Retro consoles to modern TV - best options?

[Brad]

I use mine with an Amiga sometimes. The previously bizarre screen resolutions such as 1280 x 512 suddenly make sense on a widescreen LCD.

[fallenangle]

DC via VGA shouldn't looked vertically squished if the TV is set to display in 4:3, which is all the DC/DC games ever supported. On any WS TV that will mean black side borders unless the TV is set for full screen formatting in which case you either lose picture area and/or get horizontal stretching/vertical squishing, usually a bit of both, depending on how the TV handles 4:3 sources.

The DC's VGA support: 480p (640x480) should give a superior display on any screen. A device which uses RGB SCART input is still just using the console's 480i/60Hz output, at best, and must go through all sorts of processing to display in 720p or more. That doesn't mean it doesn't look good but VGA with the DC should be better.

However most retro consoles don't have VGA support, some don't even support RGB via SCART or YPbPr, so it makes more sense to use one of the devices mentioned if you need a universal solution.

[dvdx2]

The dc outputs a fantastic 640x480 vga signal - I really can’t think of any reason to use RGB scart, besides playing the couple of 240p games or the ones that don’t work using vga (or that you can’t force)

[Brad]

Ok. Seems DC VGA clock is slightly odd, which causes some monitors to interpret screen resolution as 720x480, hence the horizontal squash. Thought I was going mad for a moment

[Leon Retro]

DC always looks vertically squashed when using VGA (to my eyes)

It has something to do with the way the DC outputs the VGA image. It outputs a 720x480 image frame, but the amount of pixels is 640x480, which confuses screens and even the OSSC, so you don't get a proper 4:3 image and lose around an inch or more each side, so the image looks squished. I think this isn't an issue when using a CRT monitor, which the Dreamcast VGA was designed for.

I see little grey borders around my Dreamcast image, which is where the image was meant to be stretched to the 4:3 frame. So the image displayed is a bit less than proper 4:3.

It's a shame, because the VGA image quality does look really nice. Maybe there will be an OSSC update to remedy the problem.

[Brad]

Snap!

[_SD_]

[_SD_]

Double post. Sorry.

[TheNewMonkey]

Another vote for the OSSC here, I originally bought it for the Super Famicom but couldn’t get any sort of decent picture out of it so ended up buying a SuperNT instead which beats it hands down!

Anyway it’s now used for the Dreamcast and looks amazing after a couple of tweaks in the settings, I’ve also tried it with a Megadrive and the results are brilliant, definitely recommended from me.

[Leon Retro]

I originally bought it for the Super Famicom but couldn’t get any sort of decent picture out of it

That's strange. It works perfectly with my Super Famicom, SNES, and SFC Jr. I'm not sure if it's my imagination, but I think the image looks richer(more colourful) than when using the Framemeister. I doubt it really is.

Anyway, I might buy a SuperNT, seeing it looks like such a cool machine to own for SNES fans.

[Brad]

SNES/SFC is fussiest console with ossc. So many variations, different cables etc. And highly dependent on TV. Mine can do 5x line scan on my pioneer 1080p but only 2x on my Panasonic 4k