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
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