so here's the deal you've got a retro
game collection
you've got a super nintendo you've got a
tower of power
but you've also got like an lcd tv and
you've got
i don't know a capture device that only
takes hdmi this is all you're going to
get out of these things by default at
least in north america what do you do
you can get hd retrovision cables for
like the super nintendo but then you got
to make sure that your tv is compatible
with it because it only outputs 240p
it's a mess and that is why this exists
this is the ossc
open source scan converter basically
what it does
is it takes component
vga and
this big chunker right here that many
people in north america probably won't
be familiar with called skirt it's a
rather large connector that can carry
composite video
rgb which is kind of like vga but not
really it's a little bit different
basically it was like hdmi before
digital signals were a thing or at least
for video
a lot of these older consoles actually
had the ability to output rgb
and what's the most convenient way to
get it start it can carry it it's fine
so we don't need to worry about any kind
of ridiculous converters or anything
these just exist in europe and also in
japan as the jp 21 connector
all you need to do is plug one end
into the ossc and the other
into your console here and as long as
your console is either rgb modded or in
the case of the super nintendo and the
sega genesis
uh it cannot put rgb on its own then
you're fine you have a very clean signal
coming out of your
retro console now there are other
options available for you if you
just want to get your retro game up on a
tv
you've got these uh kind of inexpensive
raz fox av to hdmi converters that just
basically take your regular barrel plugs
and spits out a digital signal
the problem is they're using these
barrel plugs
and this is just composite video
basically it's taking
the entirety of the video signal so
chroma
luma that is the color information and
the brightness information
and just combining it what you get is a
lot of interference
compared to rgb which has the red green
and blue and synchronization
all on separate lines this is a
vastly inferior connection standard
at least as far as resolution goes i
guess we can take a look at the actual
unit itself
a little bit more closely so we have
again these
component inputs and scart as well as
vga
there's the barrel jack for the power
we've got an lcd on the front that is
backlit
you can turn the back light off and the
options if it bugs you
it's got two little buttons for control
here on the
kind of recessed in the inside here and
it has a jtag port for programming
you won't really need that because it
also has
a micro sd card slot through which you
can actually load up a micro sd card
with firmware and it'll
just flash itself but if you ever
pricked it for some reason
then you have the jtag port aside from
that we've got two audio inputs
these are both three and a half
millimeter these
go with uh the component
and for the vga whereas scart carries
its own audio
this is one of the standard remotes that
comes with it
it is a lot more complex than it needs
to be
just as a result of it being a universal
tv remote it's just kind of a standard
one i'm not sure
if there's like a model or any
distinctive markings or anything on it i
don't think so
but yeah this one has an overlay applied
for the ossc
and it tells you all the different
functions that you're able to access
through the remote directly
so we have all the different controls
for the first input
ab1 which i believe is the skirt
av2 i believe is the uh
component and av3 would be vga i think
that's about it for the remote there are
more settings we can tweak when we have
it up and running but
well we'll have to get up and running
for that let's get a baseline by using
the raspbox avid hdmi converter
this will give us basically the same
kind of
image quality that we can expect on a
typical tv
these days not quite what we would have
gotten out of crt back then but
nothing is quite a crt these days this
does not look good
i don't know how well this is coming
through on the camera but there's all
kinds of artifacts here
um a lot of it might be just because
this kind of cheaper
raz fox box here i think might expect
480i versus what's currently being
displayed which is 240p
the problem with that is that 240p was
never standardized
it has all these weird graphical bugs
and
just in general you can see how the hard
lines there kind of change color between
like green and
magenta and let's just play it for a
minute and see how the
latency is anyway it's not perfect but
it's
not terrible either if it's if there's
any lag it's probably like one or two
frames
this feels a lot like just playing with
an emulator where there's a little bit
of lag
uh there are options available now that
allow you to run the emulator ahead of
time which is kind of interesting it's
like time traveling
so you can actually get latency that's
less than the
original consoles but in this case this
is the original console
and i think all the latency is both in
the box itself
which might be a frame maybe and in the
display
so that's what super nintendo looks like
let's uh
let's flip it over to sega and see what
that looks like that is
super blurry like the text is barely
readable here you can see
1994 sega it's like full of rainbow
artifacts and all that kind of stuff
i don't even have to explain what that
is you can see it there's just colors
where there shouldn't be colors
oh man that's distracting that signpost
there
don't do this why not
because it doesn't do anything you just
the best way to do it
let me show you
feel that that's friction it'll take the
dust off
fun fact you don't need to press the
eject button
on this nest no you don't have to they
just thought it would be fun
but if this nest is on
it won't come out
retrotech tip now let's grab the ossc
and see how that works
now you may be wondering where we get
these cables these aren't exactly
commonplace in north america and they've
been obsolete for a fair while now
these came from retro game cables a
company in the uk that actually builds
these this is their
universal snes pack-a-punch or actually
universal nintendo works on n64 and
gamecube as well
and here we go this is a 4x3 picture and
it
looks ridiculously sharp
so the first thing that's very obvious
there's no ghosting whatsoever this
actually looks more or less
like an emulator now this is an analog
signal still
it's just analog can look good like vga
used to be really good this is more or
less the same thing as vga
it's just you know not quite one of the
big things about the ossc is that it's
actually taking the input that it's
receiving
and looking at it line by line not frame
by frame so there is less than
one frame of lag and i can feel it it is
smooth this game could be flaky
i might need to clean it
oh
[Laughter]
now that that happened let's
try sega you can clearly make out the
text
i'm sure you can make it out from way
back there
there's no rainbow in this waterfall
there's no rainbows anywhere which i
mean
nothing against rainbows but they're not
supposed to be there that's
the difference between having like a
good analog signal and a bad one
and rgb even though it's analog is
still way better than well anything else
other than
if you can get pure digital out of the
console which requires a mod
there's a little bit of wonder in seeing
something this
old fire up and output an image this
clean and
for that matter there are people like
speedrunners who actually need to be
able to verify
that their run works properly on an
original console i would say that this
is probably your best bet
got 150 bucks it's not a huge investment
and it definitely makes a huge
difference this or the
rad2x cables based on the retro tank
from retro gaming cables
this was a bit of a different video than
usual as seems to be
kind of a theme when i'm on camera but
if you want to see something else
similar to this maybe check out alex's
imac
teardown that he did and oh
the stdusness the cartridge to
rom adapter that we reviewed a little
while ago on ltt
thanks for watching and subscribe