Earlier this year I acquired an XRGB Mini Framemeister upscaling device.
It is most excellent!
However when using the framemeister to play shmups I found that the lag on an LCD monitor or TV was very noticeable. For me it almost made the games unplayable.
After playing around with various bits and pieces I have collected around me over the years I found one of these:
http://s5.postimg.org/d0jjeid3b/IMG_20150418_232742.jpg
Which is a HDMI to VGA converter with a stereo breakout. They are relatively cheap.
I connected my Saturn up to the Framemeister via RGB SCART.
I then connected this to the framemeister HDMI out and set the output to HDMI 480_60P.
I then connected the other end to an old CRT VGA monitor that I have.
The result is quite a tasty VGA image! This is it with the V-Line option turned on:
http://s5.postimg.org/uxcp7v3yf/IMG_20150418_235822.jpg
I then tried putting this 480P signal through a VGA scan-line generator:
http://s5.postimg.org/95g5bxtxj/IMG_20150418_233203.jpg
The result from the scan-line generator is even better than the over laid scan-lines from the Framemeister!
Better still when using this method the input lag is virtually eradicated.
It just shows how excellent the Framemeister is. All the Lag I was experiencing previously was added by the LCD TV I was using.
To sum up the benefits of doing this are:
- You can turn an old VGA CRT Monitor into something that very closely resembles a CRT RGB Monitor such as a PVM.
- Input lag is vastly reduced.
- I found that connecting the Framemeister to a LCD PC Monitor using DVI produced significant underscan.
This underscan is removed when using the above method.
- While not really a benefit I found the stereo breakout function to be quite effective.
I thought this would be worth sharing as something useful that the Framemeister is capable of.
Even though it is counter intuitive to what it was originally meant for!
