aww man, I feel like I was just slapped. Im just trying to get ANY sort of picture!
Hehe. Sorry - not trying to make fun of you or anything, just stating the truth.
The monitor in there now isnt working for one reason or another and it seems to be a lost art for repair.
It's not a lost art at all. Many of us, including myself, repair our own monitors. If you post what kind of monitor you have, and what it's doing, we can tell you how to fix it. If, for example, it's an Electrohome G07, I can tell you right now you probably need a flyback, horizontal output transistor, fuse, and about twenty electrolytic capacitors. Total parts cost, around $35.
If you don't want to repair your monitor yourself, you can send the chassis out to get rebuilt to either a forum member, or perhaps Chad at ArcadeCup.com - he specializes in repairing arcade monitors for people.
I have the LCD monitor on hand which means a cheap repair if I can get it installed. How much worse could the picture really be? Oh, and do I need to pick up any wiring harnesses?
The problem is, that it's more than just a wiring harness. You need an intelligent scan converter box - a frame doubler - in order to display a stable image at twice the frequency. That means that the entire frame needs to be stored in some kind of memory. Such a converter will not be cheap. Fixing the arcade monitor would be cheaper and easier.
And yes, the picture will be pretty bad. For one thing, LCD monitors can't do a very good black. Similarly, LCD's look best only at their native resolution - and the resolution of an arcade game is so low that it will look fuzzy on the LCD.
-Ian