This setup is so crazy, I needed every single one of these remotes to make it work.
Oh, jeez. No! And this is a simplified version of the setup.
Let me show you everything. I'm going to go through the setup in the same order that we played through it in the video.
So the first thing we did is we played on our Genesis, which is down down there.
This is a regular Genesis to this composite splitter.
This is a cool little splitter device. It does composite and component.
It's not really a sought after device for video games,
but it does the job and I've kind of kept it as a backup in my pack pocket if I needed it.
And it turns out this was what saved the day. Don't worry, I only use composite for the first part of the video to show how bad of a use case it is.
We have a whole set of RGB and component switchers and stuff,
but I'm going to save that for a little bit later. First, let's show off the HDMI runs.
The HDMI stuff's pretty straightforward. You know, you plug it into a switcher,
goes to another switcher, goes to another switcher, easy stuff.
Let's just do an example run. So for the switch, you know, we have our switch is going into this four by two matrix.
This one can do 4k HDR. This one has two outs.
One of these is going directly to our other matrix, which I'll get to in a second.
But then there's one that's going to a 4k splitter,
and that's being split to both retro-tink. So I could actually have both retro-tink 4ks going at once.
This one's not plugged in because we shot a bunch of stuff with it yesterday. Once those send the HDMI over, they send it to this eight by eight matrix
that AVPro Edge also sent to us. It's actually an insane device.
It's $8,800 and it's just kind of a top of the line machine.
It does 8k HDR, variable refresh rate.
And because the retro-tink does 4k HDR with variable refresh rate,
we needed something this high-end to make this whole video possible.
Huge thank you to AVPro Edge. So the first two are our retro-tink 4ks.
Our third one's coming from our retro-tink 5x, which is part of our analog run.
This is an OSSC. We shot the video yesterday. We actually didn't end up using that, but we did test it.
Very impressive response times, but I find the feature sort of limiting on it.
And then this one is from our four by two matrix, which is the unprocessed HDMI from our HDMI consoles.
That way I could display any scalar on this TV. And then on the bottom, I could show just like a naked HDMI
so that you can get a comparison. Or we could show multiple different scalers at once,
including two retro-tinks at once on different settings. It was a lot.
As far as outputting from this thing. So our first one goes directly to our OLED 1.
Second one goes directly to our OLED 2 on the bottom. Wow, this HDMI port is not happy.
Oh, boy. Oh, jeez.
Oh, boy. The third one goes to another splitter.
And this is one that can do scaling and strip HDR out.
So I can scale it 4K to 1080p. It's going to two outputs.
And the reason I needed it scaled to 1080p
is because it's going to two extra on scalers.
One is the DSC 301, which takes HDMI and outputs HDMI.
But what it's doing in this case is it's taking 1080p video
and interlacing it to 1080i, which is what the HDCRT is best at on the bottom.
So that's kind of the best case scenario. With that TV, if you give it other resolutions,
it can display it, but it'll add so much lag that the ideal thing you want to do is turn off
HDPT in the service menu and only feed it 1080i.
So you kind of need one of these if you want the best case scenario with a Sony HDCRT.
And everything is so tangled. This, on the other hand, is our VSC 500.
I'm going to show you it upside down because it's tangled.
This one takes the 1080p image and downscales it to 480i
and converts it to analog so that this TV can display anything
that was shown on the HDMI to this.
This is also a very versatile device. Both of these are pretty darn cool.
When we were measuring our input latency, they were, I think, six milliseconds and eight milliseconds
added for that conversion and scaling, which is very well within the realm of acceptable.
This one can do RGB out, composite out, S video out,
but we use component because it's just what works better
with the stuff that I have. Yeah, you need a little HDMI to VGA thing in the first place.
There are so many adapters in this thing. Let's go. We're here.
We're at the analog run. This is a stupid thing.
I chose three different consoles for this video.
One is a Neo Geo. It's basically an arcade board with a super gun
that allows you to get video and power the board. It's pretty cool to use these things.
You just use like a crappy power supply, this. And like, I'm going to f**k it.
It's, this is not the best thing I should be doing.
This was literally in an arcade machine. I bought it off a dude who like runs arcades.
You can buy what SNK made as a home console, which is the AES.
Or you can buy these. I got this for I think $80, the super gun for 60 bucks.
And that's Canadian. Or you can spend like $700 on the consoloist one.
And it's kind of cool. I think the aesthetic of having kind of just a loosey-goosey
arcade board, pretty neat. You can also buy consolization kits.
I've done that with another MBS board at home, but I cheaped out and the RGB on it sucks.
So I actually prefer using this. We also have our Dreamcast, which was kind of picked
because it's got VGA out. So when I was testing the OSSC versus the RetroTank,
it was kind of a good comparison. The one thing that I didn't do is get an active VGA splitter.
And so it really dimmed the image and made it that it was
not a really great test. It was kind of cool because then you could test the
compensation for brightness that everything could do. But we ended up not using that instead,
just focusing Neo Geo and PS2.
These are both consoles that I modded, just the shells.
This one has the GDMU board in it,
so that it doesn't have a disk drive, but you can play games off an SD card that I legally own for sure.
That's right. I own all of them. And then this is a PS2 that I very hastily swapped the shell on.
It's just a PS2 shell, but I did a really bad job.
And if I don't press it in the right spot,
it thinks that it's open. Come on, buddy.
There you go. So yeah, I have to press it down for it to spin or it stops.
But obviously I can't do that in the video. So I had to place these kind of just in the right spot
and see it's spinning. It's spinning. So if you see this tower on top of a PS2 in the video,
you now know why. So out of these three consoles, I had SCART from the Neo Geo, Component from the PS2,
and VGA from the Dreamcast, which goes to the back.
Let's do Neo Geo first, because it's kind of, I think, the most interesting run.
Originally, I wanted to test way more consoles, but the testing for this and the setup took a long time.
And I think we did a pretty comprehensive job testing a bunch of use cases.
So the point is, I brought my 8-in, 3-out SCART switcher.
So you can do eight different inputs of SCART consoles.
If you're watching this, you probably know what SCART is, but if you don't, it was basically a European...
It was basically a standard everywhere but North America. While we had composite video,
you know, one pin for everything of your video,
SCART has like 20, let's say 20-ish pins,
and it doesn't use all of them. There's a lot of them that are superfluous, especially depending on what signal it's sending.
But almost universally, unless it's sending composite over SCART,
this is a better connector in terms of video quality.
And so most people now, even in North America, you generally are going to move towards an RGB setup
that's going to use SCART. So here, the functionality that I'm using really is the splitting.
So I have two SCART outs. One is going to the RetroTink 5X,
and one is going to the RetroTink 4K. The third output on this is actually through RCA,
which works fairly well because I have this SCART 2 component adapter that I use.
At home, I generally use the SCART 2 component. I just have mostly components runs
for everything that's in my retro setup, and I'll show you guys the extra on after.
So this worked really well. RGB in, component out. And then the component out went to this switcher,
which took input from the analog run, but also the digital run from this extra on.
And I could select both, and then output that to the TV,
depending on what test we were doing. I didn't have to unplug, re-plug stuff,
simplifying it a little bit. This is for the Dreamcast.
To get VGA out, I have the Bahar Bros. Toro.
Basically, you can do SCART and VGA out from it,
just from the Dreamcast connector. It's pretty good.
I bought this use, and I think the SCART on this doesn't work quite right.
I've never been able to get a great image out of it. I mean, I just unplugged that.
But the VGA is what I use at home anyway, so it's not a huge deal.
Last piece of the puzzle is the Extron Crosspoint 300,
which is a matrix switcher. It can do RGB, it can do component,
as well as composite. I'll show you guys the back, because I think it looks coolest from the back.
It's funny how messy this is, considering I barely even utilized half of this.
So this one has eight inputs and four outputs.
I kind of wish I had gotten the eight output one,
but for this case, it was fine. It would have been nice to have a fifth one.
One of the things that's kind of neat on it is it has the five BNC jacks.
So you have to use these little RCA to BNC connectors,
or you can get five BNC cables and make that work too,
but seeing as I already have a bunch of component cables lying around this made more sense.
These are like 17 cents each. But those five don't do audio.
That's for RGB and then different kinds of sync.
But you get audio on the bottom, and I bought these little modules
that go from the five pin Phoenix connectors to RCA,
just to keep it simple. You could cut the cables yourself
and then run them to this connector,
but I found these for like $3 each and saving $40 to save myself an hour or two
of just cutting cables and putting connectors in was worth it.
Right now we're running gains on our mister. We're going from mister to HDMI matrix to splitter
to retro-tink as well as the matrix.
Right now, you're seeing both directly from the mister, but with a button presser too, if this is...
It's not connected, screw that. You guys get the idea.
And then we get our HDMI's out to this, which are being scaled to this.
One of the nice things about the extraons is that you can customize the stretch and the size.
One of the bad things is that sometimes when it turns off and on,
the settings kind of reset and you get this. But that's the rundown.
That's the setup. What did you think? If you like it, let me know.
If you don't, go away. Okay, bye.