What is the advantage of using a real arcade monitor for emulation?
Put simply, the reason is that the real games used the same monitors! Seems straightforward enough right? Maybe not, because we have to get our PC to co-operate with our plan for arcade-real pictures. But surely modern PCs can make easy work of displaying those old low-res graphics right? Well no actually… read on!… Older game boards had very basic video circuitry which was constrained in resolution for two reasons: firstly most available early monitors were based on TV designs and so had the same frequencies, and also because memory was expensive and higher resolutions require much more RAM. There were some very clever designs around, which used the concept of “sprites” to work around the memory limit, but resolutions were still limited. The simplicity produces sharply-defined but low res graphics. For an emulator to reproduce this exactly, the beam of the monitor must have a one-to-one correlation with emulators graphics memory. We can make the VGA card behave as a 100% emulation
