Best way to play HDMI Or Composite?
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games back then where made to work in harmony with the TV technology, IE. the curvature of the screen, the refresh rate (hence the whole 50hz Pal and 60Hz NTSC )
I personal feel that the older games look a little to sharp and jaggered when on a modern TV so i turn on the shaders/overlay (if it don't effect the running speed of the game)
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Make sure you enable 240p once you try the composite: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/683
I switched to CRT and I'm pretty happy. Biggest plus is the input lag, because you don't need video filters/shaders anymore and it's the original resolution (and not upscaled like on HD TVs). And I really like to play 4:3 content on a 4:3 TV.
Biggest surprise were PSX games: I would not have expected them to look that good.
For best picture quality, I recommend Pi2Scart or RGB Tink.
Only one thing is missing: A decent 240p theme, but I saw somebody working on it here on the forum.
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Both are viable options, so it's just a matter of preference.
If you go with HDMI, the upside is that you will have an insanely bright, sharp, crisp, colorful, clear image, but this comes with a slight touch of input lag. HD also exposes a lot of the pixels that would otherwise have been obscured by a CRT screen, since these games were never designed with such high definition in mind. You would also get black borders if you go with a 4:3 ratio, but an overlay can fill in that void.
A CRT would be the most authentic way to experience gaming on those systems when they were in their prime. The screen would fuzzy-blend the pixels to create smooth edges, and there is zero input lag due to the way CRT screens work. The downside is that it may take some work to configure the overscan correctly, and your image won't be as crisp and clear, but the details (such as text fonts) will look as they were originally intended to look.
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Ok and what cable do i need i heard not all camcorder cables works?
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No camcorder cables work. Go on ebay and get a cable designed for a an ipod with video or a zune (if you remember what that was), those work great. Also sites like pi-supply, element 14 and pimoroni will likely have the correct compatible cables. It's not worth guessing, there are like 3 different specs for 4 pole av jacks, and only one works on the pi.
Vector Artist, Designer and Maker of Stuff: Laser Cut Atari / Pixel Theme Bartop
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@capeman I second that; I bought a generic camcorder AV cable, thinking that I'd be fine with that, but the ground was positioned in the wrong place in the plug, so I got a crappy distorted images. I eventually picked up a Zune cable, and it worked flawlessly.
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@eldrethor And not only that, the zune specific cable is dead sexy! its probably the nicest looking AV cable i've ever used and the cable is very flexible, i was very impressed.
Vector Artist, Designer and Maker of Stuff: Laser Cut Atari / Pixel Theme Bartop
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@capeman said in Best way to play HDMI Or Composite?:
@eldrethor And not only that, the zune specific cable is dead sexy! its probably the nicest looking AV cable i've ever used and the cable is very flexible, i was very impressed.
hey, do you have any links for the zune cable?
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Everything can be had on ebay
https://www.ebay.com/i/182653454444?chn=ps&dispItem=1Vector Artist, Designer and Maker of Stuff: Laser Cut Atari / Pixel Theme Bartop
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@capeman said in Best way to play HDMI Or Composite?:
Everything can be had on ebay
https://www.ebay.com/i/182653454444?chn=ps&dispItem=1that's awesome, thanks lots
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@retrofreak89 If you want the authentic experience for console generations 2 through 5, you will want a CRT TV with composite video. This will reproduce the look and feel of the games pretty much as they were back in the 80's and 90's. If you favor a crisp picture over nostalgia, then HDMI is the best way to go. It really comes down to preference. I've always used HDMI, but I'm starting to see the appeal of the authentic experience.
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@rion I wasn't aware of that things existence but yes the S-Video option would be a better choice than composite for sure. Probably a good choice to use this board if you are building an arcade cabinet to.
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Just for interest as far as original Arcade cabinets are concerned:
Were those Crts in the cabinets also connected to the pcbs/system boards with RGB or S-Video?Its a long time ago that i saw the original cabinets as a kid, but i have got the Impression that this picture, that i have with my Pi simply connected to the CRT with composite, seems to be close to the original.
I remember that the shadows of sprites were flickering and the picture was kind of blurry.
I liked it! 😊So has there been a high-quality-technoligy in the cabinets, or are we going further away from the genuine experience by boosting up the picture with S- Video or RGB?
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RGB, 15 kHz, 320x240
01001110 01101111 01100010 01101111 01100100 01111001 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 01110011 00100000 01101001 01100000 01101101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110011 01100010 01101001 01100001 01101110 00100001
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@dorkvonwaterfall thx for Info!
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I use my retropie build on my sony BVM CRT with a vga hat connected with a vga to bnc cable. You could also use an old VGA CRT PC monitor (you could find one pretty cheap on ebay). it looks awesome! scanlines an all. I don't think I could ever play 16 bit or 8 bit emulated games on an HD tv. It just looks gross in comparison i think. I was thinking about picking one of these up. although alittle pricey it would make it super easy to get the best picture quality on any U.S. manufactured CRT TV, Since most consumer grade CRT's in the U.S. never adopted SCART. Although I haven't tested myself the pi2scart or RGB-Pi seem like nice solutions if you have a scart connection on your crt.
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@dorkvonwaterfall I assume by RGB you mean what we used to call in the TV biz "component"? The three separate cables for R and B and G? If the original cabinets were indeed hooked up that way, then additional hardware that enables RGB certainly becomes more interesting.
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And furthermore: did really ALL cabinets use RGB?
I read a documentary about Atari recently and they wrote that Nolan Bushnell hired Marihuana smoking Hippies at the start to dissamble cheap Radio-Shack Televisions which were used for their Arcade games.
Also RGB? 🤔 -
@sirhenrythe5th Keep in mind that all colour CRT picture tubes are driven by separate RGB signals going to the electron guns. TVs decode a composite signal into separate RGB signals before amplifying them and passing them onto the electron guns. Given the technology of 1970's TVs, it would be relatively easy to modify a TV to accept your own RGB signal rather than use the one it generates from a composite one.
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