Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum

Main => Monitor/Video Forum => Topic started by: Nipedley on July 14, 2009, 10:00:18 am

Title: Any way to 'stabilise' a video signal?
Post by: Nipedley on July 14, 2009, 10:00:18 am
Hey guys, I know this isn't technically monitor-related but its video-related :) And it's not arcade either.. if it needs to be in a different section please move it by all means.

Basically for the past few years I've had a Toshiba hdtv (lcd) as my main television, instead of a crt. It's a fine piece of machinery but I noticed on a lot of my old consoles, the screen isn't too happy.

It's got an RGB scart input, but some of my consoles are sending signals it just doesnt like through the scart. Does it with my n64 and especially my megadrive, the screen will jump up a down by about 5 pixels every few seconds which is highly migraine inducing!

I plugged it in through my old VCR and that helped but it's not that happy with the vcr either so it's not much better. I should also mention it happens on the same pieces of hardware (megadrive etc) through RF socket as well. I know the scart works fine because it works great with my dreamcast/ps2/xbox360, what I was wondering is if there was some simple circuit I could build to take the signal from my megadrive and amplify/refine/stabilise it so my hdtv is happier.

Now the only crt's I have left are in my arcade machines and my megadrive is lonely :(

Cheers for any info :)
Title: Re: Any way to 'stabilise' a video signal?
Post by: richms on July 15, 2009, 10:35:29 am
The timing of the signal will be off. I think it was the atari 2600 or one of them didnt even put the half line in for interlacing which meand that instead of 625 lines per cycle (525 if ntsc) there was one more or less... Works fine on old analog scan tv's - if the half line is missing you just lose the vertical offset between odd and even fields making it in effect a 240 line progressive display - with massive black lines between the picture lines - sort of like an arcade display is...

Nothing you can do cheaply if the screen doesnt like it - the deinterlacer in it will probably be glitching every so often as its line count is messed up by there not being enough. Perhaps a time base corrector would sort it out but thats gonna make more lag in the signal path which has been bad enough on the last couple of flatscreens I had the misfortune of playing games on...