My component cable woes...

[bobrocks95]

Alright, I want to use an NTSC television for a MAME cab I'm building, and it's got component inputs, which should provide a nice, sharp image (so I'd much prefer to use them over composite or even S-Video, as the colors just seem to "pop" more).  I bought an ATi card with TV-Out just so I could use CRT_Emudriver with the TV and change resolutions with GroovyMAME.  Got the resolution switching working fine, this thing can switch between around 40 or 50 resolutions to match or come as close as possible to matching original resolutions of arcade games with very minimal scaling (if at all).  Scrolling looks really smooth too, no V-Sync required!

The only problem is that I currently have it running in black and white.  I've purchased 2 different sets of component cables and 2 different output dongles for my graphics card- and no matter what I do I cannot get the blue portion of the component output to show up.  So it's black and white with various washed out shades of red.  It doesn't even make a difference whether or not the blue portion of the component cables is plugged in or not.

I've been testing like crazy to try and determine the exact problem.  First thing was I brought the cables inside to try on my DVD Player.  Both sets of cables I tried had the same problem (on a different TV and different output device)- no blue.  I switched my DVD player to progressive scan, and AHA!  Blue!  So I figured it was something to do with 480i and lower output not being supported by the cheapo cables I had, and that's when I bought the second set of cables and discovered to my dismay that they had the exact same problem.

At this point I was lost- why would 2 cables, or 2 TVs, or 2 output devices each have the exact same, very specific problem of missing all shades of blue?  Hopeful that it was just the cables, I tried swapping colors, assuming that the different portions of the cable were identical and just color-coded for the consumer's convenience.  Well, no matter what mismatched color combination I used (blue colored cable in each red input, green in each blue, etc.) there was no blue.  So I did prove that each portion was identical, cool.  Then I tried substituting one of the colors with the yellow portion of a composite cable- proved that those were interchangeable, but still NO BLUE.

So by now I hope you understand that I'm extremely pissed off.  Could it somehow be that I have 2 televisions, or a computer and DVD Player, that have some weird specific problem that won't allow all 3 portions of a component cable to work?  Is it something wrong with the cables I've gotten?

The next thing I plan to attempt is getting 3 composite cables together and just carefully running all of them through the component inputs/outputs to see what happens.  Does anyone have any insight to offer?  Something to try that I haven't thought of?  I don't want to switch to S-Video after all the cash and time I've dumped on getting component to work properly, but at this point I may have to...

[rCadeGaming]

post deleted

[MonMotha]

Two things:

Make sure your video card is actually set to component mode.  It's not usually enabled by default, and auto detection of the display doesn't always work.  The luma output is often shared with the composite video output, so it may come up in the ugly scaled composite mode, which, when hooked up to the component input on the TV, will get you a black and white display.

Make sure you've got a breakout dongle that matches your video card.  There are about 4 different and incompatible ones.  Just because it physically fits doesn't mean that the pinout is right.  In particular, nVidia and ATI both used different pinouts on the same connector, and some video card makers just threw everything out and did their own thing.  This could also get you a synced but black and white image.  You might also get one of the chroma channels but not the other, meaning you'd get some red but not blue.

After that, it's just driver nonsense.  I've had decent luck getting this stuff to work, but I almost always have to "force" EVERYTHING into the right mode.

Your cables shouldn't care what resolution you run them at.  It's all just passive cabling, after all.  Your TV may care.  Some TVs have scalers that don't work with 240p.  Some TVs upscale EVERYTHING to 480p or 1080i, so it'll still look bad even if you very carefully set up the exact video timing you want.  Luck of the draw, unfortunately.  At high resolutions, low quality cabling can affect video quality, but it should still at least work.

[rCadeGaming]

+1 with MonMotha