Dreamcast VGA Boxes

[Franz the Stampede]

Holy poop. I got that VGA Box today and WOW does it make a big difference. Now I fully understand why DC games are considered "arcade perfect." This machine was so far ahead of its time, it is ridiculous.

Not as ridicolous as the fact that, of all the consoles that followed, only X360 can be VGa ready, all the others have this bloody YPbPr ONLY...

[Strider77]

YPbPr ONLY...

hahahaha...... I fealt the same way the other way around. They need to pick one damn plug that works the best and keep it so everyone can be happy.....

[icepick]

It never fails. I always get caught up with looking into VGA/RGBHV to YPbPr, so that I'll be able to play DC in progressive on an HDTV (even though it's a very long time before I have one), and after wasting hours following leads, I end up with the same realization; that it would cost too much and not yield enough of a benefit to be worth it anyway. The best bet is to get an HDTV that sports VGA input in the first place, or forget about it.

It's just a huge bummer that with this minor detail, one could end up with not only having to forego VGA, but also RGB, ending up with S-video, which would further look funny on an HDTV due to the interpolation. (As I understand it, there would even be interpolation with an RGBHV-YPbPr conversion, as VGA is 640x480 but 480p is 720x480.)

Sometimes, one might wish that with all the output signals available with the DC, and its forward-thinking nature, that it would have color-difference (YPbPr, as compared to RGB) component output as well. The fact is that color-difference component is bad. RGB is better than interlaced YPbPr, and RGBHV is better than progressive YPbPr. RGB and RGBHV are clean, established, understandable and open standards.

As far as I understand, YPbPr exists for two reasons: To have near-RGB quality video on DVDs (RGB would take up too much space, so they omit the green and approximate it from the red, blue, and luminosity), and to allow copy-protection encoding in the video signal. The only reason for the DC to have such a lesser quality video standard would be because it's being promoted in the US and other regions, not because it's technically better in any way.

So, I'm not going to complain, and I'm going to try to remember not to look into RGB-YPbPr solutions, although I doubt it'll stick. VGA is good, in a way the best (at least as far as analog signals go), and I can play games in progressive on a PC monitor right now. It's very cool that the DC supported it back in 1998, and it'd be nice if another console besides the X360 supported it today.

(Sorry, I know that no one asked, but I saw that component-to-VGA converter on NCSX and it got the gears rolling again; a "why can't there be something that goes the other way" sort of thing.)

[zakk]

Err, there is something that goes the other way..

http://www.copperbox.com/lite/popinfo.p ... =571290944

[ktownhero]

So, I'm not going to complain, and I'm going to try to remember not to look into RGB-YPbPr solutions, although I doubt it'll stick. VGA is good, in a way the best (at least as far as analog signals go), and I can play games in progressive on a PC monitor right now. It's very cool that the DC supported it back in 1998, and it'd be nice if another console besides the X360 supported it today.

Originally, Nintendo said that the Wii would support a VGA mode. I thought it was stupid, but now I know it would have been awesome. Unfortunately, they cancelled it in the final product.

[D]

For analog VGA is the best, but it's without audio.
VGA even supports a higher resolution than HDMI, go figure.
US does not support RGB, nor does Japan (there is Japanese Scart, but it's not used that much I think)
Component really started with dvd players I guess.
Like I have said many times. If you'd be able to get a PAL tv set, you'd have everything including RGB scart to quence your low res RGB thirst.
I'm hoping that with HDMI, we will get a world wide standard.
HDMI accepts at least 1080i/p 720i/p and 480i/p
There's still 50 and 60 hz issues. But most PAL tv's have supported 60 Hz since a good 15 years.
Only thing is that the HDMI connector is really flimsy and small. Smaller than the USB (almost, I think) So I foresee a lot of "my hdmi connection is f*cked" threads in the future. The DVI connector is much bigger and is much firmer. But again, like VGA, a computer standard without audio.

[icepick]

Interesting points, D! Honestly, I'm not sure of why audio needs to be included in the same cable as video, although it'd be nice from a simplicity standpoint (to an extent). Given the shift to digital, audio cables are simple fiber optic or a single wire lead (plus common/ground); it should be simple to implement into an all-inclusive AV cable. I wonder about what gaming will be like ten years from now; Things seem simpler with analog signals, although the quality might not be as good as with digital. With digital, game console manufacturers and television/audio system designers will need to work together to make sure that we don't have to manually calibrate our games to compensate for lag and other discrepancies.

I'm sure that it'll all seem obvious when we're there, as it's not like you hear people talking about hoow things seemed simpler with the 8-track and vinyl records, RF modulation and VCRs. Three of those are one-way concepts with no necessary synchronization of video, audio and user input, though.

But it probably won't be that bad.

Err, there is something that goes the other way..

http://www.copperbox.com/lite/popinfo.p ... =571290944

Hey, that's the most affordable price for one of those that I've seen so far! Thanks!

I should've clarified; What I meant was "Why can't there be something like that, with the same simplicity and availability?" It's unfortunate that the effort required to reproduce what's left of the RGB in a YPbPr signal is much less than the effort required to convert an RGB signal to YPbPr, when YPbPr is the marketed "standard." (Again, more unfortunate is that this is the standard in the first place.)

The dilemma with such a concept as this is that with the VGA/RGBHV component signal being transcoded into YPbPr color-difference component, the resulting image quality will be less than that of VGA/RGBHV, and also likely less than that of native YPbPr itself, as well as introducing the possibility of lag and inaccurate or low-quality transcoding. I might be speaking obsessively here, but to be sure that you're getting something close to RGBHV quality with a transcoder, you're probably going to have to pay a lot for a high-quality one, which end up in the USD 500.00s instead of USD 100.00s.

So, do you lay the currency down for such a device, given all the caveats... or do you stick with S-video, a monitor, or VGA-supporting TV? Of course, I won't know whether or not it's really worth it until I try it myself (which requires the funds up front), but I suppose that a low-quality transcoded progressive YPbPr image would probably still be preferable to a high-quality native S-video scaled deinterlaced image on an HDTV.

Again, I shouldn't even be worrying about this since I don't have an HDTV set yet, but I'm still curious as to what it would be like on my friend's set. The thing that got me checking into all this was because one of my uncles has a 15 kHz set (right?) with interlaced YPbPr input and S-video, but that would be an even harder sell for a DC VGA transcoded signal... or DC RGB, or whichever it would be.

[Franz the Stampede]

to sum up again:

Top 5 intelligent things regarding video game hardware
1 - Dreamcast being VGA ready (and with MANY games supporting it) in 1998
2 - Xbox360 being VGA ready
3 - MegaDrive having a volume control on the console itself (or was that only for the headphones output?)

Crap, we run out of intelligent things already...

Top 5 idiot things regarding video game hardware
1 - PS2 not being VGA ready
2 - GameCube not being VGA ready
3 - Xbox not being VGA ready
4 - PS3 not being VGA ready
5 - Wii not being VGA ready
6 - Sony not making a mandatory requirement for developers to have PS2 games to run also in 480p if they are normally in 480i (instead they focused on the memory card being called exactly Memory Card (8MB) (for PlayStation®2) or Memory Card (PS2) or the game will NOT be published, WTF)
7 - Nintendo not making a mandatory requirement for developers to have NGC games to runalso in 480p if they are normally in 480i
8 - NTSC Nintendo consoles incapable of outputting RGB signals
9 - PAL games not being optimised for 60Hz and full screen
10 - Controllers being generally too small
11 - d-pad being generally not as good as the Sega Saturn ones
12 - Regional lockouts
13 - Developers not putting an in-game option that allows to have fullscreen AND correct proportions on both 4:3 and 16:9 displays

Oh, we alredy have 13 top 5 idiot things. what a wonderful world...

[Strider77]

I end up with the same realization; that it would cost too much and not yield enough of a benefit to be worth it anyway.

those vga to component transcoders are only around 65 to 100.00. thats not alot of money and the results is more than worth it. if your spending a grand on a tv what's another 100.00 bucks. I have 2 and payed around 65 for each one.

[D]

to sum up again:

Top 5 intelligent things regarding video game hardware
1 - Dreamcast being VGA ready (and with MANY games supporting it) in 1998
2 - Xbox360 being VGA ready
3 - MegaDrive having a volume control on the console itself (or was that only for the headphones output?)

Crap, we run out of intelligent things already...

Top 5 idiot things regarding video game hardware
1 - PS2 not being VGA ready
2 - GameCube not being VGA ready
3 - Xbox not being VGA ready
4 - PS3 not being VGA ready
5 - Wii not being VGA ready
6 - Sony not making a mandatory requirement for developers to have PS2 games to run also in 480p if they are normally in 480i (instead they focused on the memory card being called exactly Memory Card (8MB) (for PlayStation®2) or Memory Card (PS2) or the game will NOT be published, WTF)
7 - Nintendo not making a mandatory requirement for developers to have NGC games to runalso in 480p if they are normally in 480i
8 - NTSC Nintendo consoles incapable of outputting RGB signals
9 - PAL games not being optimised for 60Hz and full screen
10 - Controllers being generally too small
11 - d-pad being generally not as good as the Sega Saturn ones
12 - Regional lockouts
13 - Developers not putting an in-game option that allows to have fullscreen AND correct proportions on both 4:3 and 16:9 displays

Oh, we alredy have 13 top 5 idiot things. what a wonderful world...

Depressing, but true. I say: F*ck 'em.
Of late I was especially surprised that in PAL GC titles they removed the code to use 480p. They deliberatly took the effort to remove it? May they burn in hell I'm glad I know now.

[icepick]

6 - Sony not making a mandatory requirement for developers to have PS2 games to run also in 480p if they are normally in 480i (instead they focused on the memory card being called exactly Memory Card (8MB) (for PlayStation®2) or Memory Card (PS2) or the game will NOT be published, WTF)

I always thought that was pretty over-the-top.

those vga to component transcoders are only around 65 to 100.00. thats not alot of money and the results is more than worth it. if your spending a grand on a tv what's another 100.00 bucks. I have 2 and payed around 65 for each one.

Really? That means a lot, actually. I haven't really seen any praise for the devices (or actually, any opinions either way) so I wasn't sure of the quality. That's also a good point about the cost. If I had the funds and easy access to a big HDTV, I'd have purchased that extra one from you in the trading forum.

Of late I was especially surprised that in PAL GC titles they removed the code to use 480p. They deliberatly took the effort to remove it?

That's pretty silly, unless the capability somehow caused problems. I'm not quite sure of how it could, though.

I've had the above content waiting to be posted for a couple of months now; I'm not sure of what I meant to add, but, off it goes. I'll say that as of late, I've been looking at anything-to-VGA transcoders a lot more than I ever have, but this'll probably change once I get my TV fixed.

Playing Saturn on the same VGA monitor that I use all the time for DC would be more of a convenience than anything. Then again, I did for some odd reason recently play some Giga Wing on my DC through an RF modulator into a TV card out to that same monitor, and aside from the lag and nonexistent color, it was actually not that bad. My TV is simply out of focus, I think, and although the bigger size makes up for some of it, maybe I will in fact look into some of these VGA upscan devices.

[D]

icepick, you can asjust the focus inside you tv perhaps or even through the service menu. Get a tv mechanic to look at it. and/or find the code for your tv to put it into service mode. Or get someone else to set it up for you. Be very careful though. Opening a tv requires alot of knowledge about hazardous dangers for you (and the tv)

[icepick]

Thanks for your help!

Actually, it's a pretty old TV, I don't think that it has a service menu. There is a focus adjustment (potentiometer) in the back, but it hits the stop before getting to a clearer picture... so, the choices are "blurry" or "extremely blurry," with of course lots of possibilities in between.

I'd thought about trying to add RGB input support to the TV, but after reading up some more on TVs (I knew that they were dangerous inside, but now I know moreso how dangerous) I decided that it would't be worth frying myself or my consoles. Still, how I wish!

Maybe if I replaced the focus potentiometer I could make the screen a little clearer, but even with something small like that, I feel that as long as the set isn't broken, I might as well leave it (due to my limited knowledge in this area). Something I've been meaning to do for a while is adjust the individual color gun drivers (is that right?) using the six potentiometers in the back... but since the TV's in a big wooden cabinet, it makes it tough to see the screen and adjust it at the same time. (I'll need some mirrors.)

So, you can see that it makes things pretty favorable for my mom's old 19-inch ViewSonic, DC and VGA box. I'll get around to fixing the TV up by this summer, but it will still have only RF input no matter what I do to it. I read somewhere about somehow bypassing the TV tuner to get at least composite video, but I'm not sure of how that would work.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I used to have an old 19" Tenika produced TV monitor with an RF input. What was cool about that particular TV set was that if you hooked up a Supergun with S-Video output and used a S-Video to Composite Video adapter and hooked up the composite video cable to an Composite Video adapter that outputs to RF out, the said TV monitor would display a perfect and stable picture of Seibu Kaihatsu's SP1 cart of Viper Phase 1 U.S.A. ^_~

Of course, I realize that's a lot of downgrading of native pure arcade RGB signal just to get into the RF input of said TV monitor...it would be best to use an analog RGB monitor that's capable of displaying at low resolution 15 kHz horizontal sync rate. Can't get any better than that with that particular setup with no loss of arcade RGB signal whatsoever... ^_~

Now if one were to display said Viper Phase 1 arcade shmup on an Sony Trinitron USA region NTSC 20" TV monitor (using S-Video output from Supergun setup), one would still get the irksome slow scrolling to the right non-stop. Again lack of proper signal lock on Sony's part... ^_~

At least, Microcom had the foresight to include built-in support on it's XRGB-2 upscan convertor for such odd-ball arcade frequencies such as the Toaplan and Seibu Kaihatsu produced arcade Jamma PCBs as no such "slow scrolling to the right" is present on an analog VGA monitor setup anyways. No other later produced XRGBs have this distinctive arcade PCBs support like the XRGB-2 does..... ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~