- Joined
- Jun 15, 2002
- Posts
- 8,250
So this is from a ways back but it's clear from these two shots that this board uses a fixed pixel width and scales the games to fill it, rather than varying the pixel clock (outputting exactly however many pixels a game uses across the screen, since different games/hardware have different pixel widths). Given the cheapo nature of this board this isn't surprising at all. You'd notice that when the screen scrolls, certain parts of the screen will seem to sort of have a ripple or blinking pattern, that's telling of a noninteger scale factor. Or that one pixel wide elements (like the border around each character portrait in 98) are thicker in some places than others.
If you just wanna cram games into your cab then that's one thing but if you care about them looking authentic, this is far from it. I'm not trying to sound elitist but if you care about your emulation output looking just like the board is supposed to on a CRT, set up MAME or whichever emulator of choice and look into either CRT Emudriver or soft15khz, they both do the same thing, in that they get certain computer GPUs to output 15khz over the VGA port and they do vary the pixel clock, so you don't have any scaling shit like the above to worry about.
Seeing as this thing is $70, a piece of shit discarded computer that can run everything on here that "runs fine" just as well or better, + JPAC as plug and play "JAMMA controls plug in as a USB controller" and "15khz from PC feeds into monitor" solution, would run you less and be only slightly less plug and play, have accurate video output, and would be much more versatile (I'm sure it can run a ton more games without issue than this thing even if it's some 2ghz Pentium 4 or something).
If you're playing on a LCD anyway though I suppose this wouldn't matter to you. But if you are a CRT fanatic then this getting about as far away from what makes a CRT look the way it does for retro games as can be. If any of you are hooking this up thru RGB to your PVMs and going "yep now I have all these arcade games and they're on a CRT, doin' it right", you're really not.
Oof, Xbox can't do noninterlaced output though, same issue with fixed pixel width too. IMHO if you're gonna use a console, hack a Wii and use RGB from it (you can get NTSC Wiis to do RGB for homebrew), from what I've seen many ROMs that tax an Xbox ran without issues on Wii (Out Zone's the one I know best), and the Wii does noninterlaced video AND can vary the pixel clock!I received mine and the CPS1 titles play pretty well, though the screen tearing as others have mentioned is a downer. I'd say overall something like jammifying an Xbox 1 would be a better investment for the money in terms of the quality of emulation.
Yes but see aboveDoes this thing display 240p? That would be the only reason I would have to use it, as opposed to a rawmXbox.
Willing to bet that's just line-level audio and meant to hook up to an amp, where you'd adjust the volume.Can someone with a Pandora's Box 3 confirm if the volume of the headphone jack remains at full blast even when you change the volume on the PB3? Still waiting for my Jamma cabinet, so I can't confirm if it varies over the Jamma connector, but I tried using it meanwhile using headphones, but I can't seem to change the volume. It's all really loud.
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