PC Emulation on SD CRT?

[Ziggy]

Thanks for all the replies guys, the main reason I would ever want to emulate is save-state capability. I see now that some flash carts have that ability, and hopefully they make it more of a hassle so I'm not tempted so badly! I think I will focus my questions on flash carts in another thread, since PC emulation of SD (for lightguns!) doesn't seem worth it. I already have a CRT monitor anyway, it just didn't seem the same.

Check out this thread for info on flash carts, you can also post any questions there too: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=36353

[fastbilly1]

What gpu do you have? Many have optional dongles to let you hook up component/svideo.

Or you could just get a cheapo pc just for this. You would be surprised how cheap they can get, heck if you are willing to drive to middle tn, I can just give you one.

[TSTR]

Get a modded Wii if you want quick and dirty emulation with proper resolution output.

[Anapan]

As mentioned, you can get a cheap scaler to change HD/SVGA output from most any PC mode to 640x480 interlaced for display on a SD display. Scalers are available that accept VGA (DB15), HDMI, DVI and others and scale/convert the signal at most any HD/SVGA video mode to RGB (SCART or BNC), YPbPr-Component (RCA), S-Video, or Composite output (usually with a switch for PAL/NTSC).
I've seen many available for dirt cheap so I own a lot of those converter/scalers. They mostly all work fine and were very cheap, but the quality of the output is always sub-par. When using a CRT - especially for emulation - I always want to have the output coming out @ 240P, not 480I. Otherwise you might as well install an old ATI Video Card that already does S-Video output. That was also mentioned, and for a quick-and-dirty solution, you're better off that way instead of using any of those scalers - the output at least gives you better control of the 480I flicker, and some adjustment of your under/overscan to fit your display. ATI's drivers are actually really good in that respect, so if you are okay with everything @640x480 it's probably your best bet. Since those video cards are from around 1996-2003 there's a huge surplus of them from recyclers - I know many people who have a pile in a drawer and they're all over ebay.

The method I've used isn't $400, tho it's still a little pricey with the shipping from the UK. The result is truly perfect IMO and well worth the investment over a $400 XRGB and a big-screen Plasma. It will work on any SD television that has component input. Every emulated game will output at exactly the correct resolution as the hardware&software makes hundreds of video modes available so the emulators will not have to scale the picture at all. Any CRT that's commercially available and can show a NES on it's screen will also be compatible with this solution if it has component input. I'm pretty sure you could get a cheap transcoder to convert Component into less-good signals and still maintain full compatibility tho I have never looked into it.

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In the PC, you can use a dedicated 15Khz Video card (ArcadeVGA), or one of many (cheap) Soft15Khz or CRT_EmuDriver compatible video cards.

In my case I used an ancient ATI Radeon 7000 from my long-dead 486 DX2 66Mhz along with CRT-EmuDriver with great success.

If you go with ArcadeVGA, some of the slightly-higher progressive resolutions that wouldn't normally display on a SD CRT have been hacked to output properly (including PC startup Bios text modes and others).
If you use Soft15Khz or CRT_EmuDriver, until you get into windows itself the startup and windows boot logo will roll over the screen until you get to your desktop (480i mode).

At this point the video signal coming from the PC is still RGB just lower speed than most LCD displays can display, and will not show up properly on a standard television. It would work just fine on most CRT VGA Monitors or, with the right cable it'd work on a PVM monitor (VGA-BNC) or a SCART compatible PAL TV/Amiga Monitor (VGA-SCART).

In order to get it reliably working on any old NTSC TV I used this hardware in this order:

1: ATI Radeon 7000 (A lot of cards are compatible with these softwares lately, including onboard Intel now!)

2: Generic VGA Female-Female cable (came with an old VGA monitor you owned)

3: Soft 15Khz Dongle (optional? - Supposedly feeds fake video card compatibility data to your SVGA monitor or vise - versa and says every screen mode will work with all hardware).

4: Ultimate SCART Adapter (UMSA) (This is incredible and necessary - the jumper fixes the picture on some displays)

5: Generic Male-Male SCART RGB cable (Well shielded and fully wired - a short one from ebay?).

6: Cypress CSY-2100 - SCART to Y-U-V Converter - Clone boxes are available, but are not very good. The Chinese cheap clone transcoder I bought didn't work.

7: Male-Male Component shielded video cable. (Go for thick ones - try local liquidation warehouse)

8: NTSC CRT Television's Component video input.
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The stuff from Arcadeforge (UMSA & Dongle) shipped to Lebanon KS (Center of USA) costs ~$59.48 USD
The CSY-2100 shipped to anywhere in USA is ~$127.00 USD
Cable(s) not available locally shipped free from china on Ebay might be $15?

So, if you have a PC and a SD TV that can do component you're looking at about $200 for video perfection with perfect scanlines without a console and the necessary cabling and scalers for seemingly the same result? Seems pretty good to me. Last night we played through AVSP Arcade and a couple of 2 player compo speed runs in Sonic 2 and the 36" display was stunning!
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This setup worked very well for me. Many other arrangements and a bag of incompatible parts did not work well. I have a large surplus of this kinda stuff to mess with and this was the cheapest solution for this project.

If you can get into your TV's service menu and adjust the overscan to have more visible display area (Vertical and Horizontal Width & Centering), you can save yourself a lot of trouble adjusting mode-lines in VMMaker so all the video modes fit better on your display without some being cut off.

While setting this up I was following some great guides and forum posts to tweak the video output to better fit the big screen Samsung display I used. I'll try to post the most relevant ones here shortly, but the arcade cabinet is still in the shop.

Some Pics of that cabinet (taken a little drunk so quality is low...):

The idea on this project was to do this without spending much money. Except for the joysticks and buttons this was all leftovers from another project, a free TV from the side of the road (seriously - it was rained on!), a free computer from a recent upgrade (my bro's old tower from 2003 that the kids used to watch Youtube on but couldn't play Minecraft), some spare cables and video hardware from my back closet. I still think if the hardware were bought new @ cost minus the wood, PC and TV it'd be under $300 US with shipping. As it is it's under $150 CAD because the rest is stuff from our garages.

I should mention that there's some adjustments necessary for most screen modes. Through the software provided in the packages you will need to adjust the width, height, vertical and horizontal centering for many of the screen modes. All the presets are good, but every display is different and the preset numbers are just guestimates or happy mediums. The technical side of the software to get everything perfect actually requires a calculator, notepad and studying multiple forum posts to begin to understand and change settings. It takes a few tries to get everything right but once the settings are locked in (saved) everything is awesome. if you stray too far from what your display can handle to get the weird ones centered or stretched too far it'll glitch up. There's a learning curve, but the results are totally worth it. That stuff is mostly only necessary for vertical MAME games anyway. All the consoles really only use about 7-10 video modes that are nearly perfect out of the box.

For this setup I'm now working on some custom mode-lines to allow 2 player single screen games to play split-screen using GroovyMAME's cocktail setting. This involves making custom mode-lines that weren't anticipated when making the drivers have all the necessary modes for every possible game. Very exciting stuff. I've screwed up and fixed lot of things building this machine (not expected to happen with general console emulation but I always try to push things too far) so if anyone reading this tries to run this setup and runs into problems I might have a simple fix.

Lightgun games? There are many really cheap wireless USB mouse solutions with accelerometers. The lightgun emulation usually includes crosshairs and DX.com has tons of those air mouse/keyboard combos with free shipping. With a $5 Bluetooth dongle you can use a wiimote too.

I do not know of any solution to make the gun/mouse sight line up with the onscreen crosshair (Real lightgun emulation not possible?).

Lag? If your PC is capable of at least running windows 98 - None.

For console games, the picture is better than what I've been able to get from my Framemeister and 60" Plasma (Aperture grille marks are present and *authentic* not some overlay) . I'm envious of my brother's new coffee table. He only installed 48 games - most from before he was born!

[dogman91]

The way I did it you can skip these steps

4: Ultimate SCART Adapter (UMSA) (This is incredible and necessary - the jumper fixes the picture on some displays)

5: Generic Male-Male SCART RGB cable (Well shielded and fully wired - a short one from ebay?).

6: Cypress CSY-2100 - SCART to Y-U-V Converter - Clone boxes are available, but are not very good. The Chinese cheap clone transcoder I bought didn't work.

and go straight from the standard VGA to Component, and not VGA to SCART to Component.
I didn't need to use a dongle either.
I read somewhere that ArcadeVGA is limited in it's options compared to a Soft15Khz/CRT_Emudriver compatible card.

It doesn't seem the OP is too invested in this type of thing either way, but good info for people reading the thread who might actually care.

[Anapan]

What video card and transcoder?
Yes, the ArcadeVGA is not so good, only easier in it's plug and play. At least the older model I have.
CRT-Emudriver is better tho it's less compatible since it's a modified ATI video driver versus a registry hack.

It turns out that the UMSA was necessary to push more MAME video modes through the Generic SD tube. By switching the polarity of the H/V Sync I was better able to adjust the clock speed, centering, and blanking to push incompatible/scrambled modes into the TV without losing those modes to the TV's whim of what it would handle while pushing the limits of it's "standard" definition. Without it, some higher and lower resolution screen modes would not work without having some cutoff or black space.

[chuckster]

Hey guys, I'm back! I have a few questions about SD emulation.

1) I see the old GT9800 outputs S-Video, can I just plug that directly into my CRT TV (up to 480p)?

2) Would a VGA to S-Video work just as well?

3) Can Windows 7/10 output low enough resolutions to display on these TV's, or is it mor an issue with the card (I assume this is the case since certain cards are able to output to screens like these).

4) Assuming all of this works out, is there any way I can use this as a second screen that I only use for emulation? For example, output to both the 240p/480i CRT as well as a 1080p LED, and just extend the desktop?

[CRTGAMER]

I see the old GT9800 outputs S-Video, can I just plug that directly into my CRT TV (up to 480p)?

My Laptop on the previous page has VGA and SVideo. Works on a SD CRT though blurry since SVideo does not put out 480p, but 480i. To get 480p, you need at least a Component, DVI or HDMI connection or a conversion box from VGA.

You need to read this yet again.

Reducing a PC output to composite is silly, even if the purpose is to attempt duplication of a console on a regular TV. The PC will become too blurry going thru a Composite or Svideo output. I sometimes hook up my older Laptop which has direct SVideo output and it does work, but the quality of video compared to a VGA monitor is definitely worse.

640x480 VGA resolution is similar to 480p
This is the lower end of the normal Windows resolution. To maintain the best image quality, just get a matched VGA input. If you really want the emulation gaming on a Tube TV just get a HD CRT and utilize the DVI/HDMI/Component Input with the appropriate PC out adapter.

[dogman91]

Hey guys, I'm back! I have a few questions about SD emulation.

1) I see the old GT9800 outputs S-Video, can I just plug that directly into my CRT TV (up to 480p)?

2) Would a VGA to S-Video work just as well?

3) Can Windows 7/10 output low enough resolutions to display on these TV's, or is it mor an issue with the card (I assume this is the case since certain cards are able to output to screens like these).

4) Assuming all of this works out, is there any way I can use this as a second screen that I only use for emulation? For example, output to both the 240p/480i CRT as well as a 1080p LED, and just extend the desktop?

A lot of those graphic cards (and common cheap VGA to s-video converters like you mentioned) with the s-video or composite out just dirtily scale and interlace the output to work with TVs like the one you're hooking this up to, no matter what res you set on your computer, and it looks really bad; there might even be input lag as a result of the conversion process too. If you're not willing to spend much money on the converters and such as outlined by me and others in this thread, just know what to expect... it's gonna be worse than the original consoles, and even just playing on your computer monitor will be better (whether that be LCD or not). That should answer your first three questions.

Also, only component and above can do 480p. The s-video out on your card is most like going to be scaled 480i, and blur everything as well.

With question 4, I don't think you can use the built-in s-video out on your card for that (it will likely just mirror your main desktop). Other than that, IDK, seems complicated... you'd have to use whatever cable your card supports for hooking up a second monitor and somehow find an adapter/transcoder for that for the input on your TV, and set the resolution of ONLY the second monitor to be low enough to actually display.... etc.

I suggest modding your Wii and installing Wii Mednafen if you want to play on your SD TV without spending much money; original low-res output and super sharp with no screen tear issues.

tldr; yes, everything you mentioned in the first three questions will work (the card and it's graphics drivers handles this; doesn't matter what OS), but will look blurry and not too great.

[chuckster]

Thanks guys! I was hoping for a all-in-one solution without investing in an expensive upscaler, but it looks like flash carts and RGB mods are the way to go while keeping an eye out for pro monitors. Thanks for the patience and quick replies!