Status of 「Yokotate」 in 2017

[Aatos]

Coming from more general gaming background, lately my appetite for excellent shmups has been steadily growing. I recently picked a bunch of interesting shmups for PS1 and Saturn from Japan and also got to play some in the arcade. To be frank the even difference between tate and yoko had been fairly meaningless to me previously but after those arcade experiences I started digging deeper and got really interested in experiencing these games as they were meant to be.

Getting a real tate monitor is not practical for me but I got really interested in Fudoh's yokotate concept. Given the hurdles of getting displays on their heads and the fact that this is a shmup forum, I was suprised to see the relative lack of discussion/utilization around this concept here lately. This is especially so given how popular the video recording cards have seemingly become since Fudoh's original review of Holo card in 2008 - now that everybody and their uncle is streaming games to twitch etc. these days, you'd think achieving yokotate at least through using a computer to rotate the screen would be much more affordable these days.

So, starting with people's experiences, is anyone actively using a yokotate setup and what do you have there? Several years ago I think Fudoh mentioned he had already reviewed Micomsoft XCAPTURE-1 among some other method but I never saw that review published, why is that? By now even XCAPTURE-1 seems to have become fairly old technology (well, 4 years old anyway) and as I mentioned, capture cards seem to be everywhere, but are they really viable for tateyoko concept? For instance a name like Elgato pops up often and a product like Elgato Game Capture HD60 PRO promises lagless capture but are these really suitable for yokotate computer setup? Given it's priced somewhere around $160 it's gotten much better from the $1000+ Holo card, even though as far as I'm aware no actual cheap image processor capable of rotating the image has yet appeared ..

Finally, I'm considering a yokotate setup and have no idea what I should take into consideration. If I use a computer I'd ideally plug the retro consoles through Fremeister, then feed that HDMI to a video capture card with pass-through - then for those tateable games, switch to computer display and hit alt + left arrow key, and that's it? Does the TV's resolution etc. come into play here, given that I would at some point be updating to a 4K tv, would uneven scaling cause distortions etc. ? How to minimize the lag, what is tolerable?

All comments and thoughts into yokotate are welcome!

[Steamflogger Boss]

I've been using a Silicon Optix Image Anyplace IA-100 for 4 years now and it's pretty great.

[Fudoh]

The Elgato HD60S (external USB3) and the HD60Pro (internal PCIe) indeed offer nearly lagfree previews. There are enough people here using these. The question you would have to ask is: how flexible is the preview window.

The downside is that the Elgato is picky about it's source signals (especially the refresh rate), so depending on your sources, you might have to disable the vsync option on the Framemeister.

Standalone processors you can check out include the Aurora Dido Jr ($200) and the 7xx series of VPs by Kramer (expensive!).

[Steamflogger Boss]

The Elgato HD60S (external USB3) and the HD60Pro (internal PCIe) indeed offer nearly lagfree previews. There are enough people here using these. The question you would have to ask is: how flexible is the preview window.

The downside is that the Elgato is picky about it's source signals (especially the refresh rate), so depending on your sources, you might have to disable the vsync option on the Framemeister.

Standalone processors you can check out include the Aurora Dido Jr ($200) and the 7xx series of VPs by Kramer (expensive!).

Anything from the 700 line? Cause this is cheap: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kramer-Electron ... SwyWZZQbGp

[Fudoh]

my bad. 79x series. I just had a VP-794 with me for testing.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Now the expensive comment makes a lot more sense. 0_o

[Xer Xian]

While the Yokotate concept makes a lot of sense, it probably didn't take off because it requires dedicated hardware that is not easy to come by (even less than 240p downscaling solutions). Personally I wouldn't play on the preview window of a capture card's software on a regular basis.. I didn't test it on an Elgato - only on a HD PVR and a Live Gamer Portable 2), but in these cases the added input lag and worse picture quality would defeat the benefit of going yokotate (the LGP2 lets you select different codecs for the preview window, and the only one with acceptable quality adds a ton of lag). I feel that these previews are mostly meant to sample the content and that the passthrough output on most capture devices is there for a reason.

Also I'd rather not have to turn on my computer for console gaming (but that's just a pet peeve of mine).

[Fudoh]

ersonally I wouldn't play on the preview window of a capture card's software on a regular basis - I didn't test it on an Elgato (only on a HD PVR and a Live Gamer Portable 2), but it just feels wrong to me..

these are live h264 encoders. The HD60S isn't - hence the USB3 requirement.

[Xer Xian]

these are live h264 encoders. The HD60S isn't - hence the USB3 requirement.

Oh, that makes sense. So the image that gets displayed on the preview is the raw video output of the source? In that case I take back my comment.