Right, I've had a complete night of discovery. More on that in a bit, firstly, the TV.
I spent the whole evening dragging any item with a scart lead to it for rigorous testing. To do the tests, I used a tiny little Trinitron CRT I have and placed it side by side. The good news is, I got an AV image off of the B&O! The not so good news is the TV is... indecisive about what it wants to do.
All of this was conducted with NO remote control (no longer have one) so I was relying on an auto response from the AV channel. Here's what I threw at them and what I got back. I learned quite a lot about my own hardware:
Philips multi region DVD Player using Euro scart lead (male to male):
Trinitron - immediate switch to AV on power up. When the DVD menu is set to 'NTSC', the TV goes into a stable black and white image.
B&O attempt 1: - immediate switch into DVD menu, but once it played the disc, it jumped off the AV and went back to the regular TV channel (static.) If I pressed the 'setup' button on the remote, it would immediately find the AV channel again until you allowed the disc to be played. Hmmm...
B&O attempt 2: - Messed around with the settings, flicked into PAL and found the disc played okay. Hurrah! Then, inexplicably, it accepted anything I threw at it after that. No more issues, it took NTSC and PAL DVD's, allowed me to switch between NTSC and PAL displays in the internal DVD player menu, and kept a stable picture throughout, never losing the AV channel. Very strange, maybe it just needed some encouragement.
RGB hard wired PC Engine with RGB booster extension cable:
Trinitron - Gives a stable black and white image.
B&O - not interested. No reverting to AV at all, with either the booster extension attached or without.
Sega Saturn Japanese (modded for european RGB output):
Trinitron - this is where it gets really weird. I picked up a boxed JP white Saturn when I was in a market in China and I know it runs copies out of the box cos they gave me one when I bought it. It also works directly off of a Euro saturn scart, so must have been modded somewhere else too, but I bought it blind (language barrier). Only reason I can tell it's a Euro scart is because of the Trinitron, which displays it in full colour rather than black and white (as usually does with anything giving a pure NTSC signal, including via composite.)
So the Trinitron runs the Saturn in full colour off the bat - no issues.
B&O - Despite it's wiring, no response to the Saturn at all. Fussy!
Neo Geo AES console:
Trinitron - This is the first time I used this AES just about ever. It was a spare I got for cheap and had tucked away, and truth be told I never knew its region. Turns out it's PAL as I used a Megadrive euro scart (says 'adapteur' on the back) and it has no probs running on the Trinitron.
B&O - Works first time and boy, does it look beautiful! To finally get a console running on the TV was nice, it really does have an incredible picture.
Digital TV set top box:
I brought this in from the LCD in the living room and used the same male to male euro scart I used with the DVD player. I know it works on the Trinitron already (used it before) but the B&O was being a fussy first time I tried it, doing a similar thing to what it did with the DVD player, giving me a second of picture and then losing the AV channel. I turned it off and on and soon it was working stable, allowing me to watch any TV channel I wanted after auto finding the AV.
Xbox 360 Japanese (using a scart adaptor block):
Trinitron - stable black and white picture
B&O - no picture
Xbox 360 PAL (using scart adaptor block):
Trinitron - stable colour picture
B&O - No picture (even though it's natively PAL.)
So, I can conclude this TV is probably no good for me.
It seems okay with most PAL signals despite a little fuss, but the problem is most of what I own isn't PAL, I have barely any console I could play on it which totally defeats the purpose of having a sweet CRT.
What I do now realise tonight is the importance of getting my Japanese Xbox 360 hooked into my Egret 2. My god, my head has been in the sand for so long!
Wtf am I doing attempting to play 360 shmups on a bloody LCD?! I played Raiden IV on the little Trinitron in black and freaking white and it was like a completely different game - I didn't realise the lag was so terrible on LCD because I'd never had a direct comparison.
Playing Futari was like playing the port for the first time. I always wondered why I found it so much harder than the PCB when others had said it was marginally easier. Now I know it's cos I'm playing it on a stupid LCD and therefore it's lagging like mad.
I know this is standard stuff to most of you guys, but I'm a dude who loves games but rarely finds a spare minute to sit down and play them these days, letalone fiddle around with different hardware etc. But I now realise the absolute necessity of sorting my 360 out with the proper setup, I've got to act.
So, now I got some questions for y'all:
1: Can a euro scart break an unmodded Japanese saturn hypothetically?
2: Same as above but with a Japanese Neo Geo AES?
3: Where do I find a clean cut guide to getting my 360 into an arcade cabinet. I'm rubbish with soldering and tech stuff, so I need some preconfigured accessories.
4: Can I hook my JP 360 into my LCD via my XRGB2+ and will this improve lag and image? I normally use it for my Snes/PS2 etc, but I've never tried my 360. More importantly, I know the XRGB2+ only wants Japanese leads, but I use a regular UK bought 360 lead to plug it into my LCD and it runs fine (but then again the LCD accepts my JP SFC lead fine too, so...)
Anyway, if I hook it into the XRGB2+ using this same lead (connected via a scart block adaptor) am I gonna have issues, that's really the point of all this.
Apologies for the mad fuss, I've just spent three hours sorting this stuff out and rediscovering the joys of low resolution, so now I feel like there's a mission ahead of me.
Thanks once again for the help.
