Arcade Monitor vs TV

[OrioleFan]

Hello all!

I own a Neo Geo AES which is the home version of the Neo Geo released in 1990, this is NOT the arcade cabinet version/MVS. The systems are identical andjavascript:void(0); Neo Geo was advertised as bringing pixel perfect arcade experience to your living room.

I dusted it off and hooked it up last night to a CRT TV in my house and it fired right up. However, I noticed the quality of the picture itself was less than impressive. Nothing is wrong with the system, but I am confused as the quality of the picture on the CRT TV is nowhere near the quality I've seen on Neo Geo MVS (arcade) cabinets. What could cause this? Is there a difference in quality between a home TV and a monitor (such as a Wells Gardner) featured in an arcade cabinet?

[allansim]

I have one too.  Arcade monitors often have better resolution, but look at the connection to the TV your console uses.  I bet it's composite like mine which gets the job done but is a low quality video signal compared to what we use today (i think the best it can do is 360i?).  Awhile ago I saw people who would offer to mod the Neo Geo AES to give it an S-video connection which was slightly better and it wouldn't surprise me if they would be offering HDMI modding services now although I haven't looked.

[Shun_di]

It's to do with the connection between the AES/MVS and the TV/Monitor.
The TV should be similar in quality to an arcade monitor although the quality of the components will vary between manufacturers. The problem is the if you are using a composite (yellow) cable to connect to the TV. Analogue video is made from three colours, Red, Green and Blue or RGB. The best quality would be getting an RGB signal from the console to the TV.

In an arcade machine, the arcade game pcb outputs an RGB on three separate wires. One for Red, one for Green and one for Blue. These three wires (plus the separate sync wires) are sent separately and connect to the arcade monitor directly so no drop in signal quality.
A composite signal has to send all three colours plus the sync signals along one wire meaning that you lose a lot of information and therefore quality.

S-Video is slightly better because it splits some of the composite signal into another wire but all colours still get sent on the same wire within the s-video cable.

What you want is a TV that accepts an RGB input. In the UK and the rest of Europe we had a connection called SCART which has pins that accept an RGB signal providing that you send the correct voltage along the scart cable. I've connected a PAC-MAN pcb to a SCART TV successfully and it looks great. I'm not sure how easy it is to get hold of SCART TV in the USA and Canada though. Alternatively old broadcast monitors usually accept an RGB signal.