I was looking at something like that....they are pricey but I wonder if I'm better off just trying to find an old TV or something.
Indeed it does :nod: It even recognizes the switching voltage. The brochure promotes a satellite receiver board that could be added as an optional extra, (not bad for the mid-eighties), along with other optional boards like FM radio, BNC/ DIN sockets instead of SCART, NTSC decoder etc. I must try and rescue it as my parents are thinking about getting rid of it to make way for some newfangled LCD TV :crying:
hmm, sorry about my engrish, but if this "cleaning" you said don't means other thing than "cleaning dirty" or something like that, you don't need to clean the pins, you need to push them! (bend/warp them a little) The resets are lack of physical contact.
Yeah, I grabbed some pliers and gently bent them a little - as the guides on-line said. Maybe I didn't bend them far enough - I didn't bend them too much for fear of breaking the console. The guides I read (I don't have links, since this was a few years ago) said that the pins can get dirty (hence the need to clean them, as well as bending them). I didn't really understand how, but I wasn't going to argue. If I can't resurrect my other system, I'll try fixing the one with the resetting problem again.
What Wii games run in 480i? Every game I've played was 480p widescreen apart from Puchi Copter which was 480p 4:3. I know like you said that some systems work in 480i on virtual console yet other systems such as Neo Geo are 480p. Odd that. Yakumo
Stupid question: I have seen some virtual console games that run widescreen even though the original game was not widescreen (example: Super Mario Bros.). Is this the Wii stretching the game to fit a widescreen TV or did they actually alter the game to make it widescreen?
I highly doubt Nintendo would modify the ROM- all the VC games I have are 4:3 by nature, and I believe when you play them the Wii reverts back to outputting a 4:3 signal. Your TV would then stretch them according to your settings.. ..thats how I have it here anyway.
My Wii is hooked up 480p on a widescreen HDTV, and the one VC I have is Mario Bros 3. It stretches it when I play so I don't think it runs 480i or 4:3. It only goes 4:3 when I make my Wii 4:3.
I stand horribly corrected. Just hooked my Wii back up to my widescreen TV. The resolution is usually 720 x 480p, it stays at 720 x 480p when playing Bonk and switches to 720 x 576i (PAL) when playing Yoshi's Story (according to my TVs info panel). So yeah.. it does keep outputting Widescreen. The ROM still runs at a 4:3 size (set your TV to 4:3 and its in proportion), I guess the Wii just stretches it.. :thumbsup:
Well, I was only half serious, but I've known several people with dodgy eyesight who couldn't tell the difference between composite and RGB, so in this case it might be a waste of money. You will be better off with an old RGB monitor if you have the space.
.Not for all systems. Mega Drive stays in widescreen as do PC Engine games. Neo Geo automatically goes back in to 4:3 and I'm sure Super Famicom does as well. Or at least on my TV that's what happens. In fact, my TV is strange because my Wii always starts off in 4:3 mode (the image that is, the settings are progressive 16.9) so I have to manually set the TV to "Full" mode to get the correct ratio. I never have this problem with my DVD player though. Could have something to do with the Wii going through the BS Digital input (Japanese satellite HD station) and the DVD going direct in to the port marked "DVD" Yakumo
Hmm very strange Yakumo. I can't test SNES or Neo Geo myself because I don't have any of those titles. I wonder why it only occurs for certain systems; if it was a conscious choice.
It could be down to the emulation of each console. maybe the Neo Geo emulator for Wii automatically sets the resolution to 4:3 480i while the other emulators just leave the game running in what ever screen mode the Wii is currently set at. Just an idea but could actually be the reason. Yakumo
Yeah, that seems to be the case. Honestly I never tried to use the RCA jacks to see if they could be used as additional audio out while the Dreamcast is in VGA mode. ^ ^ - Gotta love that gamers have no clothes, nothing to eat but tons of monitors, consoles and games. Just switch the PSU from your first Dreamcast with that from the one you bought this summer and you should have a working one. (or switch the GD-ROM drive) - seeing as you call it "the classic rebooting issue" I have to say that I only run into this problem twice during eight years of dreamcasting and having fixed maybe two dozens of DCs. The last time I saw it, a friend of mine had this problem and fixed it by... replacing the power cord. No joke. After maybe a year without playing his Dreamcast, he noticed that he had to plug it in as deep as possible to fix the issue, so he switched the cord with another one he had with a slightly different plug and the problem was a thing of the past. RGB can look very different on different TV sets. There are loads of factors that do get in the way (e.g. digital filters and PPUs). Your Alba is a prime example for a pure and beautiful 240p RGB picture (although the photos do not really show just how great it actually looks). I recently bought a very expansive Grundig CRT with VGA support for little money, and although VGA looks great, RGB-SCART does not. It basically looks like S-Video with its sharp picture yet somewhat dark and bleeding red color tones. My late 80s mono CRT by Nokia looks MUCH better, and on photos exactly like your Alba. The picture is very sharp so you can see each and every single pixel, yet it appears soft at the same time and all colors are extremely bright. Blue, purple and red look much better than on my Grundig EDTV. ...or real 240p. You're right, that VGA cable would be a very bad solution for Virtual Console content! :-/ - Most if not all Wii and even GameCube games should support 480p tho. From my experience most modern TVs do not accept 240p or 480i via component YPbPr. If you want RGB with your pre-Dreamcast/360/PS3 consoles, and you have the room, then I would recommend to buy a Sony PVM 2030: http://shop.ebay.com/items/?_nkw=sony+pvm+2030 - These don't cost much and seem to be pretty damn close to our European CRTs. Which consoles would you want to hook up to your TV, and what kind of TV do you have ? Not easy for me to recognize humor (since English isn't my first language), but at least I did notice that you were joking after I posted and when I read thorugh this thread again. Regarding RGB vs Composite: Depending on the source it's not that easy to notice the difference. Full motion video tends to look much better via composite than computer generated graphics, where the difference usually is just breath-taking. It also depends a lot on the composite encoder used. The Super Nintendo does output a fantastic composite signal that can rival its RGB counterpart, while Neo Geo and Mega Drive look like garbage. Oh and of course it also depends on the TV and its composite decoder. So considering that, it is possible to not notice the difference, at least for those used to composite, but those that are used to RGB won't accept anything else. I remember that my neighbor had her DVD player set to composite all the time, so one day I set it to RGB. After a few weeks she complained about a humming noise she'd get if she turned up the volume. I noticed that the noise came from the DVD player's missing brightness constrain in RGB mode so I set it back to composite which got rid of the noise. She called me two days later and said that she wants her RGB back. ^ ^
It's not so much an issue of the source - it's just that FMV tends not to have the stark colour contrasts (in terms of adjacent pixels) that video does, so the bleeding isn't so noticeable. Animated video (anime or whatever) often suffers like games do, any time you've got a sharp block of red adjacent to other colours you'll notice rolling. I think you were implying all this, anyway. Having put up with a SNES over composite for quite some time in the not so distant past, I'd have to respectfully disagree. RGB on SNES is noticeably nicer than composite, at least on any of the sets I've ever used. That said, I'd agree that the composite on SNES is actually pretty decent, but like you say - once you've gone RGB you won't want to go back. Huh, that's interesting. My current set has volume/hum problems with my (cheap, shitty) DVD player. I might connect it up via S-Video and see if it makes a difference.
I actually think I might look into doing this, just gotta save up some moneys first. Probably going to hook up everything but 360 and dreamcast...and whatever doesn't hook up to RGB...doesn't NES not support RGB?
No, it doesn't out of the box, in fact you're pretty much stuck with composite unless you 1/ pinch a PPU chip from a suitable arcade board and swap it in (obviously this requires a pretty high level of technical expertise and a lot of work), or 2/ buy a Famicom Titler unit, which is huge and expensive. The RGB-capable PPU chip also has palette issues so colours may look wrong. It's all a bit of a mess to be honest; mainly it's just a shame that there isn't a "prosumer" clone model that fixes these problems without introducing new ones (Kevin Horton was making an FPGA NES which looked to be the ultimate solution, but I haven't heard anything on that project in years now). The composite video, on my NES at least, is horrific. In time I'll probably track down a Titler, but they're just too expensive and costly to ship.
So NES is out then. I can live with that. NES is playable and decent on my HDTV to the point it doesn't bother me. I would definitly play more old games though if I could use RGB, so I really think next month I might really look into this. I need the moniter, and the cables....and I'm good? Or am I wanting SCART RGB cables and some kind of adaptor?
Depending on what inputs the TV you end up with actually has, your cabling requirements will change, but you'll likely end up buying RGB SCART leads and rigging a SCART-to-(whatever) adapter. That way you won't have to mod each cable you buy, and you won't be fooling around out the back of the set each time you want to change console.
Hah! Mine does (Loewe Xelos 5381), is it that uncommon? I have yet to try it, but I sold my GC component cable before I got the TV... argh. I once messed around in the set's service menu, and found several options relating to progressive scan , would be cool if it would do 480p!
