Component video amplification

[neorocker]

I run a supergun setup at home and have a Ninja Baseball Batman board, which means the output on it is amazingly weak and dark. What would the simplest solution to this be? I'm not the most technically inclined and was looking around for a component video amp of some kind with adjustable gain but haven't been able to find anything that isn't just amplified distributors. The supergun itself won't kick the gain up any higher either.

Thanks for the help!

[Fudoh]

I'm quite sure that your NBB board does at least output consumer RGB levels. The problem is more likely that the Jamma RGB signal is already tuned down significantly using resistors in the RGB lines before it his the component transcoder board. So what you have do is remove those resistors or replace them with potentiometers.

[neorocker]

Really? I've read everywhere that the m92 boards Irem made are notoriously dark in general. All of my other boards are bright and beautiful.

I'm not exactly solder-savvy and I'm still curious: do amps with adjustable gain exist?

[Fudoh]

Really? I've read everywhere that the m92 boards Irem made are notoriously dark in general.

but I assume that's if you play them on an arcade cab. Jamma RGB peak voltage can get up to 3V, while consumer RGB levels max out at 0.8 to 1.0V. My guess is that those M92 boards are easily above that and just considerably lower than the usual jamma peak levels.

[neorocker]

I've heard the same about playing it on anything. You can see somebody toying with it in this thread (not pretty) http://forum.arcadeotaku.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=25121 and this is obviously something I don't want to do especially considering it's not one of the Korean boards. As for anything that goes with modifying the supergun itself, again, I'm not exactly savvy in that regard. An RGB amp would be ideal and I'm still curious as to whether or not one with adjustable gain exists. It'd be great for my Model 1 Genesis as well, which outputs a bit darker than my other consoles.

[Fudoh]

But check his first statement: "I did two mods to my irem m92 ninja baseball batman pcb. First I wired up an ultimarc rgb amp with voltage divider to get the rgb levels to the same as most arcade boards" - - - this implies that his supergun is setup for 3 times the consumer peak levels already and it doesn't say anything about how a direct connection to a TV would look like.

I don't see how RGB amplification with variable strengh could work, except for using a resistor up front and then again would only decrease the amplification and not increase it over it's standard value.

[neorocker]

I think i get what you're saying. So I understand:

Average PCB: 3v -> transcoder -> 1v
NBBM: <3v -> transcoder -> 1v

And therefore it can't be amplified beyond that since it's the consumer peak, so the supergun needs pots put in pre-transcoder?

I'm actually genuinely surprised there are no powered RGB / component amps that allow for gain / contrast / brightness amplification! I'd expect something like that to exist given all the things that do exist.

[Fudoh]

Average PCB: 3v -> transcoder -> 1v
NBBM: <3v -> transcoder -> 1v

I think it's actually like this:

Average Jamma: 3v -> resistors -> 1v -> transcoder -> 1v
NBBM: 1v -> resistors -> 0.3v -> transcoder -> 03.v

Of course the resistors might be built into the transcoder board already though....