Main > Consoles
GBS Control... inexpensive open source upscaler/downscaler
Howard_Casto:
Well one of the jumpers I soldered on to replace the trim pots fell off. I guess I'm going to have to pull out the big guns and try to desolder with my heavy duty gun and hope I don't burn a hole in the board. Then I can put the jumpers in the thru-holes and even if the solder joint isn't great it should still stay in place. I've honestly never had this much trouble on a new board before and it's odd because all the solder points I had to connect for the esp stuck to the board fine.
Anyway I'll hook up audio and search the forums to see if the geometry offsets are a known issue. You have up to 10 presets you can save so worst case I fix it manually and save the settings.
Howard_Casto:
Ok.... day three of tinkering.... I think things went much better this time. I got all the last remnants of the trim pots out of there and soldered on jumpers properly. I still couldn't get the geometry to auto lock for whatever reason so I took the time to center/stretch things manually and saved it to preset 1, which is auto-loaded on startup. All 240p signals are properly centered now, which should cover 90% of the consoles I own. I've got 9 more preset slots for the rest so it should be fine.
I spliced in a micro usb cable to the power so the hdmi adapter doesn't need it's own power supply. I also hooked up audio to a 3.5mm jack that I'll mount in the back of the box. This only makes sense as the hdmi adapter and any tv with a vga input is going to use a 3.5mm jack. I want to order some rca jacks to put in the front so component sources have an easy way to adapt down to 3.5mm as well.
It looks like I need to ditch the jumper connections and solder straight onto the esp. The main issue is I'll have to make the box larger due to the added height and with 3d printing smaller is better. For now I'll leave it alone though.
I also want to cut the trace to power so I can add a power switch.
So here are my impressions:
Picture is good. Not NES classic/emulation good but darn near close.
If there is lag there isn't a lot.
Despite the fact that didn't install a clock generator I haven't noticed any obvious screen tearing. When I use larger resolution sources that might change though.
I've tried a component console (ps2) and a rgb one (snes). Picture quality is excellent on both. I had to adjust the geometry for the snes... maybe it's because it's a 240p signal or something.
When you cut the signal to the gbs, it takes quite a while to "give up" and turn itself off. Thus why I'm installing a switch. This could be annoying if you are using a hdmi switch or anything that needs that signal to die when you are done playing.
The web interface... it's not great. Don't get me wrong it gets the job done, but it looks like it was optimized for a tablet or laptop which is odd as I'm sure most people want to use their phone. Interfaces are my thing... I wonder if the authors would mind me taking a stab at it. That being said, once you get things the way you want there really isn't any reason to go into the interface again. The only thing I could see a person doing is maybe toggling scanlines on and off for 2d and 3d games respectfully.
I've still got more to do but tips for building:
Yank those trim pots off. Do that as soon as you make sure the stock gbs works.... they are a pain in the ass and if you take them off later you risk breaking off a wire you've already soldered on.
Make sure you leave some sort of breakout for power. I'm guessing we are going to see add on dongles similar to the OSSC in the future and having an easy way to tap into power will just make things easier later on.
People seem to have trouble with that debug wire..... I didn't so I don't get it. Just pre tin your wire with a very small amount of solder (no blobs). Hold the wire in place and heat until melted. No biggie.
When adding in a scart connector many sites suggest you solder ground to every ground on the scart connector. This is stupid and a waste of time. Why? Well most game consoles only have one ground... two at the most. On rgb cables that ground is soldered to every ground on the scart connector just in case. So it's really only one ground or two if audio has separate ground. So long as you have ground on your connector hooked up to composite/sync ground you are good to go. If you are overly cautious you might want to also solder to common ground. I suggest you use the separate audio ground on the scart connector for audio just to reduce the chance of introducing interference. That being said older computers might need all the grounds.... that's not my area of expertise.
Anyway more news as it develops. I don't know how much more time I can invest in this right now so that might be it for a little while. I promise I'll get those video captures soon. The elgato is in my old pc.... have to put it in the new one.
Howard_Casto:
Oh one more thing.... is anyone in the shumps forums or elsewhere on the hunt for a composite decoder chip? If a board could be built for that the gbs control would handle just about everything. I hooked up one of those cheap plug n play consoles to the component port just to see and that black and white image was quite crisp.
Howard_Casto:
Spent 20 min testing this evening. Genesis and Saturn do fine as well. It really does seem to be a thing where you set those settings for 240p once and then you don't have to bother ever again. I'll try some component consoles next time to see how it handles widescreen and ect. I'm very curious about the Wii because I believe it drops down to 240p when playing some virtual console games.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version