13 comments
CursedSilicon · 7 days ago
I'm surprised they dismissed the OSSC [1] so easily. It's not "just" for game consoles and arcade equipment. It has a VGA port on it for a reason!

Admittedly I haven't used it for anything nearly as "esoteric" as some of the gear Cameron has I'd be surprised if he encountered any issues. Though being open source I'd suspect if he did he could simply fix them himself in the OSSC's firmware if needed!

An OSSC will happily upscale any weird resolution/framerate you feed it to something modern HDMI devices can "understand". I use an "EVGA XR1 Lite" [2] to take the OSSC's HDMI output and feed it in over UVC to my laptop with USB-C. Works flawlessly and is dirt cheap

If Cameron wants a bit more of an "all-in-one" solution, myself and other retro tech youtubers like Tech Tangents, RetroRGB and others use old Datapath RGB E1S cards [3]. This thing is basically just a DVI port glued to an FPGA. It doesn't care about "resolution" or "refresh rate" it just DMA's raw pixel data right into RAM and lets what ever application you point at it decipher it. Personally I think they're pretty awful (comparatively) to the above option. The driver is a binary blob (so it probably won't work on Cameron's POWER machine) and it crashes a lot both under Windows and Linux. Though it seems more agreeable under Windows for changing resolution and other settings via OBS

[1] https://www.retrorgb.com/ossc.html

[2] https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=141-U1-CB20-LR

[3] https://www.datapathltd.com/datapath-products/video-capture-...

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tom_ · 6 days ago
I've got a mono->VGA cable for my STe, and it doesn't work with all LCD monitors. I've got a 4:3 1280x1024 display that (after tweaking display settings) resolves it to a pretty clean 1280x800 with a border at the bottom, but I tried it with a couple of displays a friend has and it seemed impossible to get it quite right. The output was very similar to the nasty screenshots shown here: monitor's pixel sampling always slightly out of sync. I wonder if it's the same phenomenon.

I vaguely remember 70 Hz and 72 Hz being VGA standards, so the ST's 71.25 Hz (or whatever it actually was) could be a bit of an oddity.

(The Nextstep output doesn't look that awesome either! Hard to say whether this is the converter or whether it's like that it source thouh.)

johnklos · 7 days ago
Oooh! I wonder if I can find one of those. I'd love a way to see all of the Amiga screenmodes on a single display :)

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