Bovine Communications

Mame Project

The Monitor
(or lack thereof)

For a monitor I went with the cheapest thing I could find at Wal-Mart. This beauty
set us back about $95 it's a standard 25" TV. I carefully removed all the electronics
from the housing it came in.  The bracket for the old arcade monitor fit like a glove.
The bolt holes aligned perfectly, so we then mounted the electronics for the TV right
to the frame of the old monitor housing. I wanted a TV that had S-Video in but failed to
find one that was in our price range at the time; in hindsight I wish we had gone S-Video.

Unfortunately when power is lost the TV stays off, we're building a circuit right now
to check and make sure that if arcade power is on then TV is on also. Right now
we have to manually turn on the TV each time we start the arcade. I thought about
just having a delayed relay push the power button every time you turn on the arcade
but this would not work because it takes about 3 mins for the capacitors to drain and reset
then TV so if you want to reboot the computer for any reason you would need to wait
like 3 mins for the TV to default back to off, or when you turned it back on prematurely
it would turn off the TV rather than turn it on (big problem). So a special monitoring system
and switch are being made.

So the TV just has a standard composite Video in, and I choose not to connect audio due
to the super tiny speaker that came with the TV (visible to the right).
The Sound is handled in the Sound section.
Then we bolted the video chassis right to the frame of the arcade, as seen by the
pre-drilling for the lag bolts. This way the monitor and chassis will not move; ever.