Anybody Used Dreamcast VGA and Convert to Component?

[lordofduct]

First I'd like to say my collection has been growing since my collection started when I was 8 years old. I've saved and collected and hunted down the best deals/investments I could to make a complete collection. One of those important standards is willing to take a picture/audio quality hit in certain places to save yourself money (i.e. not buying RGB cables for ALL your consoles). Lucky for you Europeans, RGB is readily available through affordable SCART cables... why they never introduced SCART to American's is beyond me! Either way, if I had it available and was running a snowball line of SCART switches degrading quality... a 6 way switch (self powered as well) is a very good investment!

it may cost 65 quid but this switch looks really nice. Of course you could find different stores with it for cheaper maybe or a different brand with as good of quality in build. But seriousily this investment is one of your first steps toward nice gameplay; it'll last you forever and will supply the best picture quality for your consoles that will EVER be available.

[Clockwork]

sure i would buy them if i had the money... but til i have it, there may be years, because i just startet at university and don`t have a job by now... (not too easy in a city of 20.000 students...)

but my real problem is still, one of these switches wouldn`t be enough, so there had to be a second one... grml... 200 eus for a "little" switching...

for this amount of money i`ll change connectors for a long time with a big grin and buy new cables, if the old ones won`t do it any longer. and all this with a big grin, since i bought a wii for just 50eus plus...

[Prozium]

Sorry but it isn't as simple as running the dreamcast VGA adapter to a VGA->component cable to get the DC on your HDTV in 480p. Those VGA->component cables are mainly used for low-mid range home theater projectors. The VGA input on the projector is kind of a jack of all trades port and detects the incoming signal and distinguishes if it's VGA or yPbPr. It's kind like how you use a DVI->d-sub15 adapter with a Video card on a PC. The guys on AVSforum already covered this and can explain in detail why RGB and component aren't directly compatible. They also recommend this audio authority transcoder to convert the VGA signal to component while still maintaining a high quality signal. Only downside is that it can't adjust the overscan and that may be an issue with some HDTVs.

http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/9a60.asp

[lordofduct]

Sorry but it isn't as simple as running the dreamcast VGA adapter to a VGA->component cable to get the DC on your HDTV in 480p. Those VGA->component cables are mainly used for low-mid range home theater projectors. The VGA input on the projector is kind of a jack of all trades port and detects the incoming signal and distinguishes if it's VGA or yPbPr. It's kind like how you use a DVI->d-sub15 adapter with a Video card on a PC. The guys on AVSforum already covered this and can explain in detail why RGB and component aren't directly compatible. They also recommend this audio authority transcoder to convert the VGA signal to component while still maintaining a high quality signal. Only downside is that it can't adjust the overscan and that may be an issue with some HDTVs.

http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/9a60.asp

We already covered all this.

[Mega-Dan]

Why not just use s-video? I understand you will get slightly higher resolution with this vga box, but some games dont work withit, and its a extra expense and alot of wires, and the sound quality would be rather poor to boot. Unfortunately quite a few really good games are NOT Vga box compatible.

[racketboy]

Why not just use s-video? I understand you will get slightly higher resolution with this vga box, but some games dont work withit, and its a extra expense and alot of wires, and the sound quality would be rather poor to boot. Unfortunately quite a few really good games are NOT Vga box compatible.

That's true, but I wouldn't say there are a LOT of good ones not compatible.
Last Blade 2 is one of the only one of my favorites that isn't.

[Mega-Dan]

One thats not compatible is bangai-0,and a bunch of games I play alot that are japanese only arent compatible for some reason. Pretty much my dreamcast is a marverl vs capcom/powerstone/bangai-0 machine

[lordofduct]

My concern isn't the resolution (that is why I say RGB... it supports the lower resolutions when necessary). RGB (which is what VGA uses) is also a higher quality picture.