I’ve seen a lot of really great products come out in the past few years. OSSC, HDMIDC, GCNHDMI out, etc. All this was done by members who take this hobby seriously and even some folks like Retrogamingcables deliver us the best cable connections available, …yet there’s still brand name manufactures like POUND coming out with their ringing, noise-induced offerings and more recently Mcable who has just released the Mclassic, only to continue a number of issues based on non-supported resolutions, or whatever problems they include.
I know that our communities have set the bar standard in all this not too long ago. Video quality is quite literally 1:1 on most consoles now, hell EVEN BETTER!! However these name brands continue to deliver shitty product and I always asked if there is some purpose for them to keep doing this? I mean you’re charged 60-150 bucks only to be using some shitty cable or scaler that looks worse then a/v and they later upsell you another product promising they'll deliver better on the next go. Honestly I'm @#%ing through with this!! Everyone should be too knowing in this day and age we’ve covered our own and third party products should not have a place in this industry!
I wish there was a revolt against this BS. Seriously, hit the standards we’re at or GTFO!! >:(
Yeah Pound in particular is dodge, just repackaged same old junk.
And weirdly specialist retro people just don’t seem to get it. Like I remember the PCE/TG16 RGB modding service… that advised to use the standard crap RGB to HDMI adapter that treated the image as 480i and was laggy and blurry as hell. You think people doing quality modding work would understand image quality?
The biggest issue has been quality scalers being expensive. XRGBs were the only good ones for years, Retrotink is the closest they have come to mainstream prices. So there was a market for someone to repackage the crap RGB to HDMI scalers as ‘specialist’ I guess.
What’s really odd to me is that TV’s internal scalers seems to have gotten a lot better. Sure they’re still not Framemeisters, but I know for sure my 2 year old screen does a lot better than my one from about 9 years ago. So half-assed solutions may be worse in many cases now, certainly for 480i and 480p stuff.
Getting burned with bad AV products is a stepping stone into becoming a retro gamer on authentic hardware.
Until the retrotink, engineered products still cost a bit too much for the average consumer. OSSC was the price of a Switch Liteor Xbox One S. So companies exploited the low end gap for people who, perhaps justifiably, don’t want to spend a lot of money to use their old systems on a new tv.
Those HDMI cables that artificially add AA though to an image, well… that’s relying on people’s lack of common sense. Not even sure how that’s appealing in all honesty.
On gaf I remember we’d get new people come into the AV thread and it seems almost everyone would go through wasting money on 3-4 cheap nasty things before evolving and just dropping the cash on a Framemeister
The difference now is there are companies reselling cheap nasty solutions at double the prices with a brand on them, when there now are better options for say PS2 at similar prices like the Retrotink.
I think the store retailers are some of the worst when it comes to what products they put up on display. I don’t think Gamestop’s is too bad atm (never bothered to check out anything there), but I’ve looked through other resellers and they have all kinds of unknown or no-name brands, plus these knock off controllers that pretend to be the original (check the snes controlls, repro box print, etc).
I’ll avoid them like the plague unless I know of something I know I want ahead of time, but they still harp on everyone else for a sucker deal when they get the chance.
If Mike Chi really put his mind to it, I think he could sell a lot more RetroTINK hardware. I also think he should consider licensing it to TV makers to be included for their composite input. Economy of scale would probably make it a cheap addition. Maybe I’m crazy though.
That’s actually a really good idea. For those of us who would rather use S-Video or Component, the RetroTINK is still an essential component in the chain, but for folks that want to just pull the NES out of the attic and hook it up to the modern TV, it could provide an easy way to do so with no extra setup necessary.
As to the topic at large, I’m reaching the point where, because I stream/capture retro games, and I’m finding that some stuff is still a touch laggy on my LCD TV, I’m trying to plot a course for setting up analog video splitters. That will hopefully allow me to pipe the signal to a CRT, as well as through a RetroTINK or OSSC, to get that signal into my capture card. If I can accomplish that, I’ll be a happy boy.
