Retro AV |OT| RGB, CRTs, Upscalers, and more

Even in composite, those dithering patterns could be pretty spotty depend on the quality of the CRT’s comb filter and the size of the display.

You could always just plug composite into an upscaler if that’s what you’re into… but it feels like a rather expensive way to get a blur going. And given the upscale, you may not see a proper blending of patterns anyway.

To be honest, scanlines (even faux scanlines) actually do a lot to trick your mind into blending together dithered patterns for some reason. When I upgraded my Genesis to RGB, I thought I’d miss the blending of the dithered stuff too, but I never really did.

No matter what you do, there’s always going to be tradeoffs. You can make yourself absolutely nutty if your goal is to get every little detail absolutely perfect in your setup. Dithered patterns is just one of those things that you may need to let go of.

I just played through Streets of Rage 2 this morning with scanlines on and I definitely, definitely missed it. That game makes heavy use of dithering, both for transparency and for simulating extra colors… and it really sticks out. I don’t think it’s a minor thing on the Genesis, it’s just used so heavily across the library. In the case of expanding the color palette, you can squint and ignore it, but then there’s stuff like

where it’s just a massive difference. It’s truly a bummer.

I’ll take a photo when I get a chance of this or the sonic waterfall with the LPF on my ossc jacked up, but it looks similar to the right. I was pleased with the result when this used to bug me but yeah dither is kinda cool because you don’t see it in modern stuff.

That would be awesome to have that built into scalers someday, it would be great to be able to use any of the retroarch shaders but unlike CRT shaders those dithering shaders shouldn’t need a great lot of processing power to pull off

Here’s a shot of Sonic on my Trinitron through component but w/ the gdapt shader

Here’s without for comparison

If there were a Genesis NT, a filter like the Super NT’s pseudo hi-res blending should be able to fix the dithering, right?

Retro Gaming Cables’s packapunch cables are back up for preorder. Seems like I always miss these, so I thought I’d drop a line in case anybody else had been waiting.

This may be a dumb questions, but do PAL Dreamcast games work/look different on a technical level compared to NTSC when outputted via VGA on a CRT?

Not unless they are 50hz. All of the ones I’ve played have a 50/60hz option at start up. This includes Bangai-O, Shenmue, and SoulCalibur.

Cool – good to know!

Tried this on my ossc and found the lpf setting doesnt let you do anything stupid with it. I thought it was free setting like everything else but the only options are to tune for different resolutions.

It looks like the OSSC outputs full PC RGB. I set my tv to auto and noticed that my tv is defaulting to full. If its going to my TV shouldn’t it be outputting limited? And if that is the case, by forcing my tv into limited will that affect the color of the OSSC?

What scaling are you using for the ossc? If I use line4x on a 240p signal or 2x on a 480p signal it interprets it as a PC due to the odd resolution.

Hmmm, interesting. I noticed it on PS2 because I have been trying to trouble shoot what the hell is going on with poor video signal. Anyway. I will check it again tonight.

Optimal timing for the super Nintendo via the ossc.

Just curious if anyone on here has picked up one of these or has any experience with something similar.

I’m running a Framemeister into my LGB6 Oled and I was curious if something like this might upscale better than the TVs internal upscaler.

Hey Gang,

I can’t really see a way around getting a cross point but I was hoping there was maybe 2 in 2 out cross point that is really thing that would allow me to feed my component and rgb switches into both my OSSC & my PVM. the smaller the better because I feel like I am completely out of room as is. I have sync on luma consoles so I am hoping its not going to break things. I think the GSSCARTSW has a sync stripper maybe that would help me with the extron. I an not completely sure.

I just talked to Patrick the Sony Tech and he was telling me my 20L5 only supports 1 rgb/component card and the other slot doesn’t have any sockets. Its just a hole. /shrug

If I have to buy all new cables. I think I would rather just buy the HD Retrovision cables and try to find a component matrix.

If you have any ideas how I can move my rgb chain and my component chain so that I can feed them all into my PVM & OSSC at the same time I would be very grateful.

Patrick was confused. I don’t have a BKM-129X card. I just have it hooked to the back of the monitor. I can buy that card and fix my entire issue. using the 129x’s output to feed to my scaler.

Crisis averted. Now to find that card.

So in the consumer CRT thread I posted about a big ol’ 36 incher I picked up off the side of the road. It’s treating me right, really enjoying gaming on it. I have a component switch hooked up and I’m game-planning my cabling set up.

In the meantime, on a whim I snagged a “Roku Express +” (https://www.walmart.com/ip/Roku-Express-HD-NEW/369278616) and thought I’d see how 2018 streaming looks through composite… and I’m having a really fun time watching stuff on here! The Plex app is top tier, 4:3 video looks great and even widescreen formatted stuff gives me a “first DVD player” (PS2 for me) nostalgia trip. It won’t replace the plasma or the 4k and it’s a bit ridiculous but isn’t everything?

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Can someone recommend a good source, preferably in the US, where I can obtain any or all of the below Extron parts?

image

Bottom: CSR 6 Captive Screw to RCA Female Audio Adapter (part # 26-575-01)
Top Left: Captive Screw Connector (part # 100-457-01)
Top right: Captive Screw Connector (part # 100-460-01)

I spoke to Extron support early this week and requested contact information for any resellers but they have not reached back out to me. I’m honestly a bit baffled that Extron doesn’t seem to sell parts to the public direct from their website but I’m sure they must have a reason.

@SAKY From what I know, Extron really only sells to other businesses, not at retail or to individuals online. You need a corporate account with them and their new products are really expensive for one person, way more than the prices on old/used Extron gear on ebay. Set up an alert on ebay for the CSR 6 cables and be prepared to wait a long time. I lucked out on 16 from one seller a couple years back. And at least a year back saw a sold listing for like a few dozen!

@Danexmurder I’ve had my eye on that. Should be better than your TV’s scaler because it will do a nearest neighbor upscaling which practically no TV does. Below is a related image I came up with on the old forum for a related topic. The bottom middle large sprite is roughly how games appear on a 4K TV if the source is 720p or 1080p. I made this well before I got my own 4K set and this softness ended up being accurate whether it was Super NT, OSSC, Switch, Wii U, etc. The bottom right is how it should look with a quality dedicated 4K scaler or 4K emulators/consoles/mods… anything that bypasses the TV scaler and doesn’t add any blur.

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