retro gaming: RGB vs NTSC

[jdyeah]

The only way to see the difference is to see it i person..you went into further details about the variables that I merely touched on.

That said, I don't imagine any Plasma or any HDTV is going to have the resolution that a CRT monitor is going to have...they just won't. It would be too costly to produce such a device to sell to a mass market.

I used to run my dreamcast through a vga box and into my Mitsibushi Diamond Pro Graphics 21" CRT monitor. Because of the resolution available on that monitor (1600x1200), the games looked amazing..much better than anything I could expect from a large plasma, led, lcd or other tv. That and the dot pitch is quite small at .24mm center to edge. Naturally the dream cast puts out a higher rez. I could always try and run my older systems through that monitor and see how it looks.

side note, your pictures are not of a side by side of your sony and my plasma setup. thats what I meant by a side by side.

As you mention, these old consoles are limited in what they can produce from a video resolution perspective. That said using this SCART setup and an RGB converter box, then running that to my plasma TV, produces an amazingly clear game experience. Much better than using regular a/v cable, coax or s video.

Considering I gotta play games on something 40" or larger, there is no CRT option for what I want to do. none of the current computer monitors (LED and LCD's) can match up to the best CRT's built, so those are not options.

And I still don't think that the difference between what I've got setup and that Sony CRT is large enough to say "wow, thats a big difference." I am sure its noticeable, as mentioned before I've run games through my Diamond Pro, but its not good enough for me to downgrade in size to one of those Sony CRT's. On these aspects, its purely preference.

all that said, for the average joe who wants the best possible rez from old game systems on their new TV, the SCART setup is the only way to go. I suppose that is where I am coming from. So really, your arguments and positions are valid and have merit and I am not disagreeing with them so much as suggestion options that may be more suitable for a larger gaming group. The main reasoning behind that being the scarcity of these specific sony CRT's and their size (21-25"). I'd got nuts after awhile if I had to play console games on a monitor that small, which is why I stopped doing it. that's just me though.

 

[jdyeah]

Oh and I run at 4:3..I think. I 'd have to go into my settings and see which ones I use. My TV offers a game setting and I hadn't ever really thought much about what the aspect ratio of that setting would be. I can cycle through a few..I definitely do not like playing games in the distorted mode, that is for sure.

 

[jdyeah]

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.

also, a lot of people like me refer to RF as coax...and vice versa because the RF adapters had that coax looking cable with the single pin and the metal housing you'd screw onto the back of your old TV.

 

[exdeath]

Yeah the biggest step is going to be getting native RGB, and converting to component is just transcoding the signal format it's not disturbing the data. Component YPbPr is for all intents and purposes the same as RGB with sync on green and will give the same quality. But that is just the clean signal.

Clean signal has nothing to do with scaling and upscanning. While the RGB output gets you 90% of the way there, the other 10% is for those who don't like the fuzziness that non-integer-multiple upscaling produces when running low res sources on their HD fixed pixel set. The best signal in the world can't change that. A high dollar dedicated external scaler/deinterlace processor/scanline generator comes 99% close at 10'+ viewing distances.

I settled with a 20" right now just because I found one willing to ship and it was nearly brand new with less than 100 hours on the tube (important for shopping for displays built in the 1980s-90s.) I'm always on the hunt for a 25, 27, 29, or 32" and if I see one with low hours and taken care of within 100 miles of me, it will be mine! Problem is alot of the larger displays are older tubes, have long hours and abuse (airport terminal displays, ugh), etc. The PVM-20M4U is actually the best tube Sony ever made, HR Super Trinitron tube, ultra fine .30mm dot pitch 800 lines TV res (long before HDTV) that used to be prefered for endoscopy and medical imaging. Those specs aren't that impressive until you consider this is a 1990s TV video monitor with specs that would be considered typical for a SVGA PC monitor. I'd be downgrading tubes to go bigger, but really, the HR tube isn't really doing anything for 240p content anyway. I'm just worried about convergence issues on the bigger tubes. This 20" is PERFECT. Single white pixels in the corner of the Super Metroid mini map are perfectly white, no convergence issues or edge fringing at all on any corner.

I tried composite on my 1080p projector on a 106" screen just for kicks D: BARF. I don't even have composite wired to my wall plate it sucks so bad I tried S video in the past but that was also barf.

Crappy RF NTSC encoded signal + 30 foot unshielded s video analog cable + upsampling to 1080p = /wrists. Now I only run component with 1080p graded individually shielded 75 ohm coax and HDMI, nothing else Upscaled 480p from Gamecube/PS2 is about the minimum I put up with on HD displays.

Yeah I'm a pixel counting snob I admit it.

 

[jdyeah]

I'm just curious why you'd want to run a scanline generator...I don't miss scanlines...do you?

 

[exdeath]

I'm just curious why you'd want to run a scanline generator...I don't miss scanlines...do you?

On a LCD/plasma HD display it helps break up the image and give the illusion of a crisper, sharper native CRT-like image to offset the solid continuous soft fuzzy blurry edges caused by the necessary upscaling to a fixed pixel panel.

One pixel from a 256x224 device becomes 20 pixels on a LCD/plasma HD display and has fuzzy edges and corners because of the averaging/sampling/filtering that takes place.

4:3 on a 1080p display is 1440 x 1080. 256 x 224 scales such that one source pixel = a blurry block of 27.120535714285714285714285714286 pixels on the HD display (1440/256) * (1080/224). Obviously it's not a perfect fit, so there is gaussian sampling taking place to force a fit. One pixel becomes a blurry averaged block of 27 or so pixels, and instead of the original color solid red, it becomes gradients, eg there is some pink at the edges where the next source pixel was white, etc.

Artificial scanlines help break up these gaussian sampling artifacts of smooth solid continuous regions and reduce apparant blur in the vertical dimension, making it also harder to notice in the fine line horizontal direction left behind by the "scanlines", and give it a sharper CRT/arcade monitor look like the game was meant for and hide some of the resampling blur.

Top dollar equipment like the XRGB2 and SLG3000 boxes are very convincing at 5-10 feet on a moderately sized screen like 30-50". But blown up on a huge projector screen it's still not going to look quite as good as I'd like so I chose to just go straight for the best and get a native RGB CRT and devote a seperate room to retro gaming.

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

 

[exdeath]

Artificial scanlines helps sharpen up 240p content upscaled on HD panels and give it that crisp arcade monitor look that retro gamers remember so fondly. That's the closest you are going to get to the real thing. Note, it's an external electronic device manipulating the image in conjunction with an upscaler, it's not a software filter in an emulator or anything like that.

Look at the images above and compare to a native CRT image which doesn't have to upscale and note how much more discrete and distinct each pixel is. Especially pay close attention to the fonts.

It's supposed to be a single shade of white, those greyish blueish lines and edges on the score up above never existed in the original source, those are resampling artifacts. Note below the solid singular color yellow and white fonts with no scaling, resampling, filtering, or dithering. Just yellow or white pixels, on or off, end of story. Even with a high end up scaler and scanline generator, a flat panel just doesn't compare:

See how my fonts are SOLID yellow or white? There is a distinct on/off boundary between the yellow/white of the font and the black outline and blue backgroud of the water fall, just as there is a solid boundary between the black and white pixels of your mouse cursor and no blurry grey "in between" blending when you aren't running 640x480 on your 1280x1024 PC LCD.

I can try and take a close up if you want, but between the fine aperture grill pitch and the fixed pixel resolution of my digital camera, it gets bad banding and moire patterns trying to take a picture up close. Just look at Sonic's head and note how discrete and sharp and solid the unbroken individual single pixels are because they are single pixels and not averaged blocks of numerous multi colored pixels. Just remember if you look too hard, you're going to be seeing the numerous pixels of your high res LCD PC monitor rendering what should be single pixels of a enlarged photo and not really get the real effect of being in front of a real CRT. Hell even the photo itself takes numerous pixels to show one real pixel of what was being photographed.

Sigh, like I said, pictures just cannot tell the story, period. There is too much resampling and filtering and inserting of nonexistant image data already the moment you snap the picture, and it completely does not communicate reality. The real thing is sharper than even my Sonic picture and is really breath taking in person to see for the first time. It's really awesome watching the Super Metroid intro loop and feeling like it's an arcade game and not a watered down NTSC home console.

 

[SaurusX]

I'm bumping this thread. Can anyone detail exactly how I might go about connecting my classic SNS-001 console to an HDTV via the component inputs? There's some talk here about SCART cables and converter boxes, but does anyone have specific links to what you need to get the job done right? I found a website, http://www.hdretrovision.com, where the guy is in the preliminary stages of producing finished cables, but I don't want to wait an indeterminate amount of time.

 

[exdeath]

You need a RGB cable for your SNES (PAL and NTSC are different) and a RGB to component transcoder like a JRok.

http://www.jrok.com/hardware/RGBv4/

SNES has RGB + combined sync at the AV port, you just need the cable if you want to use the factory multi AV port plus the cable has the 220 uf DC blocking caps on the RGB lines for the NTSC SNES.

RGB to component is a lossless conversion, its just some addition/subtraction and combining the sync onto green.

The biggest issue is having an internally shielded cable or running audio separately to avoid a 60 hz hum in the sound from the video signal coupling.

On my phone, Ill give more detailed info later if required.

 

[SaurusX]

The biggest issue is having an internally shielded cable or running audio separately to avoid a 60 hz hum in the sound from the video signal coupling.

The audio issue is of particular interest to me. Every SCART to component conversion box completely neglects the left and right audio channels. So I can convert the video to component, but play the games in silence.

There's a guy on Youtube who created his own RGB SCART cable with the audio lines seperated out to avoid the problem you describe, but I honestly can't see myself actually creating any cables. I can buy already made products and string them together, though.

 

[JD50]

Bumping an old thread here... I need something better than my terrible composite cable for my N64. Component cables for N64 are nearly impossible to find, any suggestions?

 

[exdeath]

Bumping an old thread here... I need something better than my terrible composite cable for my N64. Component cables for N64 are nearly impossible to find, any suggestions?

N64 doesn't support component out of the box. There is no such thing as a SNES/N64 component cable, and the Gamecube one is an entirely different beast with the digital AV out unique to the Gamecube. Unlike SNES, N64 doesn't even have RGB lines going to the AV out port. And even if you add the 3 wires from the video encoder to the AV out port, it will be very dim and requires a video amplifier circuit easily implemented with a 3 channel Ti 7314.

Then you would need the normal SNES/N64 AV cable with RGB, and almost all of these are going to be aftermarket. All of these have SCART connectors carrying RGB from the AV out, including the offical Gamecube RGB SCART cable. Note we are talking the SNES style analog AV multi out RGB SCART cable, NOT the digital Gamecube component video cable. Problem with Nintendo consoles is you can't make your own cable easily because of the stupid proprietary Nintendo AV multi out connector that you can't get anywhere. And you can't just hijack an official cable because it lacks the pins even if you repin it. But there are lots of prefabricated cables on ebay and such for < $9 usually. On these cheap non internally shielded SCART cables, beware of video->audio cross coupling that causes a buzz in the audio that varies in amplitude with the picture brightness.

Finally from there you can do lossless transcode from RGB to component with any numerous boxes/boards available if you don't have a 15 kHz RGB monitor.

Honestly not worth it, and not THAT big of an improvement on N64 other than cleaning up NTSC rainbow artifacts and dot crawl. N64 is naturally very blurry anyway with it's 320x240 resolution combined with a 2048 byte trilinear mip mapped texture size limit. Sharpening up the signal does NOTHING to alleviate the N64 trademark playdoh through wax paper look. In fact it makes some games like Killer Instinct Gold look like complete crap because it cleans up the NTSC butchering that hides obvious texture seams and rectangular alpha blended edges of things that are non rectangular.

I did it just because I'm already heavily invested in RGB infrastructure for my other consoles. N64 benefits the absolute least from RGB output of all pre 480p component video consoles.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Not as retro, I just bought a HDMI converter for my PS2. Wasn't sure what to expect but it was cheap so I figured I'd give it a go. It works as stated and isn't an external device that needs its own power, all self contained just plugs in the back like a USB stick. The picture seems to be a little less crisp than component, almost blurry at times. As it doesn't have any functions to scale, or upscale it has a black box around it.

I'm playing around with it a bit, but will probably stick to the emulator.

All that extra hardware is fine if you really want to mess with it but at the end of the day, I don't care about the picture being exactly what it was. I want to play the games, and if I can improve the picture quality while I'm at it, that's a bonus. I do have a 37" CRT still here, but I've pretty much quit using it. I might turn it into a MAME cabinet someday...but who knows...

 

[Soundmanred]

All that extra hardware is fine if you really want to mess with it but at the end of the day, I don't care about the picture being exactly what it was.

This is normal and 99.99% of people.

 

[exdeath]

This is normal and 99.99% of people.

Most "normal people" have a 1080p flat panel and had a PS3 or 360 for 8 years hooked up with yellow composite in letterbox with their TV on zoom or stretch and claim they could see the difference between 720 and 1080 when they can't even read player names.

 

[JD50]

N64 doesn't support component out of the box. There is no such thing as a SNES/N64 component cable, and the Gamecube one is an entirely different beast with the digital AV out unique to the Gamecube. Unlike SNES, N64 doesn't even have RGB lines going to the AV out port. And even if you add the 3 wires from the video encoder to the AV out port, it will be very dim and requires a video amplifier circuit easily implemented with a 3 channel Ti 7314.

Then you would need the normal SNES/N64 AV cable with RGB, and almost all of these are going to be aftermarket. All of these have SCART connectors carrying RGB from the AV out, including the offical Gamecube RGB SCART cable. Note we are talking the SNES style analog AV multi out RGB SCART cable, NOT the digital Gamecube component video cable. Problem with Nintendo consoles is you can't make your own cable easily because of the stupid proprietary Nintendo AV multi out connector that you can't get anywhere. And you can't just hijack an official cable because it lacks the pins even if you repin it. But there are lots of prefabricated cables on ebay and such for < $9 usually. On these cheap non internally shielded SCART cables, beware of video->audio cross coupling that causes a buzz in the audio that varies in amplitude with the picture brightness.

Finally from there you can do lossless transcode from RGB to component with any numerous boxes/boards available if you don't have a 15 kHz RGB monitor.

Honestly not worth it, and not THAT big of an improvement on N64 other than cleaning up NTSC rainbow artifacts and dot crawl. N64 is naturally very blurry anyway with it's 320x240 resolution combined with a 2048 byte trilinear mip mapped texture size limit. Sharpening up the signal does NOTHING to alleviate the N64 trademark playdoh through wax paper look. In fact it makes some games like Killer Instinct Gold look like complete crap because it cleans up the NTSC butchering that hides obvious texture seams and rectangular alpha blended edges of things that are non rectangular.

I did it just because I'm already heavily invested in RGB infrastructure for my other consoles. N64 benefits the absolute least from RGB output of all pre 480p component video consoles.

So what you're saying is I should probably just suck it up and stick with the composite cable. I have an RGB Scart cable for my SNES and that looks fantastic. I've seen guides online for getting that to work with the N64 but I really don't feel like getting into soldering.

Do you have any pics of your setup with switches and power supplies? I've seen some folks with rackmount power switches, I might look into getting one, it looks really convenient.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Most "normal people" have a 1080p flat panel and had a PS3 or 360 for 8 years hooked up with yellow composite in letterbox with their TV on zoom or stretch and claim they could see the difference between 720 and 1080 when they can't even read player names.

You do have a point. I fall somewhere in the upper middle.

 

[exdeath]

Do you have any pics of your setup with switches and power supplies? I've seen some folks with rackmount power switches, I might look into getting one, it looks really convenient.

Nothing super elegant. Sony PVM-20M4U with a BNC RGBS cable going to a SCART plug sourced by a 3 to 1 mechanical SCART switch with audio being pulled out at the switch where a Klipsch 2.1 input is connected. When I can I source audio straight through. Normal OEM power bricks going to a power strip. Only have the consoles I'm actively playing hooked up for anti clutter.

 

[JD50]

Nothing super elegant. Sony PVM-20M4U with a BNC RGBS cable going to a SCART plug sourced by a 3 to 1 mechanical SCART switch with audio being pulled out at the switch where a Klipsch 2.1 input is connected. When I can I source audio straight through. Normal OEM power bricks going to a power strip. Only have the consoles I'm actively playing hooked up for anti clutter.

I've got the same Sony PVM. I'm looking at getting an SCART switch as well, which one do you have? I'll probably have an NES, SNES, N64, and PS1 hooked up at the same time. The NES and N64 won't be using SCART though, I think I can just plug them directly into my monitor. At some point I'll probably grab a Dreamcast that I'll want hooked up as well.

 

[exdeath]

Dreamcast does 31khz VGA > 15khz RGB. You can run 640 x 480p native.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Dreamcast does 31khz VGA > 15khz RGB. You can run 640 x 480p native.

Nice. Is it the first console that can do that?

 

[JD50]

Dreamcast does 31khz VGA > 15khz RGB. You can run 640 x 480p native.

So how did you hook this up to your Sony PVM?

 

[exdeath]

So how did you hook this up to your Sony PVM?

Dreamcast can do both 15 kHz RGB and 31 KHz VGA.

 

[JD50]

Dreamcast can do both 15 kHz RGB and 31 KHz VGA.

Yea but there's no VGA port on the PVM, so is RGB the best picture on the PVM?

 

[exdeath]

Yea but there's no VGA port on the PVM, so is RGB the best picture on the PVM?

PVM is a NTSC based device. It's 240p or 480i, it can't do 31 kHz scan rate for RGB or 480p.

VGA 480p is best for Dreamcast but very few games actually support it.