Post
by MonMotha » Wed Jun 03, 2015 3:29 pm
Man, that thing's been butchered. Being a Korean cabinet to start with, which are of generally inferior construction to the Japanese ones, it's probably barely worth the $750 in typical markets these days. Depends on the condition of the stage (everybody always says "it's good").
LCDs are pretty terrible for DDR in general. They're all widescreen, so you either have to stretch or live with barn doors on the sides if you want the right aspect ratio. It really throws me off to have it stretched, especially on double, since DDR's arrows already start off pretty big compared to, say, PIU. They also pretty much all lag, often quite a bit, unless you're VERY careful to specifically find one that doesn't. Most people who do this sort of hack job replacement don't bother. Contrast and response time is also typically iffy on low-end LCD monitors and TVs which is especially bad if you like playing with lots of high speed. Most of them also have serious trouble scaling the 480i RGB that the System 573 puts out if they can even do it at all.
VERY modern DDR (X and newer, but not really until X3) do support widescreen and can even take advantage of the higher resolutions as can Stepmania. Python 2 versions (SN and SN2) support 480p, but they still assume a 4:3 aspect monitor. They also usually have some degree of support for adjusting the display to compensate to the degree possible for display lag. Setting it all up can be a pain. Stepmania is already hard to deal with if you want it to actually work correctly and reliably.
You can actually still buy new "crate" 27/29" arcade monitors for the time being. They're actually fairly cheap by historic standards at ~$500 + shipping. It's getting tough to find them that'll handle 480i (15kHz), but most of them will do 480p (31kHz) or even higher and so support modern versions well enough. Build quality is usually so-so but varies depending on make/model. I don't know how long this situation will continue since, AFAIK, nobody is making new CRTs anymore. All the monitors being sold are using NOS tubes. It's also usually possible to repair old monitors when they break.
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