So... in my endless quest to defeat my television's composite input artifacting, I replaced my stereo receiver. While my main motivation was to get digital audio from the new consoles, I also wanted one that performed video upscaling.

I went with the Harman Kardon AVR-247, and found a good deal on a factory refurbished model. After testing the audio, the first thing that I hooked up to it was the Duo. Upscaling to 480p over HDMI, the composite input looked great... for a few seconds. The beautiful uncorrupted image would float from the bottom to the top of the screen, then flicker and go blank for a few seconds, and it would loop, on both NES and SNES. Same thing with S-Video.

When I tried the component output, I got a stable image, but the top third was all wavy. The receiver has an A and B output mode, but neither seemed to make a difference on either input.

I got my N64 to output a stable upscaled image with S-Video, but it was black every other frame. I suppose it's kinda like a stereoscopic effect, but still...

Dreamcast over S-Video was fine.

This leads me to believe that the RD is outputting in an odd video format. I know that the NES had off-screen overscan areas, so maybe it's emulating that. I'm wondering if there's any kind of device I can run the signal through to do away with it. A "VGA box" might work, and Yobo makes one that's ~$50 shipped on Amazon.

I'm beginning to wonder if doing a component mod to my RD would be a better option. Has anybody written up an easy-to-follow guide yet? I'm sure that I could do it, but I'll need more than just a schematic.