Recomendations on connecting my Pi3 with retropie to a SCART CRT TV

tiberboi

Hello, got hold of old family CRT TV not used in a decade and I'm thinking it would do great for old games on the Pi.
The TV only has a SCART socket, I looked around for some options but there doesn't seem to be an obvious solution:

a 4 pole RCA cable? (plus SCART adapter)
a simple hdmi to RCA?
looked into the "RGB-Pi" cable, but that seems to be expensive and only work with their own OS?

What do you recommend? Looking for something preferably cheap.
(bonus points if it also works o Pi5 when Retropie is released there)

mitu

Unfortunately connecting to a Scart is not so straightfoward from a Pi. Are you sure the TV doesn't have a Composite (RCA) input option ?

The most 'direct' option is using a GPIO HAT like Pi2Scart (which I think is the cheapest option ?), with alternatives like Recalbox's RGBDual, RGB-PI. Neither of them are plug-n-play with RetroPie (or RaspiOS for that matter) and you have to configure them separately through config.txt. For the latter 2 HAT options, you have the option to use the authors' recommended gaming OS - I have no experience with either of them, though Recalbox seems the most similar to RetroPie as far as interface is concerned.

The other options would be to get a converter from either RCA (i.e. from the RPI's Composite output) or HDMI, but I don't think these options are cheaper than Pi2Scart.

tiberboi

@mitu thanks for the reply.
The TV only has a SCART socket and what I believe is a S-Video socket?
So no RCA input, but I already have 2 RCA to SCART adapters which I use to plug my Dreamcast (which also uses RCA) like the one in the image:

So can I just get a RCA cable and use it with the adapter?
Sorry for my ignorance, I didn't even realized the Pi had a RCA socket until now...

mitu

@tiberboi said in Recomendations on connecting my Pi3 with retropie to a SCART CRT TV:

So can I just get a RCA cable and use it with the adapter?

Yes, that should work.

tiberboi

@mitu Alright I'll try that then.
Thanks for the help, this makes things way cheaper.

Rion

@tiberboi Seeing as you CRT has Scart inputs it would be a downgrade to pair it with a Composite cable when the CRT has support for RGB. Look into PI2SCART or Recalbox RGB Dual instead and save yourself the hassle and trouble.