BushLin wrote:If you want to spend ~$50 on a decent lag free experience, try to score a small Sony PVM monitor.
Oof. Or ten times that in my case. (But shipping is responsible for half of it.)
I've had some PC capture cards that would do... okay... analog input. But, nothing I've ever seen does as well as these purpose-built retro gaming scalers. Granted, I've never had the pleasure of using an expensive professional scaler, although most of those are designed to be really good at deinterlacing video content, and don't have any particular regard for 240p. My Black Magic capture card doesn't even know how to sync to 240p.
Nice thought, but it's a fool's errand to try and cobble together a better solution than the Retrotink or OSSC. I have both. I use the OSSC for VGA and RGB sources, and the Retrotink for composite and S-Video sources.
The OSSC was designed from the ground up for what it does, and when I saw the difference between my SNES plugged into my TV using composite, and through the OSSC using RGB, I was instantly convinced the investment was worth it. I've spent a fair amount of cash on Retro Gaming Cables SCART cables for my consoles, but... I can play on real hardware while it looks like an emulator.
I haven't used the Retrotink much yet -- just haven't spent any significant time with consoles that use composite since I got it. From what I understand, the guy did some research to find a video encoder IC that performed well with console sources. You're not going to do better than that by luck, on a budget, taking what you can get from capture cards.
These are curated devices purpose-built and, IMHO, priced very fairly. They aren't cheap, but I've bought enough cheap devices to know it isn't a bargain, and you don't come out ahead.