/vr/ - Retro Games

Scaling pro tip: If it doesn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars it's shit.

Best thing to remember is shit in, shit out. A converter is only as good as its weakest link. Converting composite to HDMI isn't going to make the image look any better, just as converting a 22khz MP3 to FLAC isn't going to make that sound any better. Unless your TV somehow has a worse upscaler than the converter in your pictute(It probably doesn't), don't waste your money. Those kind of converters like the one in your picture are meant for televisions with no RCA inputs whatsoever so you can use RCA on that TV. They're not built for image quality.

You'll want to look into RGB and converting that into component (Or, in the Gamecube and PS1's case, using a Wii or PS2 with component cables which the systems support natively). Most systems besides the NES and TG-16 support RGB natively and scaling -that- with a Framemeister will look very nice but it's best to do things one at a time. Start with getting better video outputs for your system, put that on your TV with no external scaler and see how you like it if your TV supports it -- easiest way to tell is to hook up a PS2 with component and play any PS1 game. If it shows up on screen, your TV can display and upsacle 240p on its own; if not, you'll need a scaler. There will likely be interlacing issues that can be fixed with a Framemeister but, again, best to take baby steps with these instead of investing so much money in one when you may very well be satisfied with the vanilla results.

Check out this site:
http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/

They have a lot of decent reviews on this kind of thing.

Just note that the XRGB is probably the best thing you're looking at that doesn't run you $2,000.

>>1939401
using an upscaler from composite to HDMI still ends up looking better than plugging composite directly into your HDTV. You still get the blurry composite video, but that's completely separate from shitty internal upscaling issues such as distorted picture and input lag.

>>1939401
After all the money spent on this life support method, it's better to go crt until it dies, then just emulate.

>>1939408
>using an upscaler from composite to HDMI still ends up looking better than plugging composite directly into your HDTV.
It's the same thing. The scaler found in those cheapo HDMI boxes is literally the same scaler in a budget HDTV.

>>1939475
You're changing the argument, since I never talked about cheapo HDMI boxes. We're assuming quality here.

The lower image quality of composite still has _nothing_ to do with the problems of upscaling. Two completely different things.

>>1939484
>We're assuming quality here.
If you buy a good TV, it will already have a good scaler built in (see: Wega XBR, etc). There's no point to spending a bunch of cash on a good scaler for a crap TV.

>>1939487
Obviously we're not assuming that, since OP brought up the issue of needing an external scaler in the first place

>>1939408
>>1939484

I think you nailed it for me. I'm not necessarily looking for the quality of graphics, my girpe is with the way HD fucks with the hardware. If I can get it to look and respond like it used to as a kid, then it's all I'm really after.

I've seen what SCART does, and it's gorgeous. But I don't think very many of us worried about sort of thing that as kids. Maybe I'll experiment one day, but for now my priorities are getting my flat screen not to fuck with the basics.

>>1939540

Sounds like you want an XRGB Mini Framemeister. Unfortunately they cost around $350 dollars depending on the exchange rate. Sorry, but that's just what a good quality upscaler with low lag costs. Also be aware that your HDTV will also introduce a certain amount of lag on top of that. In other words, the XRGB will add about a frame of lag and then your TV will add who knows how much in addition to that.

Stuff like this is kinda why most people stick with CRTs if they can.

>>1939575
The lag from retro consoles on HDTVs is because the built in upscalers are ass and take significantly more time to convert the signal than a good external scaler does. The net effect is significantly less lag, since you're skipping the part where the TV tries to convert the image itself.

The only lag left in terms of the TV itself is simply from being a LCD TV. The same lag you experience when playing native HD games like on PS3/360 or on your computer monitor. That's not the kind of lag we're talking about here though

tldr: good external scalers get rid of the lag, not add to it.

>>1939589

You're right. The XRGB technically does add a few miliseconds of lag but because it’s taking the heavy lifting off the HDTV the net effect is an overall reduction in lag. Still, even then the remaining lag can be noticeable. I found that out when I switched from an XRGB back to a CRT and certain games got more responsive. Probably not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but it was a factor.

>>1939634
Don;t play on shit tv/monitors. Even esports have given up on crts.
>>1939460
>life support method
Almost everything up to the n64 will last for a long time. With the replacement of capacitors when they go bad and batteries they'll last basically for ever.

>tfw you got a 20M4U for $10 and it works perfectly.

Fuck upscalers.

>>1939379
the best cheap ones are made by lenkeng

also people talking about lag in here are pretty misinformed. good scalers good very little lag. we're talking about total under <10ms. If you can detect that you are an extremely savant autist, congrats.

>>1939649
By life support, I'm referring to crts. Eventually they die, and hdtvs will be all that's left. I definitely won't be the one spending $200 on rgb mods then an extra $300 on an upscaler.

>>1939827
All scalers have at least 16ms latency, unless operated in line-doubler mode, which has insignificant latency if implemented correctly and requires a CRT.

theres only 1 good upscaler and it costs a few hundred dollars and its the one that is recommended everywhere on the internet

thankfully I am blessed with an LCD TV with minimal input lag and it has s-video ports so I just use that and its great. Sadly finding a good LCD TV with s-video ports is really hard these days.

Search for "SCART to HDMI" I believe there is a video by some guy named adamkoralik who bought some chinese 50$ scart to hdmi which ended up blowing all his other ones out of the water and quite possibly gives out the best picture quality every console before DC can give out.

>>1940025

Don't most LCD TV comes with a scart port nowadays ?

>>1940050
what fucking bizarro country do you live in?

>>1940058

Italy, i have to admit that here scart has always been the most common way to connect any video device.

>>1940013

don't know where you're getting that number. framemeister has <5ms . People have done testing over at shmups hardware forum and I've seen plenty under 8ms. too lazy to find the threads right now

>>1940148
Their own documentation admits it has at least one frame latency (except in VGA line-doubler mode). Post proof if otherwise.

>>1940159
checked it for you, fudoh reports the latency of the framemeister to be between 1.03 to 9.83 ms, which is pretty well unnoticeable.

http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/framemeister.html

A bit besides the point, but you don't even need <100ms latency for the majority of games, arcade or not. Mind adjusts to latency in an instant

>>1939926
Most consoles output rgb with out mods.

>>1940058

In europe almost all the TV since the 90's have SCART/EUROCONECTOR ports

>>1940050

>Don't most LCD TV comes with a scart port nowadays ?

For some reason , in America and another parts of the world , They don't

>>1940252
>he weird thing about this is that a pixel-adaptive video deinterlacer needs to buffer at least two fields to be able to compute a new frame with information from both fields. Even weirder is that Micomsoft themselves state in the manual, that for timing-critical games the game mode should be used (instead of Standard mode) - though the Standard mode doesn't rate any slower (judging from the info screen).
Suggesting the reported delay is bullshit. Somebody needs to hook one of these up to an oscilloscope and give us some real numbers.

>>1940379
I know its hard to believe that CRTs are really becoming completely invalidated, but the numbers speak for themselves man

more discussion on <10ms latency upscaling here:

http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/

and here:

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=33454&start=120


can't find the exact post with someone using a combination of slg3000 and a scaling unit but they also had consistently below 10ms. And this is on shmups forums where people are playing danmaku for highscore.

>>1940440
>CRTs are really becoming completely invalidated
Even if the latency was exactly 0ms it would not be a CRT replacement because it does nothing to prevent sample-and-hold blur.

>>1940451
nah that's also being worked on. see black frame insertion. CRTs are already a thing of the past and will soon be relics or antiques. or pleb trash

only good use I can think of would be in an arcade cabinet for the authenticity factor, particularly from the curvature. Because we're already getting pretty damn close to having high enough resolution to have filters look the exact same as the old high-end CRTs. I think that'll even become outdated if flexible display tech ever takes off

>>1939384
good goy

>>1940451
playing old games a crt does output a bright bloomy line of picture and in the next one the line is black sort of but the bloom and blur from the previous and next line sort of fill it

how are they handling this? or dithering ?

i actually have come upon lots of games that use dithering, even if just at small parts almost all games i have played need this effect

>>1940462
The only way to get black frame insertion without added latency is with emulation. For original hardware you'll need a scanning backlight, which is much more difficult and expensive.

>>1940475
Dithering is only blurred on shit tier CRTs. Sharp pixels are superior, and many systems used dithering while being designed for high resolution CRTs.

>>1940493
>implying black frame insertion will never be latency free

come on now

also

>implying hardware won't get cheaper over time

CRTs are great and all but that doesn't mean that they're not becoming irrelevant

>>1940501
>implying black frame insertion will never be latency free
It's physically impossible for black frame insertion to add zero latency. You unavoidably have to buffer the entire frame. Assuming 50% duty cycle (which is not as sharp as CRT but looks acceptable) the best you can do is half a frame of added latency. In the case of emulation you can emulate at higher speed than the original hardware to compensate.

>>1940534
I'm sure someone will make a separate processor or something of the like to fix it. In the meantime I'll take a nice new flatscreen over some pleb antique

>>1940545
>a separate processor or something of the like to fix it
It's called a "time machine", and if somebody invents one the last thing you'll care about is video games.

>>1940558
or maybe something to double the speed of the incoming signal and then add black frames. use your imagination

>>1940568
>or maybe something to double the speed of the incoming signal and then add black frames
That's called an "emulator".

>>1940584
how about a processor that does that to the signal of original hardware.

>>1940493
>>1940493
>Dithering is only blurred on shit tier CRTs
but id rather have dithering than a shit looking game

>>1940592
Good luck overclocking all components of your console to double speed. You'll also need to slow down and reassemble all the audio fragments.

And if you do manage it, the purists will complain it's not "original hardware" anymore.

>>1940612
You mean like the image on the right? I grew up with mode 13h DOS games, dithering is normal.

>>1940616

>what is a signal

lol @ purists

>>1940252
>>1940148
All those ms numbers are bullshit to begin with, lag is not calculated by that, but by amount of frames, which is 16.67ms per frame for 60hz.

You cannot calculate anything lower than that because that would mean that the button press responds BEFORE the console finishes drawing the frame, which is either impossible or pointless to do on most console designs, and would introduce screen tearing.

Plus you have to take into account the input lag that the game itself has when playing. Video game consoles are just fixed hardware computers, they have as much lag as the programmer of the game allowed.

Having no frame latency in vga line-doubler mode sounds plausible since you are literally just doubling every line as the signals are drawn. Any actual processing would require the entire frame to be drawn by the console first, which means 1 frame lag at minimum.
But shit like 9.83ms lag, that is impossible.

>>1940440
>http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/

That guy needs to split this unbelievable clusterfuck of a page into an index and sub categories.

Just the html is almost 900kbytes without the images. Jesus.

>>1940638
There's no requirement for a scaler to operate on the whole frame at once. Every practical scaling filter is windowed, and with pixel art you can get good results with a small window. You only need to buffer a few lines.

>>1940616
>Good luck overclocking all components of your console to double speed. You'll also need to slow down and reassemble all the audio fragments.

Technically, you'd just need to make your own video encoder silicon. Many consoles output RGB internally and use a video encoder to convert that to some other signal (composite, s-video, etc).

>>1940651
>make your own video encoder silicon
And CPU, and VPU and SPU, and every other clocked component of the original hardware. Or maybe liquid cooling + overvolting would be sufficient.

>>1940654
What exactly are we talking about here? If you just want to upscale the video signal to 120hz with every other frame being empty black, you only need to change the video encoder for that. It would work on the same principle as line doubling, except that you'd need to write 1 frame to memory first, so you'd get like half a frame of lag (or 1 frame in 120hz).

It's the same as if you'd internally a wire a XRGB inside a Genesis in place of the cxa1145M.

Or are we talking about something else?

>>1940674
>so you'd get like half a frame of lag
Which is what we were talking about avoiding. If you want zero added latency you need to double the speed of the input to the video encoder, which means emulating or overclocking everything to double speed.

>>1940747
If by overclocking you mean processing the signal to twice the speed via some external device, I see no problem with that.

>>1940638
you have no idea what you're talking about

>>1940764
Obviously I don't, because to get zero latency BFI with the same signal generation requires time travel. Your external device cannot magically output something twice as fast as it inputs without buffering.

>>1940785
what games do you play that need zero latency

>>1940789
Muh zapper.

>>1940779
>you have no idea what you're talking about

Man you sure told me why I'm all wrong about everything.

>>1940785
The frames will finish at the same time. In other words, just as the 60hz frame is done being scanned out, you'd finish scanning out the first 120hz frame as well. Then, you'd scan out the second 120hz frame, while the next 60hz frame began.

Depends on where, exactly, you're measuring latency. You'll have to wait a little to start scanning, but you can finish spot-on.

>>1940789
Latency is cumulative. Neglecting individual delays because they are "small" is how we ended up in the modern situation.

>>1940825
So quarter frame on average, and half a frame worse than the emulating/overclocking solution which can be better than the original hardware if everything else is perfect.

>>1939401
I've been playing my PS1 on my HDTV through RCA don't kill me please will the PS2 component fix anything?

I only notice screen tearing on FIFA 2000, the rest of games are just a little blurry.

I doubt I can get a original Sony cable, getting a generic one will affect the quality a lot?

>>1940889

It will, if your HDTV supports 240p. Some do, some don't.
Even a generic component cable will look much, much better. I've used >£5 cables which are full of noise and still look leagues better than composite.

>>1940916
>if your HDTV supports 240p
It doesn't mean shit that it plays now?
and why do I keep reading "ps1 doesn't support component" on some places?

>>1940948

I've played PS1 games on my PS2 using component cables and it works fine.
I've also played Megaman X Collection on PS2 (which natively outputs 240p) and it works fine on the component cables fed into my EDTV CRT.
Some HDTVs cannot interpret 240p or interpret it incorrectly as 480i.
I'm unsure if the PS1 supports component cables, but PS2 does while playing PS1 games.

If you have a Wii, you can try running the 240p test suite program.

>>1940889
depending on the TV you could switch the output on the PS2 to RGB and it should work
check over your TV's specs if it's a Sharp your more than likely fine

>>1940950
I neither have a PS2 I really should get one or a Wii.

>>1940951
Its a Samsung TV (ln32d550)

>>1940889
evcen ps2 games look like shit on modern tv

>>1942943
A shitty modern TV combined with the wrong game and limited technical skills can certainly cause that to happen.

>>1940948
>and why do I keep reading "ps1 doesn't support component" on some places?
PS1 video output is composite, s-video, or RGB. PS2 adds the option to toggle the RGB pins into YPbPr component.

>>1942943
PS2 games look like shit on every display, because of the interlacing.

>>1944558
>the wrong game
No such thing, only a wrong display for a game.

>>1944706
Devices that can properly display interlaced images natively (without deinterlacing), like CRTs, can produce quite a nice image with non-progressive scan games from the PS2 generation.

>>1944747
or a nice upscaler like the framemeister

>>1944747
240p > 480i, no matter how you display it.

>>1944804
upscaler = deinterlacer, so no

>>1944842
Depends on the working resolution of the most important part of any gaming experience: the game.

>>1944915
you're saying the framemeister won't produce a nice deinterlaced image? Nah, it's top notch