Composite to VGA converter - good idea or not?

[BugsyPal]

Hi all,

At the moment I have my three consoles (AV Famicom, Super Famicom, and PC Engine) connected to my LCD TV. As you'd expect, it doesn't look too great, and so I am looking into obtaining a suitable CRT display.

The supply of discarded CRT TVs appears to have dried up in my area. What I do have immediate access to, however, is a CRT VGA monitor. With this in mind, I was wondering whether a composite to VGA converter such as this one would give acceptable results. By "acceptable" I mean at least on par with a typical TV of the early 90's - much the same as these consoles would have originally been played on.

Does anyone have any experience with these devices? Do they really work as advertised? Are there any downsides I should be aware of?

Most grateful for any advice offered.

[tangaroa]

Hi all,

At the moment I have my three consoles (AV Famicom, Super Famicom, and PC Engine) connected to my LCD TV. As you'd expect, it doesn't look too great, and so I am looking into obtaining a suitable CRT display.

The supply of discarded CRT TVs appears to have dried up in my area. What I do have immediate access to, however, is a CRT VGA monitor. With this in mind, I was wondering whether a composite to VGA converter such as this one would give acceptable results. By "acceptable" I mean at least on par with a typical TV of the early 90's - much the same as these consoles would have originally been played on.

Does anyone have any experience with these devices? Do they really work as advertised? Are there any downsides I should be aware of?

Most grateful for any advice offered.

If your trying to do this on the cheap, then yes the device will work, but it will still only look as good as your RCA connection and should be as you say "on par" (much much better than on your LCD - older systems on new tvs = OMG that looks terrible epic fail). If you don't mind having an extra monitor then its a sound way to go. It might introduce a little bit of lag, but I'm not familiar with this exact device so Im not sure exactly how much. It might be noticeable or it might not be at all it depends on how quickly it handles the pass through and conversion. For that you might want to do some research to try to find one with a low millisecond conversion pass through (usually as long as it isn't upscaling you should be fine). The downside is that once a CRT TV or monitor goes you'll have to go out on the hunt again. I imagine that as time goes on these will be increasingly difficult to find/fix.

Another alternative (which will also future proof your consoles or any other older systems and will give you better than acceptable results but it is extremely expensive $$$) would be to buy either a Framemeister or XRGB-3. I have the latter in combination with a gefen vga to hdmi converter on my 47" LED HD and NES and SNES games look even better (and with OG scanlines to boot) than they ever did on a crt after tweaking all the settings although the PC engine might require a mod as it has a wonky sync rate and blanks out for a few seconds every now and then (depends on TV - each brand and model is different). This could also happen with your converter but generally speaking older crts were much more forgiving when it came to sync and refresh rates. Depending on your budget and if you want to get your game on with your main HDTV again this would be the solution. But you would have to dig deep into your pocket in the $300-$450 range so that solution definitely isn't for everyone.

Hope that helps.