Samir wrote:

You negate that, which brings information to the topic at hand, and instead you act like like a forum troll. Good job.

Be nice everyone! Or else!

BTW. In my quest to cheaply and easily make my N64 look decent on my 50" plasma TV, I ended up using a DVD recorder as a bridge between Svideo and Component video (TV doesn't have Svideo). It looks great and seems to do a fine conversion without any extra undesirable video processing. I also compared composite and Svideo and the most obvious benefit is color quality I think.

Something else I've noticed about low resolution game consoles on modern TVs is LCD response time is even more an issue than usual. You don't really want even more blur in your blurry upscaled old game! Plasma is definitely the way to go.

Color quality doesn't get radically better with S-Video... it's still the same PAL or NTSC encoding being done after all. But it definitely gives a sharp and stable image and the jump from composite to S-Video is bigger than S-Video to RGB imo.

I also don't know how you can bear playing that on such a huge screen with probably the wrong aspect ratio for the console anyway. But that is just me 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

Color quality doesn't get radically better with S-Video... it's still the same PAL or NTSC encoding being done after all. But it definitely gives a sharp and stable image and the jump from composite to S-Video is bigger than S-Video to RGB imo.

I also don't know how you can bear playing that on such a huge screen with probably the wrong aspect ratio for the console anyway. But that is just me 🤣

Svideo benefits both luma and chroma. Color is notably more saturated though maybe it's not noticeable without a side-by-side compare.

The TV of course has 4:3 mode. Though some N64 games do support 16:9! Perfect Dark is an example.

What I've noticed is that nowadays quite a lot of people are vocal about prefering the N64 to other consoles of the time. Back then it was a bit different, N64 didn't have anywhere near the mainstream audience of PSX and was more seen as a kids console, a bit like Gamecube later. I guess having a shit load of sports/racing game clones helped the PSX a lot heh. But even then its library is bigger and better... and Nintendo shot themselves in the foot with designing the architecture in such a stupid way that it wouldn't perform anywhere near what its specs would suggest when comparing them to other platforms. With a way too late 1996 launch to boot.

N64 has its share of great games, but without doubt the PS1 has a lot more. I'm pretty sure the lack of CDROM is the main reason for that, though honestly I'd rather have carts than a 2x CD drive. 2x is so slow for loading data, and CD audio and FMV are overrated. I also prefer N64's visuals to PS1's broken 3D.

I don't know if lack of perspective correction and no bilinear filtering is enough to consider it broken given what impressive graphics devs have achieved with the hardware. Framerates are also most definitely better. It is just that with these limitations and so little memory games had to be tailored for the console and not every studio had the money or right people to do this. Certainly the console excels in tightly confined games where they managed to squeeze a lot of detail out of this 1994 hardware. Solid expansive world games weren't really possible besides very few examples, that was definitely N64 territory. And Nintendo could even make a few extra bucks with their memory expansion paks.

I had the N64 as a teen. Loved Mario 64 but that was it for me. Sold it shortly after. Also it didn't have any RGB Scart output available. Later me and my brother saw the PSX on a computer show (before it was launched). There was also the Sega Saturn. We sat Ridge Racer, Wipeout and Tekken and Sega Rally. I knew straight away that the PSX is a game changer.

Got an early second hand unit and I played the heck out of it. At first I had a Scart RGB Amiga monitor hooked up, a CM-8833, such a good screen and later a nice 70cm Philips CRT with 100Hz and also Scart RGB.

Personally ANY console I would want RGB and 60Hz. Pal games ran 20% slower and it was real eye opener when I got the first NTSC versions of GT and Metal Gear Solid. No more black bars at the top and bottom either.

If I'd want to hook them up to a modern TV I wouldn't fart around with composite or S-Video and spend the money on the Framemeister RGB to HDMI scaler and be done with it.

swaaye wrote:

BTW. In my quest to cheaply and easily make my N64 look decent on my 50" plasma TV, I ended up using a DVD recorder as a bridge between Svideo and Component video (TV doesn't have Svideo). It looks great and seems to do a fine conversion without any extra undesirable video processing.

Really? My Samsung DVD recorder (DVD-R120) is utterly useless for this since it interlaces progressive video and adds 1+ second of lag to it.

By the way does anyone have a link to the "RF/Composite to RGB converter" mentioned in this thread?

133MHz wrote:

Really? My Samsung DVD recorder (DVD-R120) is utterly useless for this since it interlaces progressive video and adds 1+ second of lag to it.

I have a Toshiba D-R5 and yeah it works well. If I run HDMI and ask it to upscale to 720p it does appear to use some denoising. But leaving it on 480p looks great and doesn't appear to do any extra processing. I don't think there's any lag either. My Samsung plasma also doesn't seem to introduce any problems with 480p scaling so everything works out. I've played hours of N64 this way.

swaaye wrote:

Be nice everyone! Or else!

BTW. In my quest to cheaply and easily make my N64 look decent on my 50" plasma TV, I ended up using a DVD recorder as a bridge between Svideo and Component video (TV doesn't have Svideo). It looks great and seems to do a fine conversion without any extra undesirable video processing. I also compared composite and Svideo and the most obvious benefit is color quality I think.

Something else I've noticed about low resolution game consoles on modern TVs is LCD response time is even more an issue than usual. You don't really want even more blur in your blurry upscaled old game! Plasma is definitely the way to go.

Thank you for stepping in and keeping the community friendly. 😎 It's great to know that my sugguestion works quite well. Happy gaming!

d1stortion wrote:

Color quality doesn't get radically better with S-Video... it's still the same PAL or NTSC encoding being done after all. But it definitely gives a sharp and stable image and the jump from composite to S-Video is bigger than S-Video to RGB imo.

That interesting to know, and it makes sense since s-video seperates the color and black and white parts of the video (similarly to how rgb separates into red green blue). That separation definitely cleans up the lines. I used to swear by s-video when editing using vcr decks at home back in the day.

AFAIK with a "perfect" comb filter you could get very near S-Video in terms of stability... I think I've seen ads for 3D comb filters and such on newer TVs which is funny, in times of HDMI and such I simply cannot imagine anyone seriously feeding some low-res composite signal to those screens and expecting it to look any good.

It also seems that when capturing a composite signal there are ways to filter out the dot crawl digitally... at least I've noticed that most console captures don't have it (and I'm sure the majority still uses composite).

@Mau1wurf1977: It's interesting how some people, including me, still call it PSX... not everyone understands this but back in the day in almost every game magazine it was called like that. A quite rare case of a preliminary name just not dying off, I suppose. Nowadays most people either don't get it at all or think of the Japanese PSX (PS2 with DVD recorder).

133MHz wrote:

By the way does anyone have a link to the "RF/Composite to RGB converter" mentioned in this thread?

Something like this isn't labeled as such anymore. You'll find them known as an 'ATSC external tuner'. These are actually the same boxes that the government was giving away for free when the whole analog to digital conversion happened. The box will accept a coaxial cable and output vga/dvi-i/component. You don't want them outputting hdmi as that would indicate an analog to digital coversion was going on inside the box.

Here's a link to two boxes I found that should do the job:
http://www.splusdirect.com/index.php?l=produc … CFcdAMgod1z4A_g
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16815260027
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16815276009

swaaye wrote:

Be nice everyone! Or else!

BTW. In my quest to cheaply and easily make my N64 look decent on my 50" plasma TV, I ended up using a DVD recorder as a bridge between Svideo and Component video (TV doesn't have Svideo). It looks great and seems to do a fine conversion without any extra undesirable video processing. I also compared composite and Svideo and the most obvious benefit is color quality I think.

Best way to handle this is to mod the N64 to output RGB and use one of the previously mentioned Micomsoft XRGB upscalers.

Yeah I was going to post a topic with the exact same problem on the dreamcast. I got angered with HDTV + Composite, the image was so blurry and bad quality I couldn´t play racing games because it is very hard to distiguinsh stuff in the track ahead of you and I keep crashing into walls and stuff I cant see, I cant even read the license plate on cars in MSR and TXR2.

Then I was surprised when connecting it trough a RF output to an old 17'' CRT TV looked much crisper than composite in my LCD TV 19'' with 4:3 aspect, I could actually read the license plates, so something is very wrong with this TV since I played Wii in friends house trough composite in large LCD wich is the same 640p res as the dreamcast and the image was quite decent, how come RF output has more quality than composite, I think it is a problem specific to this TV something related to awful quality scaler?

So I suppose purchasing a VGA box for dreamcast is useless if I connect it to my HDTV the image would still be blurry? I wonder if something can be done like connecting it to an old VCR and use the VCR SCART output? Or if you know some models of computer CRT screens with composite input since I am needing a new one for my PC.

I also tried the emulation way trough NullDC and Chankast with no sucess, in my PC 80% of games run fine but have horrible stuttering audio no matter which settings I choose so they are unplayable.
On my laptop with Intel GMA X3100 runs fine except that half of the screen diagonal flickers or is completly black if any object is being rendered further than 3 feet away from the camera, so half of the screen is black almost all the time.

VGA blurry? It doesn't get better than that. For starters the image is progressive, a huge step up over interlaced images.

And I don't understand why people muck around with composite and S-Video. Go RGB or go home 😀

For modern TVs you want RGB consoles and a framemeister scaler.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

And I don't understand why people muck around with composite and S-Video. Go RGB or go home 😀

Here on the other side of the pond we didn't have RGB, ever. When I was growing up having composite video was a luxury. Consoles came with RF leads, AV cables were optional. Your parents' brand spanking new TV set might have had a composite video input, but the beat up hand-me-down you could actually play on sure didn't - in fact you were lucky to have a coaxial input instead of screw terminals 'cause with the latter (+ impedance adapter) the picture was usually a lot noisier. Pretty much everyone I knew played through RF and we had to put up with crappy RF switches, fine tuning knobs, interference, blurriness and wiggling the connectors until the noise went away. I hadn't seen an S-Video connector in the flesh until well after 2000, and component got very late to the party, when the damage had already been done.

Back in 2010 I was playing my old consoles through composite on a 21" CRT thinking that was as good as it gets, then I had the luck of finding a broken 24" Nordmende CRT TV from Germany (and thus with RGB SCART) for cheap on a flea market. I fixed it up, wired an RGB cable for my SNES, and things have never been the same since. Then about a year and a half later, the not readily available video processor IC died on it and I'm still mourning the loss, not being able to find a worthy replacement. I got a 'modern' 29" Samsung CRT thinking about getting an RGB to component transcoder but I found out that the TVs modern enough to have component (and TVs for the American market in general) have terrible geometry - they're fine for regular TV watching but 2D video games look like they're being projected on a pillow some fat guy had been sitting on.

It's a sad situation - I feel like I went to video heaven, then suddenly dropped back to earth with no chance of returning. I really hate the Samsung but anything else I can find is just as bad, so I have to make do with it and S-Video. I actually managed to get another, even larger SCART enabled TV but it's got a bad flyback transformer. It's like the universe doesn't want me to get my large screen RGB fix 😢

Oh I see 😀

Well you can mod your consoles and get that Framemeister scaler. You will fall from your chair when you see the image on your modern flat/big screen 😀

The problem here is that modern TV´s destroy the image quality of any kind of input that does not match the native resolution, even component or SCART looks bad, it doesent matter if you set it to 4:3 with black bars or if you try using a smaller screen to see less pixelization, but it seems as some TV´s are better at converting analog signal that others otherwise the Wii would have failed miserably since most people I know connect it trough composite to hdtv´s, my cousin refuses to play racing games with me on the dreamcast for this reason, but he plays a lot of Wii trough composite and says that the graphics are hundreds of times better than the DC and that the image is not blurry, so I guess his tv is better, specially considering that many cable TV boxes 4 or 5 years ago didn't even had HDMI and people had to connect them trough composite or scart and no one complained about quality.

Specially here in europe most of the old TV´s I found up to 2004 dont have any kind of input except for the antenna and the higher end models have scart and a few have composite, but everyone drooled over the graphics of the DC and other consoles trough composite back in the day because it looked good, unlike now with the extra blurriness of modern TV´s.

Also the DC failed miserably here, most of the people I know never heard of it and think it is some sort of cheap PS1 clone when they look at the graphics, I remembered seeing it on magazines but actually no retail stores sold them and everyone was buying PS1 and N64 in 1999 at the same price as the dreamcast prolly because of lack of football games and no online support and most TV´s here didnt have composite. I cant seem to find a SCART adapter for it and VGA boxes are rare and cost more than the console itself at least in the flea market.
Guess I have to give up playing it and wait for a decent emulator that actually works.