Extron Jr 800

[Rasp]

Hello. I've been lurking here for a few years but just registered because I know there are a lot of you that know the Extron line of equipment. There is an Extron jr 800 that is being sold locally on my FB marketplace.

So I have an older PC I'd like to run emulators on up through n64 in 240p. I have an older CRT by JVC that has an S-Video input. So the Extron junior takes vga input up to 800x600 and spits it out back out via S-Video and a few other selectable outputs. The key thing here is the flicker switch. It has settings for full, reduced and the most important: NON INTERLACED.

So would the non interlaced mean 240p conversion?

[BazookaBen]

No need for the device. Your PC can output 240p

[Fudoh]

The Jr. can indeed output 240p, but it's limited to s-video (no RGB output). That's why it's usually not widely recommended. If you go for it, you should feed it 480p though and not 600p.

[Rasp]

No need for the device. Your PC can output 240p

Yes but when you run the s-video out directly to the TV only interlaced resolutions are available. Even with crt_emu driver I learned this is just not possible without some sort of device in the middle. Cards with tv out always display interlaced afaik.

The Jr. can indeed output 240p, but it's limited to s-video (no RGB output). That's why it's usually not widely recommended. If you go for it, you should feed it 480p though and not 600p.

No that's fine.....When I was a kid honestly I played on nothing but RF until composite on the PS1 and n64 era so the s-video will be plenty good for my eyes. As long as it can display a progressive scan 320x240. I was planning on just running 640x480 via vga to the extron to my CRT and run RA. Simple.

[Rasp]

So I have one more question. I finally got a chance to set up the extron. I think there is a problem with the resolution windows is giving it though.

I'm running an ATI 4650 card on W7x64, with my resolution set to 640x480. I have the lever switched to non interlaced. When I boot, it shows my bios in 240p, I can screw around in bios and everything looks fine. When I exit to windows, it just shows a black screen. It doesn't make a difference if I switch it to interface mode either. I know Windows is booting fine because I here the desktop start but again no picture.

The Jr. can be fed up to 800x600, so I don't what's going on. Any thoughts?

[orange808]

That's odd. Boot Windows into safe mode.

[Rasp]

That's odd. Boot Windows into safe mode.

No picture either. I'm a little disappointed. I was so excited to get this piece of equipment but it's not performing as well as I hoped. For whatever reason, the windows boot logo doesn't show no matter what. I don't know if it's rendered in an incompatible resolution but even the safe mode menu doesn't show.

Well, one thing I did find out after hours of troubleshooting with this last night is the extron does NOT like my Radeon drivers. If I use onboard video, the windows boot logo still doesn't show but I'm able to boot into windows and such, but RetroArch will not start when using my onboard video drivers. So for giggles I downloaded Nestopia standalone and ran Contra, but something is def wrong....the game is blurry almost as if there is some sort of bilinear filtering, But there are no filters turned on. It's definitely progressive scan, but not as sharp as my Raspberry Pi3 with the new 240p composite firmware output.....ON COMPOSITE. I'm using s-video on the PC.

Any ideas if the Extron may be defective? If it is I'll return it. I dunno how I get a sharper picture on a crappier connection on the pi than I do with the PC. It doesn't make any sense. Not to mention this thing can't seem to display certain parts of Windows which is not good.

[Rasp]

Ok so I kind of figured this out. The safe mode and boot screen show up fine when I hook up a PC monitor to the vga out on the Extron so if I ever screw anything up I can always fall back on that. No big deal.

The blurry resolutions were a combination of having the underscan switch set on the Extron and uneven resolutions in RA. After reading some of Fudoh's posts here I now have an even crisp picture. It's just a matter of setting up each core with correct values.

Thanks for responses guys, I should be good from here on out.

[Fudoh]

sounds good. And yes, indeed, there are quite a settings that can screw up your results.