When emulating original arcade cabinet games it gets even harder to be pixel perfect. Many used custom horizontal and vertical scanning frequencies because they were speccing the specific CRT in the game's cabinet. This changed not only the frame rate but the number of scan lines.
Emulating a collection of these games precisely requires a CRT that can scan at multiple frequency ranges. Fortunately, such monitors were made by arcade monitor manufacturers both for new OEM cabinets and monitor field replacement in existing cabinets. For my custom emulation cabinet I chose a Wells Gardner D9200, widely considered one of the best such monitors ever made. Fortunately, I originally built my cabinet back in 2008 when these CRTs were still being made. Of course, the PC and software have been updated many times but IMHO, there is no better single CRT for broad-based emulation of many titles in one system.
The D9200 accepts analog RGB input and will scan at an incredibly wide range of frequencies enabling the cabinet to emulate virtually all raster CRT based arcade games. Once you acquire such a monitor, proper emulation requires feeding it a native analog signal to avoid external transcoding. The last graphics card manufactured with native analog output was the Radeon R9 280x released in 2013. It's also the fastest GPU available for a purist emulation system. Although analog retro emulation doesn't typically require a GPU that fast, it can be useful if you also want to natively emulate titles from sixth generation home consoles such as PS2, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Gamecube which had 3D titles but still output analog video to CRTs at 480P.
To complete a pixel perfect emulation system you'll need to run a special version of the MAME arcade emulator called GroovyMAME, which works together with a specially hacked graphics card driver called CRT EMUDriver. This driver allows precisely setting the scanning frequencies of analog graphics card output. The maintainers of GMAME release new versions monthly in sync with MAME and have been doing so for over a decade. If you really want to do it right, I recommend the active community of hardcore retro analog purists at http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,52.0.html. Having played, worked on and owned many analog CRT based game cabs in the 1980s, I thought I knew a lot about retro analog emulation but I always learn something new there.
So called "Pixel Perfect" retro analog emulation of original arcade cabinets and home consoles isn't necessarily easy but it is possible - and IMHO absolutely worth it.
Emulating a collection of these games precisely requires a CRT that can scan at multiple frequency ranges. Fortunately, such monitors were made by arcade monitor manufacturers both for new OEM cabinets and monitor field replacement in existing cabinets. For my custom emulation cabinet I chose a Wells Gardner D9200, widely considered one of the best such monitors ever made. Fortunately, I originally built my cabinet back in 2008 when these CRTs were still being made. Of course, the PC and software have been updated many times but IMHO, there is no better single CRT for broad-based emulation of many titles in one system.
The D9200 accepts analog RGB input and will scan at an incredibly wide range of frequencies enabling the cabinet to emulate virtually all raster CRT based arcade games. Once you acquire such a monitor, proper emulation requires feeding it a native analog signal to avoid external transcoding. The last graphics card manufactured with native analog output was the Radeon R9 280x released in 2013. It's also the fastest GPU available for a purist emulation system. Although analog retro emulation doesn't typically require a GPU that fast, it can be useful if you also want to natively emulate titles from sixth generation home consoles such as PS2, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Gamecube which had 3D titles but still output analog video to CRTs at 480P.
To complete a pixel perfect emulation system you'll need to run a special version of the MAME arcade emulator called GroovyMAME, which works together with a specially hacked graphics card driver called CRT EMUDriver. This driver allows precisely setting the scanning frequencies of analog graphics card output. The maintainers of GMAME release new versions monthly in sync with MAME and have been doing so for over a decade. If you really want to do it right, I recommend the active community of hardcore retro analog purists at http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,52.0.html. Having played, worked on and owned many analog CRT based game cabs in the 1980s, I thought I knew a lot about retro analog emulation but I always learn something new there.
So called "Pixel Perfect" retro analog emulation of original arcade cabinets and home consoles isn't necessarily easy but it is possible - and IMHO absolutely worth it.