they get stuck on one color which can be very noticeable on black screens. I have an old LCD monitor that has 1 green pixel, and when Windows boots, it is all I can look at.
Overall I think an LCD would be a great option for my project because they are light weight, and support most current display standards. They usually cost about as much as a CRT would cost if you could find one (new), and it would free up space inside my arcade cabinet that would otherwise be taken up by a CRT display.
PROS
- Light weight.
- Support most modern video standards, resolutions, and color depths.
- Newer LCDs feature great response times and contrast ratios.
- Support for VGA and DVI connections.
- Price is about the same as a new CRT.
CONS
- Small LCDs utilize non-standard video connections.
- Small LCDs are usually more expensive than a larger LCD display.
- Older LCDs suffer from slow response times, and low contrast ratios.
- Possibility of dead pixels.
TV’s
The last consideration I had made for the project was using a portable TV display. It is easy to find small tube TVs for relatively cheap, it would meet the size requirements I am shooting for, and I know they are available locally so I could save myself money on shipping.
There are several considerations to make with the idea of using a TV though. First off is that a TV display is usually a relatively low resolution. This means that while the emulators would play fine on the TV (since old video games were originally designed to be displayed at these resolutions anyway.) anything I did within Windows would look terrible.
Keep in mind that your operating system will be set to at least 1024 by 768. Some people might say “hey, you could always set it to 800 by 600” but we need to keep in mind all the display factors involved with the OS. 800 by 600 on a 7-10” screen is going to leave little if any room for icons on a desktop. Plus if we make a custom interface which I would like to do, you will also be limited in the room you have to work with. So because of the size of the display, the display requirements of the operating system, and various other considerations I have pretty much ruled out using a portable TV display.
There are two other brief considerations I want to mention regarding portable TVs. The first is the interface connection on this type of display. Most of these TVs use an RCA video connection if they do support video in. To use a display like this it would need to support video in. Most video cards that support video out via RCA do not output a signal until the operating system kicks in. This means that if we have the display hooked up to the PC we will not get video until the system has loaded into Windows. So if anything goes wrong during the POST and we need to troubleshoot the system we would be unable to do so unless we hooked up another display. (CRT or LCD)
The second consideration is that these types of displays have relatively poor color depth compared to LCD displays or CRTs. With older game systems this is not a problem because as I mentioned before these games were originally designed to be displayed on TVs. But this is another consideration for anything custom we want to do within the OS. Whether it is a custom boot screen, background, screen saver or interface. So we might put a lot of work into designing something really nice for our arcade machine only to have it look half ass because of limited color depth on a TV.
PROS
- Light weight.
- Inexpensive
- Easy to find. Can be purchased locally to save on shipping.
CONS
- Utilize non-standard PC video connections.
- Limited video standards, resolutions, and color depths.
- Usually display at best 800 by 600 with most being much lower.
- May not have a video-in connection which is required for the project.
Conclusion
As you can see there are a lot of factors that go into choosing and then finding the proper display for a project like this. With a standard sized arcade machine finding a display would be relatively simple and I would already have what I need. But because I will be building a miniature arcade machine finding the perfect display has been a much harder undertaking than I originally expected.
I hope this article has given people some ideas for considerations to look at when they are planning their own arcade machine.
DIY Arcade Machine Design for Internal Components
Planning the Internal Design of the Arcade System
Ok guys. Today we are going to be doing some more studying and planning for the design of our Arcade Machine. In the last post we checked out the way vintage arcade systems were designed to get a feel for the look of our arcade cabinet. Today we will be studying the insides of manufactured arcade machines, and build it yourself arcade systems that people have designed to get a better idea of the internal layout.
The first thing we need is a good resource for the internal layout of some vintage manufactured arcade systems.
I found a great article on About.com entitled “A Look Inside a Classic Arcade Cabinet”.
It has some good shots of the inside of a vintage arcade cabinet, along with basic explanations of each picture and the components.
There is also a lot of great reading material in the Wikipedia article on Arcade Cabinets. I recommend browsing through it for some interesting information on how classic arcade machines were designed.
I also found a nice compilation of sites from DIY Arcade builders that have shared their designs with others to give people a good idea of where to start. They can be located here at Arcade Controls.com - Arcade Cabinet Plans.
These are mainly to give readers a good idea of how to get started with their plans. I have found that one solution is never ideal for everyone, so chances are you are going to be doing your own plans from scratch.
I wanted to cover some of the internal design considerations I will be making as I come up with my designs.
- Considerations for how to mount an LCD monitor in a home made Arcade Cabinet.
- How to design a backlit area for a marquee on the top of the system.
- Create an area for the wiring below the controls to keep this separate from the rest of the internal components.
- Come up with a way to mount a trackball mouse into the controls for “roller ball” controls used in games like Centipede.
- Design an easy to wire, highly effective controller for the system that does not have problems like blocking or ghosting associated with keyboard controls.
- Mount internal components and hardware based on standard computer case layouts in the bottom of the system.
- Have USB ports accessible for connecting controllers to the system for use as a console.
- Build accessible video out options for when the cabinet is being used as a console.
- Proper venting to exhaust warm air and keep the temperature inside the system at appropriate levels.
- Power solution for computer and monitor to power both devices while only needing to plug into one outlet.
These are some of the considerations I have in mind for my designs. Hopefully this will help you come up with considerations you will need to make when you are working on your own design.
In my next post I will be sharing some of the designs I have been working on as well and sample plans you can download for the construction of the cabinet. Thanks for checking out DIY ROM Arcade!
Top 25 Arcade Machines – Arcade System Designs
Planning Out The Arcade System Design
Ok, so the first thing we will want to do when planning out our Build It Yourself Arcade Machine is study actual vintage Arcade cabinets to get a feel for how we want to design ours.
I think that this is an important step because I want my Arcade Machine to have a very authentic look and feel to it. I check around online for some good examples of Arcade Cabinets and found some great links on a website called Killer List of Video Games (http://www.klov.com/)
The site has a ton of pictures of Arcade Machine cabinets, Marquees, Screenshots and Artwork. For the purpose of this post we are going to be looking at the shape and dimensions more than artwork.
I have compiled a list of my top 25 favorite arcade machines from when I was growing up and I will be using these as examples for the study.
Top 25 Best Arcade Machines:
01. Asteroids
02. Bubble Bobble
03. Centipede
04. Contra
05. Defender
06. Donkey Kong
07. Final Fight
08. Frogger
09. Galaga
10. Ghost n Goblins
11. Lunar Lander
12. Marble Madness
13. Metal Slug
14. Missle Command
15. Moon Patrol
16. Pac Man
17. Paper Boy
18. Q*bert
19. Raiden
20. Rampage
21. Space Invaders
22. Star Wars
24. Tempest
25. Tron
(This list is basically arcade machines off the top of my head. If you have some better ones you think deserve to be in the list, or have a better example of a good looking cabinet please leave a comment and I consider adding it to the list!)
Observations of Arcade Machine Designs
From studying the similarities in most of these systems we can gain several insights into how to design an authentic feeling Arcade Machine.
The first thing we notice in all the designs in that while the controls and marquee layouts can vary, the display is almost always in the same spot, and same position. Some arcade machines make use of the display in two ways. On some it is horizontal like your standard 4:3 TV displays but on others it is turned on its side to give it a tall, narrow feel which would be good for games like Centipede and Galaga.
For my design I will be utilizing a 4:3 standard display setup as this applies to the majority of games out there. Considering that I am planning to do a miniature arcade machine this means my system will need to be at least 15” wide to accommodate a standard 17” (LCD) monitor.
I will be going with an LCD monitor for this project and will go into more detail on it when we discuss the PC hardware selection in a later post.
The next thing I notice with most of the arcade cabinets is that if you remove the marquee, the lower half and upper half of the cabinet is roughly the same height. For the miniature system I will be making the lower half of the unit about 1/3 the height of the system with the top half being roughly 2/3's of the total size.
I will be doing this to make the unit more compact so it is more convenient to play on a table or desk. This will also help create a smaller unit that is easy to store as it will not take up as much space as a full size arcade machine.
Because I will be making the bottom of the unit smaller I am going to ad a slight slope to the front of the system to create a little wider base on the cabinet for stability.
Another common feature we notice on a lot of these units is that the marquee is usually pushed back farther than the controls. I am guessing this is so people do not bump their head if they are leaning into the system. I will be designing my system with this in mind since on a miniature system this may get in the way of someone’s view if they are sitting over the unit.
A lot of the units we see here also have some sort of shroud around the display which helps block out light from glaring on the screen. I think this is a great idea and will be incorporating it into my design also.
The last major feature we notice on a lot of these units is how the controllers come out from the system at an almost horizontal angle. I would like to copy these designs and make it so my display and controls are at roughly a 120 degree angle from one another, similar to if you have a laptop open with the display tilted back.
Overall this gives us a great idea of where to start with our design.
I now have a good idea of common traits and design features from various Arcade cabinets and can begin to work up some sketches based on what we see here.
A few other things to keep in mind while I work on the design are the following:
- I would like a marquee on the system that actually lights up so I will need to plan for a light kit in the top portion of the system.
- The controls need to be comfortable to use so I will need to utilize the entire width of the system and possibly design them a little wider depending on how the initial mock up feels.
- I want the ability to use a third party controller with the system so I can play it like a console if the mood strikes me. I also plan on designing it so I can hook the system up to my television and play it like a true couch potato, so the ability to use a USB controller with it is a "needed" feature for me.
- Because I want to be able to hook up the system to the TV I will need some sort of “convenient” video out feature on the system so I can connect it to the video in connection on my television.
- I do not plan on using CD/DVD drives with the system so I will be transferring data via a network connection and a USB memory stick. Because of this I will need an accessible network port and USB port somewhere on the system.
- I would like to have a keyboard that is hidden from “normal” use but can quickly and easily fold out if I am doing admin stuff with the system.
- The addition of a track ball mouse on the controller would give the system a more authentic feel for games like pong, breakout, and more. This will need to be worked into the design of the controller.
So overall this covers most of the considerations I need to keep in mind when drawing up sketches for possible design ideas.
In my next post I plan to follow-up with some of the potential designs I have had floating around in my head and try to plan out some concrete designs to work from. Thanks for checking out the site and look forward to my next post on creating our arcade machine design plans.