Monitor suggestion

I need to get a new TV for my spare bedroom because the TV I have in there is 10 years old and crapping out on me. I've been getting in to shooters a lot recently so I came to the idea that instead of buying a normal LCD TV, I'd pick up an LCD computer monitor with a rotatable stand so I can tate it for shooters. I'd hook up other consoles to it as well, but I should be able to hook most of them up through VGA so that wouldn't be much of an issue.

My question for you guys though would be: what kind of monitor would you recommend? My TV right now is 27" and I'd like to keep it around that size if possible. I'd be down for something higher, but it looks to me like 30" is around the max. Any recommendations?

Personally I'd say to consider getting a CRT arcade monitor (eg 27", 29"). You could get one of those and then make an enclosure for it by cutting some panels.
I think 4:3 monitors can run vertical shooters, they just take up the middle part of the screen (with black bars on each side).
Or you could get a cab with a CRT monitor. That way you don't have to build an enclosure.

joe8 said:

Personally I'd say to consider getting a CRT arcade monitor (eg 27", 29"). You could get one of those and then make an enclosure for it by cutting some panels.
I think 4:3 monitors can run vertical shooters, they just take up the middle part of the screen (with black bars on each side).
Or you could get a cab with a CRT monitor. That way you don't have to build an enclosure.

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I actually just got a cab, but there's always the possibility I want to play a shmup that I can't play on my cab. I can play vertical shmups at a 4:3 resolution right now, but that isn't how they should be played (I've noticed I'm much, much worse at Dodonpachi on a horizontal setup than I am on a vertical setup ).

It really just comes down to laziness: having a monitor that is on a rotatable stand is much easier to rotate from a landscape position to a portrait position than having to pick up and reorient a big heavy CRT. I'm trying to kill 2 birds with one stone, since I need to buy a new TV in the near future and I'd like to be able to play vertical shmups the way they were designed.

It really just comes down to laziness: having a monitor that is on a rotatable stand is much easier to rotate from a landscape position to a portrait position than having to pick up and reorient a big heavy CRT.

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Just pay somebody to come to your house and rotate it every so often. Or you could build some kind of machine to rotate it.

joe8 said:

Just pay somebody to come to your house and rotate it every so often. Or you could build some kind of machine to rotate it.

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If only I was Dr. Moneybags...or mechanically inclined for that matter.

what systems are you going to hook up to the machine? newer systems wont look as bad on an lcd, and older ones you could get an upscan box to match the LCD native resolution.

Just in case your not aware, LCD's have a native resolution and when you run content that is a lower res the display looks yucky. You can avoid this by purchasing upscale devices that are designed for games (ie xrgb3, megacool1080p, etc).

If you get an LCD for games I suggest getting one with a fast response time if you can.

I just noticed i haven't seen any 27inch lcds with rotating base, let me know if you find one. You might have to go custom and wall mount. There are a few adjustable wall mounts for displays that accomadate for this, not sure of weight limit and restrictions though. Display prolly has to be VESA compatible.

agustusx said:

what systems are you going to hook up to the machine? newer systems wont look as bad on an lcd, and older ones you could get an upscan box to match the LCD native resolution.

Just in case your not aware, LCD's have a native resolution and when you run content that is a lower res the display looks yucky. You can avoid this by purchasing upscale devices that are designed for games (ie xrgb3, megacool1080p, etc).

If you get an LCD for games I suggest getting one with a fast response time if you can.

I just noticed i haven't seen any 27inch lcds with rotating base, let me know if you find one. You might have to go custom and wall mount. There are a few adjustable wall mounts for displays that accomadate for this, not sure of weight limit and restrictions though. Display prolly has to be VESA compatible.

Click to expand...

I'd hook up some of the newer systems (360, xbox, ps2) and a few older ones (saturn, DC). I have an XRGB-1, but I really havent looked in to how well it upscales and what it can do (bought it on a whim because I heard about those boxes before and thought I was getting an awesome deal for $40).

What would you consider a fast response time? I think the highest I would try and go would be 8ms. I'd like to go lower (like around 5ms or so), but I'm really restricted in regards to sizes unfortunately. I made a post over at AVSforum to see what they know about tv stands that can rotate a display from landscape to portrait so maybe i can get lucky and pick up a normal LCD tv and just rotate that.

btw you can ignore me if your not picky on visuals...It's a big deal for me so I stress it a lot If your the type that can tell when things don't look right and it bothers you then maybe I can help steer you in the right direction

I can say this much, the ps2 will look like arse (most of the time). That 480i signal just doesn't seem to work well on any HDTV i've had. TV's tend to do a poor job of deinterlacing video feeds, so there is a lot of approximation done when drawing the extra pixels. It's hard to play a danmaku if all the projectiles are squiggly. I got an megacool 1080p, which is sorta like a cheaper more limited xrgb and it has made the shooters far more playable.

I would suggest a tv with at least 1 vga, it should not be hard to find. In the long road you won't regret it. It would allow you to use the xrbg or megalcool boxes as well as your dc via the vga box to get the best visual on the new tv. I rarely use my dc anymore, but I can say it looks just fine on an hdtv when using vga. Not so much for svideo or rca.

From what I understand 8ms is good enough for a 60hz display, but if you get a display that does say 120hz see if it has like a 4ms or so response time. My tvs are in the 8 range, but I recently got a monitor that is 2ms. It replaced an older 8ms lcd. Sublte visual effects in Himesama that were noticable on the crt and not the lcd became visable on the 2ms display.

I wouldn't panic though if you can't find better than 8ms in a tv though, just wanted ya to avoid a 24ms.