retro gaming: RGB vs NTSC

[exdeath]

Anyone who has old consoles and a CRT and is serious about old school gaming (eg: already knows that emulation is the devil) needs to get a Sony PVM monitor and some RGB SCART cables.

Sony PVM-20M4U HR Trinitron 20"

Pictures as promised from an earlier thread (make sure you enlarge them):

Pictures really cannot do it justice, it's sharper and more colorful in person. Camera kinda blooms out from the brightness in the dark, but I have to turn the lights off for pics to avoid reflections and glare off the CRT glass.

Take note both are on the same monitor so it's not a matter of crappy TV versus professional monitor, it's a matter of just how much NTSC encoding butchers images. And before anyone says anything about component or HDMI... good luck with finding either of those for anything older than Gamecube.

This is a 20", there is a guy with 8 x 32" PVM-3230 monitors for $50 two hours away from me. If they haven't been used for something crappy like airport terminal displays or something I think I'll take either my SNES or Genesis with me and check them out and maybe bring one home

Next on my list, perhaps a supergun and some JAMMA boards...

 

[lamedude]

Looks great but the waterfall looks better on NTSC IMO. I've read that a trick Genesis devs would use to get around the 64 color limit was to put 2 colors next to each other that NTSC would blur together which seems to be the case for the waterfall.

 

[Fox5]

Nice improvement.

But I would just build an HTPC, outputting over HDMI and hook up a 360 controller, and call it a day while running some emulators.

 

[exdeath]

Nice improvement.

But I would just build an HTPC, outputting over HDMI and hook up a 360 controller, and call it a day while running some emulators.

256 x 224 does not look good upscaled to 1920 x 1080, let alone on a 106" screen.

Even the best scalers (XRGB2, etc) only come *close*, still not as sharp as running analog RGBS to a native RGB CRT. Besides it would be the 360 upscaling it internally via texture magnification with trilinear filtering so it would no doubt look like blurry crap by the time it went out over HDMI.

 

[JD50]

Where did you get your RGB SCART cable? Is there anything specific I should be looking for?

 

[exdeath]

Ebay, but most of them are crap. Thin cables with unshielded wires for both audio and video running along side each other inside the cable, resulting in buzz on the audio proportional to screen brightness on the SCART end.

I'm looking for some 6+ core individually shielded bulk mini coax cable to rewire them.

For now, I've just hacked the cable/connector open on the console side and break out the audio out seperately using standard 2 x RCA shielded audio patch cables. On the Genesis it's easy, I just use the RCAs from the CD attachment.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/eviltim/gamescart/gamescart.htm

You need a monitor (like the PVMs) that has a single "external sync" input that can do composite sync (1 combined H+V sync pin, unlike VGA with separate H/V sync or component with composite sync on green). eg: 4 video cables R+G+B+CS.

Most SCART setups will use composite video for the sync, and most video monitors will accept a standard composite signal for RGB external sync because they will have a built in filter/sync stripper. The PVMs will take just about anything for sync. I've taken it a step further and rewired composite video to plain sync if the console has a dedicated plain sync pin (which both the Genesis and SNES do). Also eliminates any potential for the high frequency colorburst interference in the cable from the composite video.

That's pretty much it. You could make a custom cable for each console that just wires R,G,B, composite (for sync) to BNCs or RCAs, but I just got a SCART switch with a SCART to BNC to the monitor because it's alot easier to find/buy already made common SCART RGB cables for any console.

Just make sure they are RGB capable, SCART is a very flexible 21 pin connector an can carry pretty much anything, it can be composite only and not actually carry RGB. The thing you have to watch for is there are some differences between PAL/NTSC consoles and cables. For example, it's the PAL Gamecube RGB SCART that will work perfectly unmodified with the NTSC SNES.

 

[Ross Ridge]

For the mini-coax, I'd just cut apart one or two VGA cables, they're cheap.

Though I'd argue "NTSC" would give you a more accurate retro experience, like with the waterfall mentioned by lamedude.

 

[exdeath]

For the mini-coax, I'd just cut apart one or two VGA cables, they're cheap.

Yeah that occured to me... but in the last years of VGA they started skimping there too with thin tiny interference prone unshielded cables. Gotta find the old school half inch thick cables and not the crappy little skinny ones they pack with monitors for free now days.

I've specifically looked for bulk SVGA cable but alot of those only have the RGB lines as shielded coax, so the 15 KHz sync would be on one of the unshielded lines and still couple with audio. It's the audio that really needs to be shielded by itself.

Really not a big deal since I'm breaking out audio separate right now, but I'd eventually want to get some furniture and clean this up and simplify wiring and break the audio out one time from the switch.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My NEC 20" CRT looks kind of like that. It's pretty sharp. CRT is def the way to go for consoles. Even emulators output over S-Video TV-out look better than on an LCD, IMHO.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Looks good and definitely noticeable. Much crisper and colors do look better.

What's with the blue on the left edge?

Also, did we really need another thread about this stuff? ()

Looks great but the waterfall looks better on NTSC IMO. I've read that a trick Genesis devs would use to get around the 64 color limit was to put 2 colors next to each other that NTSC would blur together which seems to be the case for the waterfall.

I don't think the picture is doing it justice. You can see the vertical lines/bands on the RGB monitor really badly and I assume that's probably not that visible in person.

Nice improvement.

But I would just build an HTPC, outputting over HDMI and hook up a 360 controller, and call it a day while running some emulators.

I would use something other than a 360 controller because its d-pad is awful.

I'd like a really nice setup like exdeath has, but I just couldn't justify it I don't play enough old games to warrant the cost and everything. I wouldn't mind if Nintendo and others would do some sweet remasters of their games. Don't just do 1080p either, convert them to vector graphics so they'll scale regardless. Actually, that would be very cool, a program that converts old games to vector graphics on the fly.

Actually exdeath's setup for some reason (probably him mentioning unshielded cables) reminds me of the Vectrex.

 

[exdeath]

Blue on the left is the border color that all Genesis/Megadrive games have. You normally don't see it because it would be overscan. The Sony PVM being a professional monitor shows the entire frame and doesn't have the massive overscan that consumer TVs have. It's great for RPGs that have config screens spanning the whole frame because you get a perfect full screen and don't have edges of menu borders and stuff cut off.

BTW you can get numerous sizes and models of PVM monitors ranging from 14" to 32" for around $50. It's just a matter of finding one local that won't cost an arm and a leg to ship, and getting a good one with low hours that didn't burn in with flight times at an airport 24 hours a day for 10 years or something bad like that. These things are heavy/dense as hell, I'd say the 20" PVM weighs as much as at least a 32" consumer TV. I chose this one, PVM-20M4U because it was one of the later models made in the late 90's, the last of the CRTs before digital panels took over, so it's going to have the newest, cleanest, brightest tube, and it's also one of the higher performance "Super Trinitron" tubes that used to be used for high res things like medical imaging. Some of the other models like the popular PVM-2530 were made in the 80's and finding a clean low mileage tube would be far more difficult, not to mention things like dead capacitors, etc. Also I got a decent deal ($140 shipped) and it sat in the original owner's private editing bay with only 100 hours on it. I'll be bringing home a PVM-3230 32" next weekend for $50 if they end up looking good and not burned or dim, etc.

The vertical "banding" / striping or whatever you want to call it is really there in RGB, that's how it's being drawn on purpose. That is what is being output by the Genesis natively in both pictures, what the programmers and artists drew, vertical lines every other pixel. The lack of vertical lines in NTSC is soley due to NTSC crushing the fine detail, something taken advantage off by developers for dithering, transparency, shadows, etc.

The Genesis never had true transparency as it didn't have color addition/subtraction hardware like the SNES does. Transparency was faked by drawing tiles that skipped every other pixel via color 0 (the normal pixel masking that allows sprites and foreground tiles to be non-square). On NTSC the limited overlapping chroma/luma bandwidth crushes and blurs the fine vertical detail in the horizontal direction and makes it look solid, so when every other line is fore-back-fore-back it looks transparent. But in RGB you can see the distinct even and odd lines that are skipped. Same thing with insect wings and glass, it's just a checkerboard of solid pixels and masked out "color 0" pixels, and the fine detail gets destroyed in NTSC. There is no real transparency at all, there never was on the Genesis. SNES on the other hand has genuine color add/subtract with a hardware alpha blend register.

The only other way the Genesis did transparency was to draw a solid graphic on top of another graphic every other frame, causing a 60 fps flicker that looked like a transparent object (you can see this when you pause and unpause rapidly while Sonic has a shield on).

The biggest difference is the dot crawl. The PVM has a "358 Filter" option (3.58MHz color subcarrier), I assume it's just a standard comb filter, that removes most of the dot crawl at the expense of making the image twice as blurry and effectively crushing the resolution, which is what a normal TV does by default. It was turned off in the NTSC pic to show the full effect of NTSC encoding and keep the NTSC example as sharp as it could be.

 

[Fox5]

256 x 224 does not look good upscaled to 1920 x 1080, let alone on a 106" screen.

Even the best scalers (XRGB2, etc) only come *close*, still not as sharp as running analog RGBS to a native RGB CRT. Besides it would be the 360 upscaling it internally via texture magnification with trilinear filtering so it would no doubt look like blurry crap by the time it went out over HDMI.

I would use an emulator, not native. It can do full pixel scaling (and thus retain that native look), or apply the various filters. IMO, I like the old games with filters on, they look like flash games once you get some SuperSAIx2 or whatever the filters are called, but obviously not everyone does.
http://proth.bravepages.com/temp/comparer/

 

[exdeath]

I would use an emulator, not native. It can do full pixel scaling (and thus retain that native look), or apply the various filters. IMO, I like the old games with filters on, they look like flash games once you get some SuperSAIx2 or whatever the filters are called, but obviously not everyone does.
http://proth.bravepages.com/temp/comparer/

That's cool too, I just prefer the razor sharp 1:1 pixel sampling and native scanlines for that arcade monitor look that no emulator or digital panel with scaler can do

 

[darkswordsman17]

Whoops, nevermind, turns out it was from the scaled down image. It looked like the moire you get when taking pictures of CRTs.

There's zero chance of getting a nice one of these monitors locally, and I wouldn't want to lug it around and don't really have room to have a classic gaming collection and TV anyway. Definitely nice, but I gave up chasing down relative perfection, I've done it in a variety of little projects and it never turns out to be worthwhile for me in the end. Instead, now I just do the halfway point, which is the research for it, and then stop before actually delving into it. This way I get the learning experience with less of the "hassle and heartache" that ends up going with it.

 

[jdyeah]

For anyone needing help with this, I spent a LOT of time researching SCART and what not.

If you are in the USA, you need to buy SCART cables for your system..most likely you will need to buy them from Europe.
You will also need a SCART to YUV/YUB converter box. Basically, Your SCART goes from your console to the box, then component cable goes from there to the TV.

I hook up the component cable to my Plasma TV and it looks amazing...the pics here really don't show how much better the SCART is compared to regular AV, coax or S Video..

You also need an audio break, too so that you can get sound, as the sound is not carried through most of these SCART boxes. I bought a separate adapter and run some regular audio cable.

For me it was well worth it...but it may come to a price others are not willing to do. I think the SCART cables are about 10 bucks each and the converter box is about 40-50.

But considering that I have the Nin, N64, Genesis, Saturn, 3D0, Gamecube, Master System, Dreamcast, PS1,PS2 etc.. I have a lot of need for the absolute highest quality signal transfer available.

 

[jdyeah]

Whoops, nevermind, turns out it was from the scaled down image. It looked like the moire you get when taking pictures of CRTs.

There's zero chance of getting a nice one of these monitors locally, and I wouldn't want to lug it around and don't really have room to have a classic gaming collection and TV anyway. Definitely nice, but I gave up chasing down relative perfection, I've done it in a variety of little projects and it never turns out to be worthwhile for me in the end. Instead, now I just do the halfway point, which is the research for it, and then stop before actually delving into it. This way I get the learning experience with less of the "hassle and heartache" that ends up going with it.

You really don't need a monitor to enjoy the SCART. Just get a converter box.

I think when I get a bit more time I can take some pics or if I get really adventurous I'll even do a youtube video or something.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Please do, I know plenty of people would be interested, or maybe its just me. I've liked seeing Exdeath's results and info, and good to know about the SCART cables.

Definitely if you have a good "classic" game collection it'd be worth it. Really even if you had a good SNES collection it would.

But, yeah, even though I've given up on playing my luck on it, I really like learning about it and seeing the good results.

 

[jdyeah]

Please do, I know plenty of people would be interested, or maybe its just me.

Definitely if you have a good "classic" game collection it'd be worth it. Really even if you had a good SNES collection it would.

But, yeah, even though I've given up on playing my luck on it, I really like learning about it and seeing the good results.

I look at anything older than PS2 as classic, now .

I'll see if I can find some old posts of mine from another forum. Because it was 2 years ago when I first really investigated all of this stuff and found out about SCART and the converter boxes. Obviously, people before me figured this out so I'd just be passing info along.

Give me a couple days and I'll at least get some links and info up.

 

[exdeath]

You really don't need a monitor to enjoy the SCART. Just get a converter box.

I think when I get a bit more time I can take some pics or if I get really adventurous I'll even do a youtube video or something.

Nope... Your plasma is a 1080p fixed pixel display. Old consoles are 240p at best. Do the math. And fail to get the point with mention of any "converter box" Especially if you aren't running an XRGB2 or equivalent high end up scan processor. Bleh. You are basically taking RGB and converting to component (no real loss there), then allowing your flat panel's internal scaler to rape and molest the incoming image.

Yes you can get an image, yes you can play and enjoy it, but its not going to be the BEST possible image. Which may or may not be in you're list of priorities unless you are seriously attached to your old consoles and classic games.

What you're doing is still miles better than composite, as you are using the RGB signal. Its like connecting 640x240 to your plasma over a VGA cable vs. a RF box, which still 10000x better and sufficient for 99.99% people to be wowed.

But going unmolested RGB to a arcade quality CRT and bypassing the need for a upscaler to resample to a fixed pixel panel is just that final step and cherry on top to retro bliss and is the ultimate setup IMO.

 

[exdeath]

And yes those pics CLEARLY show the difference. Top image is composite (yellow RCA from a standard AV cable as output at the console's AV multiout), bottom is RGB, both on the same monitor. Both delivered over the same SCART cable which can carry multiple signals, all I did was hit a switch to swap between using the composite or RGB source.

SCART is just a cable standard and in and of itself doesn't mean anything. I could have just as easily made my own cable from the console to 4 x RCA/BNC carrying RGB+sync and plugged it straight into the monitor. Its just more convenient that SCART cables are ready made, have many many pins and happen to carry RGB if available at the source, switch boxes are easy to come by, and best of all you don't have to worry about finding proprietary AV plugs on the back of the console with ready made cables.

What really matters is that RGB pins are output to the AV out on the console since these systems all predate component video and 480p and otherwise only allow hookup through ugly NTSC encoded composite. You don't have to use SCART, it's just you can easily buy SCART cables ready made for $10 and hook them up to a $5 passive switch box and you're done. Just make sure they are wired for RGB and have the appropriate capacitors and stuff for PAL/NTSC; not all SCART cables or adapters pass through the RGB pins, some only have standard composite.

Converting to component isn't that big a deal. There is always a minor loss when converting anything, but otherwise it's the same as raw RGB (with sync on green) for all intents and purpose, just a different way of representing the signal.

 

[exdeath]

If anyone is confused yet:

RGB = component = VGA >>>>>>>>> svideo >>>>> composite >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RF

HDMI/DVI is only slightly above RGB/component/VGA because it's digital and doesn't suffer from analog interference, but otherwise carries the same exact "pixel perfect" information.

RGB is the same type of pure signal on a VGA port, individual line level red, green, blue, and sync, not encoded in any way. Normally component video is essentially the same thing, but we have to fall back to raw RGB on consoles that existed before component video was adopted in consumer electronics (anything before 480p, eg Gamecube/PS2/etc).

 

[jdyeah]

Nope... Your plasma is a 1080p fixed pixel display. Old consoles are 240p at best. Do the math. And fail to get the point with mention of any "converter box" Especially if you aren't running an XRGB2 or equivalent high end up scan processor. Bleh. You are basically taking RGB and converting to component (no real loss there), then allowing your flat panel's internal scaler to rape and molest the incoming image.

Yes you can get an image, yes you can play and enjoy it, but its not going to be the BEST possible image.

Overall, the point is to get the cleanest signal possible. Now if that is one of those old CRT Sony's , great. But how many of those are laying around? How big are they? But for example Sega Genesis images can be output at 256 pixels (32 tiles) or 320 pixels (40 tiles) across and 224 scanlines (28 tiles) or 240 scanlines (30 tiles) down. The 240-line resolutions are only used on 50 Hz displays like PAL, as the extra lines end up in the overscan of a 60 Hz signal NTSC. This console outputs in RGB video.

So using a a SCART RGB converter to send the signal out via component is the cleanest way I have ever been able to see these old games. I am not disagreeing with your thought on the Sony CRT as the cleanest, but I guarantee that what I'm seeing on my plasma cannot be far off from that CRT.
I'll take what I have on my 50" plasma any day over those Sony CRT's for three reasons. First, because its a huge ass TV. Second, because those Sony CRT's can't offer a signal that much greater than what I am getting. Third, what I'm doing is miles better than the next step down, which is S Video.

BTW, I want to make sure that for anyone reading this, I am not implying or stating that I am turning my signal into a higher rez. I am not. What the console puts out, is the limitation and again for this console its what is listed above. The key is getting the full value of that RGB and the cleanest look possible to your TV.

What we should do, is a side by side comparison of my SCART setup and your Sony setup. Unfortunately, that means two people have to live in the same town and have the equipment to do it. Otherwise, there are too many variables to control that can plague the test. We'd need to use the same, exact camera. The same lighting (natural+time of day, or same exact bulbs, wattage and room environments)...etc blah blah.

But I'm down if people want to have a Pepsi challenge here. If nothing else it would be fun and help everyone to decide if its worth their time going out and getting one of those CRT Sony's.

 

[jdyeah]

Also in case anyone else is wondering, the gamecube, xbox, wii, dreamcast, ps1 and ps2 can all output RGB, component video, s video or composite.

 

[exdeath]

The pictures I posted above ARE a perfect side by side comparison, at least between video signals. Genesis does not output s-video or component. Only composite video and the original unencoded RGB passthrough as it was fed to the composite encoder chip (usually a Sony CXA1645 or Samsung KA2195D or similar). Scart uses composite video as sync for RGB so both are present in the cable. This is ok because the sync signal is a "digital" square wave, it's either there or it isn't, so even a shitty composite video feed will provide "perfect" sync. Though I do resolder the composite video pin in the scart cable to pure plain sync on the console side if the console outputs it, just to remove any chance of the composite video and 3.58 MHz colorburst noise crosstalking into the RGB or audio lines. I had both hooked up in the screens above. Same console, paused for the same screen, same monitor, same camera, all I did was flick a button on the monitor to go from standard yellow RCA composite video to RGB+external sync and take pictures before and after.

As for the plasma being as good as the CRT for low res analog content, not quite... consumer grade fixed pixel panel with a built in 75 cent upscaler chip vs professional video monitor that can natively adapt to 240p content with no image processing or upscaling. Even in RGB, it's going to appear soft and fuzzy and filtered just like running 640x480 on a 1280x1024 19" LCD, and won't be anywhere near as crisp as a CRT. This alone is why I moved all my 8/16 bit consoles from a 106" 1080p display to a 20" CRT.

People who are serious about retro but who run fixed pixel flat panel displays invest several hundreds of dollars into XRGB2 upscale processors and SLG3000 scanline generators and even they will say it's "good enough" but no match for CRT. You will never ever get perfect integer multiple pixel scaling unless you run 512x480 or 1024x960 centered and leave a border if the scalar can allow you to do that.

Also do you run 4:3 mode on your plasma for old consoles with proper care to avoid 4:3 burn in on the 16:9 screen, or do you just distort to 16:9?

PS: PAL/NTSC are irrelevant at this point, RGB doesn't care and the PVM monitors are full frame with no overscan (which is why the colored border and bottom line flickering attribute data is visible on Genesis/Megadrive games). The game consoles are designed for native 240p output (480i single field only - 240 lines) because they are native RGB devices. The video is fed to a PAL or NTSC encoder chip AFTER the fact to generate the composite video feed. Developers choose to leave unused rows/columns to allow for borders to accommodate variations in PAL/NTSC overscan and horizontal sizing, so overscan and PAL vs NTSC recognition is purely convention.

 

[exdeath]

Keep in mind that the images I posted you are seeing were

a) sampled and scaled by a fixed pixel digital camera sensor,
b) scaled in a paint program to a reasonable size for forum posting, and
c) displayed on your digital fixed pixel flat panel LCD computer display.
d) re-sampled again if you run your PC monitor at anything other than it's native res, and/or didn't enlarge the images

Because of that you might say it looks the same as a scaled image on a plasma/lcd display because that is really what you are seeing on the computer looking at those pictures right now anyway. But in reality, in person, seeing the native analog CRT display with your own eyes, it looks much much better and sharper than digital pictures can capture. That's primarily the reason I didn't want to post pics, they simply don't do it justice. Using a fixed pixel digital CMOS sensor to take the picture in the first place invariably samples, scales, and filters the image from the start, completely ruining the entire point. A good RGB CRT setup is just not something you can take pictures of.