I'm on my second Saturn and the video output is pretty lousy compared to the first one. In addition to that, when the CD-ROM is being accessed, occasionally I will get interference on the screen. This seems to happen when the servo is moving heavily. I've tried replacing the composite A/V cable, which made a small improvement. About ten minutes ago I reassembled the entire machine and I noticed that a component near the video out jack was bent and being held out of place by the EM shield. I pushed it back into position, reassembled the system, and the video was much brighter with richer colors. I double checked the tightness of every screw before I reassembled it, including the grounding strip for the CD-ROM. I know I didn't bend this because when I installed my modchip a few weeks back I didn't remove the EM shield. No capacitors were swollen or leaking. Anyway, as you can see, horizontal lines are checkerboarded and zig zagged. Every single thing on screen has a faint ghost image as well. There's also this weird, dirty dot crawl effect going on as you can see in the videos. Every game does this. It's like there are faint ghost pixels popping up in various locations on the screen. Any ideas? I'm an amazing computer technician but when it comes to electrical engineering I'm pretty dicey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxAuCHJeU9I http://imageshack.us/a/img221/2415/201302162156312701.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img826/9325/201302162156576131.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img818/1624/201302162157043241.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img839/456/201302162156397361.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img163/5994/201302162159422441.jpg
It's not "dirty", it's composite. Composite video will either have encoding artifacts from inter-modulation distortion (what you're seeing) or the fine detail can be filtered out which prevents artifacts, but leaves the video soft and devoid of sharp pixel edges. Unless you're going to rework the encoder circuit there isn't much you can do about it. Get a S-video cable if it bothers you that much. The actual artifacts are determined by the video encoder, the encoder's filtering, the pixel clock (changeable on the Saturn) and on-screen video content. The ghosting/ringing is caused by impedance mismatch, which is either the Saturn's output network, or your TV's input network--not likely, or a poor quality video cable--very likely.
Yeah I think I'm going to try an S-Video cable. I might as well buy another composite video cable while I'm at it. I gotta say though, output wise, this thing is way worse than my N64 or Genesis. I've tried multiple TV's. I think the cable is faulty. Anyone have a cheap S-Video cable they are willing to sell? The prices have gone completely crazy on those. I owned one five years ago but it shorted out.
