I'm looking for a way to get better picture quality from my Genesis 2. However I don't understand electronics to do any modding myself and haven't had any luck finding a modded Genesis, or someone to mod my genesis. So my question is I found on ebay RCA to HDMI converters like this one http://cgi.ebay.com/3-RCA-Composite...053?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a628914a5 And wanted to know are they worth it? How much better is the image or any one of them in particular to look out for? Just a general idea if I should buy one or not.
Those boxes are a load of crap. Don't waste your money on them. If you want a good upscaler then you are going to have to spend a lot of money. On the lower end of the good kit price level we have the XRGB2plus and 3. Both of them will improve the video quality but I do suggest using RGB from the Mega Drive, not crappy composite.
That box will contain the same kind of shitty upscaling electronics that your TV has inside it. It won't make any difference to picture quality, not least because (as others have pointed out) it's using composite as a source, which is terrible to begin with. Don't waste your money on something like that.
If someone wanted to upscale PS2 or Wii games, then the only choice is the XRGB, right? Even if a box you got had, I don't know, Component or something, it wouldn't help much. Or would it? Cos a computer store near my house has something called "gamebox" to connect component cables to a monitor.
There are many professional scalers. Most don't have the game-oriented features like the XRGBs, though (scanline emulation etc). The usual caveats about price/performance come up. Scalers (at retail) are either cheap and crap or expensive and good. I guess there are probably some expensive and crap scalers, but the point is the cheap ones are never any good.
Because the Wii and PS2 both output 480p max (and most PS2 games don't even support 480p), which at best leaves scaling and other forms of postprocessing to the set. This is why many people with HD sets say that component cables on the PS2 "don't make much difference" compared to their S-Video connections... realistically, there isn't much difference, especially if the game is running in component 480i.
The XRGB-3 is more suited for 240p sources then 480i. I get great results with classic 240p systems like the Neo Geo, but when I used it with my Dreamcast (with RGB SCART, just to test), the quality wasn't that great. The integrated deinterlacer isn't that good. I would recommend a Gefen VGA -> DVI scaler (which accepts 480i through component and RGB) for your 480i/480p sources. Dreamcast + VGA box + Gefen scaler = pure pixel perfect gaming porn.