> I've been considering getting a 19" rotatable LCD, hoping vertical games would
> be "super-wicked."
>
> How does it compare to a CRT, in your opinion. I've read others, but I'm trying
> to gather as many as possible.

Let's put it this way, I'd MUCH rather play vertical games on a vertical RGB arcade monitor. But game are pretty cool on LCD. It's just that they look artificial no matter what fancy blitter or scanline effects used. If you can get a real arcade cab with a vertical screen, that's THE best way to go. Of course. :)

But yeah, rotating LCD's are definitely very nice for vertical games.

May I recommend the Dell 2001FP? It's 20.1 inches, it rotates, and is the best LCD I ever saw. Very bright rich colors. I have zero dead pixels, and because it's got a very fast pixel refresh rate there's no blurring like on many LCD's. I only paid around $700 for it during a promo at their business sales site a few months ago. You can often get stuff much cheaper there.

In MAME I scale everything to 1600x1200 and use 75% scanlines. This looks fantastic. If I didn't have my arcade cab sitting 10 feet away I'd swear it looked like an arcade picture, but it's still a little "too good" if you know what I mean. But really, it's excellent. You just can't beat the real thing though. Unfortunately my current arcade cab has a standard res 25" monitor which doesn't do vertical games too well (using ArcadeVGA & JPac), has to scale them up using 640x480 interlaced. Playable, but vertical scrolling games look... not great. Non-scrolling vertical classics (i.e. Pacman, MrDo etc.) look great. Horizontal games look completely perfect tho. Wish my cab could rotate the monitor. And it's too narrow to fit one of those 27" CGA/VGA's. Oh well.

If you get an LCD, be sure to pay attention to pixel refresh rates - anything more than 16ms will mean some noticeable blurriness when stuff moves. Bad for games. At 16ms or less things look great. Fast LCD's cost a bit more but if you use it for games, it's worth it.

-Prophet-
www.retrogames.com