Showing off the Framemeister! SNES RGB

Hmm, well... You can adjust the sharpness. There's also processing modes which do different things; one of them, "standard", does appear to add a little bit of blur, whereas another one, "picture", removes that blur. I use "picture" for SNES and "standard" for N64. There's also "retro mode" which adds a curved, dimmed "border" around the game. makes it looks more like an older, curved glass tv.

 

playing rgb with a crt is not better and less expensive?

 

I been on fence about this for long time.

XRB mini does not have any component output? Disappointing. I Personally don't think XRB mini any better that Sony PVM monitor as a natural way. £216 just for black plastic box? Sound like a ripoff to me.

 

It has d-terminal which is the same as component,all you need is a adapter.

 

Thanks for info. They could have made it simple and less messy just by adding component output in the box instead of adapter. Barely cost them to make.

 

I think he was on about a component out but to be honest it's no big loss anyway unless you have a TV with no HDMI. The biggest problem with the Framemeister is the lack of a VGA input but then again only the DC would really make use of this I guess.

To touch upon what Unknown-Organization said. You can't say "£216 just for black plastic box? Sound like a ripoff to me" until you've used one. Besides, it's not a just a plastic box. There's some very clever electronics in there and it's not meant to be a replacement for a broadcast monitor it's for those who don't have room for a CRT or just can't get one. The PVM or any other broadcast monitor are not that easy to come by and they won't last forever.

There are so many CRT snobs who knock the Framemeister when they've never seen one in person. All of the videos and photos on the net don't look as good as it does in real life. I'm from a background where I only used RGB ever since 1987. I grew up with RGB using quality CRT screens so in a way I should be a CRT snob and I was until I actually saw a store demo of the XRGB3 and later on the Framemeister. I was sold straight away, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t want a CRT now since I'm accustom to at least a 40" screen these days. Anything smaller just wouldn't impress anymore even if a true quality CRT does have a warmness to it that the Framemeister or any other up-scan converter may lack.

 

I know,it would just convert component to hdmi which buy all means is great in my option.

 

Output or Input, I kinda confuse with that.

Yeah well but still, £216 is pathetic price and not available in Europe only Japan obviously. Sound like they are making good profit for a laugh even If is less demand. Sure CRT are quite big depend on the size you having. Seriously Yakumo I appreciate what you are doing here but come on.. there are plenty good CRT or SONY PVM out there and are easy to find sometimes, most of them cost way less than £216. XRB mini may have improve upscale for HDTV in bigtime but I believe XRB mini should come everything in the package in day one out of the factory, example output device like VGA and component and anything else that is lacking. For that price..... Should be one big perfect complete box set to begin with.


(true quality CRT does have a warmness to it that the Framemeister or any other up-scan converter may lack)

I guess that another reason that putting me off. It is like playing retro emulator on PC losing nostalgia in my opinion

End of day, CRT more accurate than Framemeister... not rocket science! well I guess I becoming a CRT snob.

Maybe I will wait If there another updated Framemeister Hardware box in the future. Depend what the feature it has, probably even better If they exclusively focus only for retro gaming.

 

Quality CRTs are really easy to find in the UK and parts of Europe but in the US or Japan, they're not. Most CRTs here don't have RGB support unless you find a Sony that does and then you'll need a converter cable since they use a none standard format A look on Yahoo Auctions just now brought up only 2 TVs well, not only TVs, they were PVM monitors which will need an adaptor made to use 21 pin RGB. One is going for 178000 yen, that's over 1000 pounds! Bloody nuts.

The reason the Framemeister is expensive is because it's a specialist product. Of course they make it for a lot less than they sell it for but you are failing to take in to account that the next closest up-scan converter (which isn't as good for gaming I may add) cost at least twice as much! So in that respect it's quite a good price but yeah, it's not cheap.

 

In my country (and in EU area by extend) almost every cheap TV has a scart rgb input. It was really a very common connection here and noone considered it anything special.
Over the years I have kept several crt sets (non of that PVM stuff since rgb inputs were common here), from the latest Sony Trinitrons to the rival technology ones from Philips/JVC.
All quality crts do feel special and have some features that cannot be replicated by any lcd screen nomatter what the upscaler is BUT nowdays I can't really stand crts (not only for the space they require but also because of their size and eye strain), that's why I decided to invest on a framemeister.
I am not a 15y.o. kid anymore that can stand 1m away from a crt and play for hours LOL
It is true what Yakumo says, none of the vids/pics available really make it justice. I've just stored my crts and don't really plan to use them again in the near future. Yes, the framemeister result is really that good.

I've had the xrgb-2 and xrgb-3 in the past, I can't say they impressed me much - mainly because I was using crt tvs and old-tech lcds with them - plus the fact that rgb connections were already plentifully available here.
But now that you can get a quality lcd screen the results are very different.
Anyone should really hold judgement on this until they've seen it in person, it does not cost 300e because Micomsoft wants to scam users... it actually worths that kind of money for what it does and how it does it.
Don't forget that all these micomsoft products are not really for everyone: one must REALLY care enough about their potential in order to get them. Else it's using the onboard tv scaler or cheap ebay scalers or even crt tvs, whatever floats one's boat.... , personally I don't have plans to go back to crts or onboard scalers, unless I am forced to.


jm2c

 

some points:

-The Framemeister uses a video decoder chip similar to what you'd find in any HDTV. There isn't any sort of magic to it, really it's just doing what TV manufacturers have failed to do because they try to force non-standard game video into broadcast standards.

-In no way does a CRT more "accurately" display video, unless a CRT's flaws (which are what people, myself included, find charming) are the standard by which you measure accuracy.

-Just about every CRT since the mid 90s digitizes video too in order to use digital comb filters. RGB is slightly less likely to be digitized, but in terms of authenticity most CRT displays don't have a "cleaner" signal path. Real RGB/CRT snobs should go arcade monitor.

 

I basically see the framemeister as a replacement for the onboard scaler. It sure uses a processor similar to what you might find on some sets - like Calpis mentioned - but the similarities end there, the optimization and options available are miles ahead.
IMHO the onboard scalers are set/configured in such a way so that they achieve maximum compatibility instead of maximum performance, from a tv manufacturer's point of view this makes total sense.

With the Framemeister you have several processing modes to choose from depending on the source format (where you can really see the difference between a correct and wrong mode) and it actually allows 240p sources to be displayed as such with proper upscaling and not that "bogus 480i/576i" one that is what 100% of the sets I've used do...

It really makes a difference and it takes some time to get used to the options and how it works, I've had it for a month+ now and I still think there is room for optimization on my settings... heck you can even mess with the settings so much that your tv/screen can't recognize the signal anymore and it displays the "invalid signal" message LOL

I've also opened my unit to look inside (old habit ), here's what you get:

 

Thanks for the board shot o_o I'm really surprised, I thought Micomsoft did their own post-processing/scaling. There isn't anything really proprietary about the Framemeister since the scaling is outsourced to a Marvell processor. It's kinda too bad that there isn't just a large FPGA on the back-end so that homebrew firmware might be a possibility. Something I'd like to see that's impossible with the actual hardware is "universal" CRT deflection emulation to support all weird arcade and computer modes plus instant progressive/interlaced switching.

 

Now that is the one thing I really want on the Framemeister. Is it possible at all?

 

I wouldn't count on it. I'd guess the AD frontend could probably maintain sync through the change, but I think it's up to the scaler ultimately. The switch between progressive to interlace happens spontaneously in the middle of a scanline, and it's likely that the control logic has to detect the switch, change the destination in the framebuffer and reconfigure the scaler, then the scaler has to refill its pipeline. I don't think all that could happen seamlessly unless it were an expected event by the hardware, and if that were the case it'd probably already work.

 

heh, I knew the internals pic will be a hit
From my experience what you pay in such things is the firmware/software, can't say I am surprised it uses a normal/common scaling chip... Most of the times how you "talk" to the hardware can make a night and day difference.
btw, is this chip considered a mainstream or a high-end one?

 

I think the Marvell chip is probably "high-end" for what it does, and the Analog Devices chip is probably a pretty standard all-in-one input chip today. It's hard to know how well TVs using custom solutions are performing, but I suspect that most wouldn't take as much care or have as much expertise as Analog Devices, though there isn't data to confirm that. The digitization hardware is important but the algorithms to interpret the data are just as important, and since it's impossible to know what the chips are doing on the inside, we just have to trust that they're doing a good job. I always prefer some degree of programmability because something like a video processor can never support everything out of the box (unless it's dealing with well defined MPEG data or something), there are simply too many variables.


Right now audio CODEC chips are approaching perfection--they're able to digitize any conceivable audio signal about as well as physically possible. Video ADC just aren't there, not because we don't have the technology but because chip makers don't see the need to include expensive features (programmable termination, attenuation/amplification and clamps) necessary to interface with "bad" video signals. Until we see that kind of flexibility I'm afraid we can't have "universal" video processors because it's too hard to build those components yourself (unless you want to manually adjust a dozen potentiometers every time you switch devices).