FPGA Based Videogame System

[spoonman]

17 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:

Genesis is pretty decent stock, but them jailbars, or as Kevtris likes to call them "Failbars".   

Also, notice you have a MP-10 in your profile pic, you a member at TFW2005?  I just bought a TE-01. 

I have 7 Genesis systems, 3 of them '89, non-TMSS model 1, and none have signs of jailbars. My SMS (model 1), indeed does but not the Genesis, or at least none of mine do I should say. 

 

Examples (because I know how much you love them) > Genesis Model 1 (launch system) displayed via HD Retrovision YPbPr onto Wega CRT - photographed with iPod Touch 6:

 

 

And on another Genesis Model 1 via HD Retrovision displayed on PlayStation 3D LCD HD Display (to show that it's not the CRT masking them)

These had very visible jailbars when displayed using the same cable + display, but with the SMS Power Base system:

 

 

And more Genesis games on the LCD (lighter colors, such as blue seem to show off jailbars more, but none are visible here. 
Again, these are all on a stock model 1 with only a $53 HD Retrovision YPbPr cable.

 

 

 

 

 

I like Analogue's systems as much as the next guy, but let's not make up false issues with the original Genesis console to sell more Mega Sg's. 
 

[SegaSnatcher]

1 hour ago, spoonman said:

I have 7 Genesis systems, 3 of them '89, non-TMSS model 1, and none have signs of jailbars. My SMS (model 1), indeed does but not the Genesis, or at least none of mine do I should say. 

 

Examples (because I know how much you love them) > Genesis Model 1 (launch system) displayed via HD Retrovision YPbPr onto Wega CRT - photographed with iPod Touch 6:

 

 

 

 

And on another Genesis Model 1 via HD Retrovision displayed on PlayStation 3D LCD HD Display (to show that it's not the CRT masking them)

These had very visible jailbars when displayed using the same cable + display, but with the SMS Power Base system:

 

 

 

 

And more Genesis games on the LCD (lighter colors, such as blue seem to show off jailbars more, but none are visible here. 
Again, these are all on a stock model 1 with only a $53 HD Retrovision YPbPr cable.

 

 

 

 

I like Analogue's systems as much as the next guy, but let's not make up false issues with the original Genesis console to sell more Mega Sg's. 
 

Jailbars is a well known issue that plagues Genesis systems.  RetroRGB has a good write up about them.  Banding is another issue.   Thick dark lines you tend to see in Bluish/Purplish backgrounds and such.  No Genesis offers perfectly clean RGB out without some mods.  There is one mod where you can simply lift the composite line and that cleans things up, or a straight up RGB bypass mod.

Edited September 15, 2019 by SegaSnatcher
Delete photos

[SegaSnatcher]

Example of those banding lines.

[Slipard]

19 hours ago, Kosmic Stardust said:

Yes. And they're not $25 to ship... ?

How dare you complain about shipping fees?! ?

Edited September 15, 2019 by Slipard

[Enragedwhale]

I have VA0 JP Megadrive and it’s jail bar city and that’s with the composite trace cut. I’ve changed a couple of resistors to correct the overdriven audio and it’s sounds freaking fantastic (better than the SG) so I’ll have to get an RGB bypass board at some point.

[Toth]

On 9/14/2019 at 5:27 AM, atmn said:

Does someone have the schematics for the HD-15 Connector? Cant find the one from the FAQ from the Nt Mini. I suppose its the same.

 

I wanna start making cables. I guess the signal cables should add 220uF caps or are they inside the DAC?

 

 

This page?  This is what they refer to when they say you can make your own.

https://support.analogue.co/hc/en-us/articles/115000923948-Using-Analog-Video-output-with-the-Nt-mini

[Andromeda Stardust]

11 hours ago, Toth said:

This page?  This is what they refer to when they say you can make your own.

https://support.analogue.co/hc/en-us/articles/115000923948-Using-Analog-Video-output-with-the-Nt-mini

Just connect the dots:

https://gamesx.com/avpinouts/genesisav.htm

RGB pins, sync, grounds, and stereo audio pins run from the dsub 15 to the 32x minidin.

[CZroe]

How dare you complain about shipping fees?! [emoji6]

Three differences:

VAT is a tax, not a "shipping fee," thus your comparison is invalid.

Analogue's products are the OP's FPGA game consoles and accessories, thus the discussion is more on-topic.

This issue isn't limited to one region (EU Economic Zone), thus it is applicable to a broader range of customers who might be interested in this product.

 

Same reasons it was appropriate to mention my "foreign transaction fee" problem here despite it being significantly less than your fee (around $13, IIRC).

 

Again, sucks for you and other EU people who were caught unaware, but you seem to be doing your best to make us resent ever showing sympathy to your situation.

 

 

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

On 9/14/2019 at 11:40 AM, mario64 said:

We’ll see. I for one don’t consider a requirement to splice cables as a viable commercial product. Most people won’t have a clue how to do that. If they intend on officially supporting 32x it should be publicly stated, included in the user manual and the necessary cable(s) should be available for purchase. 

I think it needs to be said these are boutique enthusiast products. You get the base product but addons may require work.

 

Many console gamers are experienced modders or can at least roll their own cables if needed. Analogue could easily provide a connector for the 32x cable, however, but realistically how many people would buy it?

 

Low run products require the same initial investment in tooling cost as a high run product, so fragmenting their own market by releasing accessories might be a pain. Analogue don't have the output as say retrobit or hyperkin does.

 

We are lucky to get multiple color options on the base consoles. I would even roll cables for people for a fee, but without owning the actual 32x hardware, I would have no way of testing it.

 

Suffice to say if you wanna daisy chain cd and 32x and oyher addons, you may have to deal with wiring everything up.

12 hours ago, Kosmic Stardust said:

Just connect the dots:

https://gamesx.com/avpinouts/genesisav.htm

RGB pins, sync, grounds, and stereo audio pins run from the dsub 15 to the 32x minidin.

 

Honestly the analog adapter would be redundant for me. I have stock hardware with clean composite outputs for my crts, and hdmi consoles for the big screen.

 

None of my displays support rgb, component, or even s-video. It's hdmi, composite, or rf. Also I think Analogue missed a golden opportunity here to enable 480p vga output on the Dsub connector for old school vga monitors.

 

Would be a cool feature, but there are existing lagless hdmi/vga adapters already that could do this.

[spoonman]

On 9/15/2019 at 2:26 AM, SegaSnatcher said:

Jailbars is a well known issue that plagues Genesis systems.  RetroRGB has a good write up about them.  Banding is another issue.   Thick dark lines you tend to see in Bluish/Purplish backgrounds and such.  No Genesis offers perfectly clean RGB out without some mods.  There is one mod where you can simply lift the composite line and that cleans things up, or a straight up RGB bypass mod.

I'm not sure what to tell you. I have not modded my systems in any way, and as you can see there is ZERO signs of banding or jailbars. It's 100% free of them on all 7 of my systems. Perhaps they used defective consoles or bad cables. I've never even heard of people mention jailbars on a Genesis. 

They are very obvious on my SMS (model 1) and TG16, but that's all.

 

Here are some blue screens. If you see jailbars or anything else please let know where

 

Again, all photos of the Genesis model 1, w/ HD Retrovision YPbPr cables on PlayStation 24" HD Display. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Enragedwhale]

That’s excellent that you’ve somehow hit the Genesis lottery, enjoy your jailbar free systems. 

 

But it it is a very common issue, especially on the earlier JP revisions and I’ve never owned a one that didn’t have them to some extent.

 

And I’ve used probably 10 different RGB cables over the years at various price points from a variety of sellers and the difference they make is negligible to my eyes. They can make a big difference over longer runs with switches etc in and maintaining stable sync but always with the jail bars 

[hyrulebr]

3 hours ago, spoonman said:

...I've never even heard of people mention jailbars on a Genesis. 

 

You are a very luck guy! ?

 

I have 2 Mega Drive model 1 Japanese and I can see jailbar in both. One is modded so the jailbair is very faint but still there if you look very close. The other is unmodded and the jailbar is very easy to see.

 

Also have a Laseractive RGB modded and no jailbar at all. ?

 

[derFunkenstein]

VA6 and/or VA6.8 are the model 1 Genesis jackpot systems. Very minimal jailbars and excellent audio. Next runner up is VA3 and VA4 model 2. I have a VA4 model 2 and no hint of jailbars. 

[spoonman]

21 hours ago, hyrulebr said:

 

You are a very luck guy! ?

 

I have 2 Mega Drive model 1 Japanese and I can see jailbar in both. One is modded so the jailbair is very faint but still there if you look very close. The other is unmodded and the jailbar is very easy to see.

 

Also have a Laseractive RGB modded and no jailbar at all. ?

 

So I've heard.

7 Genesis consoles and no jailbars on any of them. Well maybe there is on the Gen 3.. I can't bring myself to use that. It sounds like they are more common on the Japanese Mega Drive than on the Gen. 

[Pixelboy]

14 minutes ago, spoonman said:

So I've heard.

7 Genesis consoles and no jailbars on any of them. Well maybe there is on the Gen 3.. I can't bring myself to use that. It sounds like they are more common on the Japanese Mega Drive than on the Gen. 

 

I don't know much about this stuff, but wouldn't the TV be a factor? Are there some TVs that somehow auto-correct that jailbar problem, while most other TVs do not?

 

[CZroe]

 
I don't know much about this stuff, but wouldn't the TV be a factor? Are there some TVs that somehow auto-correct that jailbar problem, while most other TVs do not?
 

Yes, but it's usually the other way around: anything with digital processing exacerbates it due to horizontal pixel clock syncronization... even CRTs, like my XBR910.

[Andromeda Stardust]

12 minutes ago, CZroe said:

1 hour ago, Pixelboy said:

 
I don't know much about this stuff, but wouldn't the TV be a factor? Are there some TVs that somehow auto-correct that jailbar problem, while most other TVs do not?
 

Yes, but it's usually the other way around: anything with digital processing exacerbates it due to horizontal pixel clock syncronization... even CRTs, like my XBR910.

word. My tcl 4k jailbars all my systems over composite. Green is the worst for some reason. Colored texts is borderline illegible, but latency is low. And don't get me started on the 30hz deinterlaced venetian blinds... ?

[Toth]

Would it be easy for Kevtris to enable a mode on the DAC to be used with any HDMI product or is there a technical reason it may not work well if they enabled that?  Is there a legal reason they may not allow it?  Could a potential jailbreak allow something like that if it is technically possible?  I don't have any reason to use it for anything else I don't think but was just curious what reason they would have had for not doing that.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Toth

[Atariboy]

Unless you had a widescreen HD CRT, what good would it do? Anything like the SNES Classic Edition that you might be thinking about using on a CRT is outputting a pillarboxed widescreen image. 

 

I for one wouldn't be too interested in playing classic games on a plug and play system windowboxed on my 4:3 Trinitron. 

[CZroe]

Unless you had a widescreen HD CRT, what good would it do? Anything like the SNES Classic Edition that you might be thinking about using on a CRT is outputting a pillarboxed widescreen image.    I for one wouldn't be too interested in playing classic games on a plug and play system windowboxed on my 4:3 Trinitron.   

 

 

For Analogue products, the Analogue DAC enables true 240p without pillarboxing. If it added support for other stuff then it would likely have options for handling aspect ratios, but it doesn't absolutely have to. Stuff like UltraHDMI do have stretched modes which would render properly once sent to a 4:3 CRT, a bit like anamorphic DVD. Heck, UltraHDMI'S 5x 1200p mode is always 1600x1200, which makes it really difficult to find a proper digital monitor with the same native resolution (I use Dell 2007FP)  

 

 

 

[Atariboy]

1 hour ago, CZroe said:

For Analogue products, the Analogue DAC enables true 240p without pillarboxing. If it added support for other stuff then it would likely have options for handling aspect ratios, but it doesn't absolutely have to. Stuff like UltraHDMI do have stretched modes which would render properly once sent to a 4:3 CRT, a bit like anamorphic DVD. Heck, UltraHDMI'S 5x 1200p mode is always 1600x1200, which makes it really difficult to find a proper digital monitor with the same native resolution (I use Dell 2007FP)  

I know how it works with Analogue products.

 

I imagine the only unexpected functionality this potentially might have is with the NT Mini, and even that I rather doubt will happen when the system already has native analogue capabilities built into it. But perhaps somewhere someone has the use for feeding analogue video to two different devices, so never say never I suppose.

 

Past that slim possibility, I'd be shocked to learn that this works with anything other than the Super NT, Mega SG, and hopefully a long string of future Analogue products. 

Edited September 20, 2019 by Atariboy

[SegaSnatcher]

2 hours ago, Toth said:

Would it be easy for Kevtris to enable a mode on the DAC to be used with any HDMI product or is there a technical reason it may not work well if they enabled that?  Is there a legal reason they may not allow it?  Could a potential jailbreak allow something like that if it is technically possible?  I don't have any reason to use it for anything else I don't think but was just curious what reason they would have had for not doing that.

I say its more business reasons than technical.  Last time I checked Apple Pencil only worked on their own devices, so its not that out of the ordinary.

[SegaSnatcher]

On 9/19/2019 at 3:33 AM, spoonman said:

I'm not sure what to tell you. I have not modded my systems in any way, and as you can see there is ZERO signs of banding or jailbars. It's 100% free of them on all 7 of my systems. Perhaps they used defective consoles or bad cables. I've never even heard of people mention jailbars on a Genesis. 

They are very obvious on my SMS (model 1) and TG16, but that's all.

 

Here are some blue screens. If you see jailbars or anything else please let know where

 

Again, all photos of the Genesis model 1, w/ HD Retrovision YPbPr cables on PlayStation 24" HD Display. 

 

With all due respect I'm not gonna judge by your photos.  I can only say what I and many other have experienced.  I've never owned a Genesis without those banding lines.  

[spoonman]

7 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:

With all due respect I'm not gonna judge by your photos.  I can only say what I and many other have experienced.  I've never owned a Genesis without those banding lines.  

 

I'm not really sure what you're accusing me.

Do you believe that I posting something other than an original Genesis model 1 with zero mods/fixes, connected with an HD Retrovision component cable? Or.. Pehaps, I must be using a special de-jailbar Photoshop filter on my dozens of Gen screen shots.

 

Anyway, my point was that you shouldn't spread false info about original hardware being "plagued by jailbars" because you read it somewhere online. I've seen a lot of jailbar plagued consoles in my lifetime. Famously on cheap FOAC Famiclones, on the SMS (model 1), as well as on the TG-16. 

 

 

On 9/15/2019 at 2:26 AM, SegaSnatcher said:

Jailbars is a well known issue that plagues Genesis systems.  RetroRGB has a good write up about them.  Banding is another issue.   Thick dark lines you tend to see in Bluish/Purplish backgrounds and such.  No Genesis offers perfectly clean RGB out without some mods.  There is one mod where you can simply lift the composite line and that cleans things up, or a straight up RGB bypass mod.

Again, I have no banding, and no jailbars on any of my 7 USA Genesis systems. That includes also connecting the Sega CD (model 1), 32X, and Power Base Converters as well.

 

And Yes, perfectly clean video signal without any mods. No bypass, no composite cuts. Just this. 

 

And this..

 

To get this..

[SegaSnatcher]

1 hour ago, spoonman said:

 

I'm not really sure what you're accusing me.

Do you believe that I posting something other than an original Genesis model 1 with zero mods/fixes, connected with an HD Retrovision component cable? Or.. Pehaps, I must be using a special de-jailbar Photoshop filter on my dozens of Gen screen shots.

 

Anyway, my point was that you shouldn't spread false info about original hardware being "plagued by jailbars" because you read it somewhere online. I've seen a lot of jailbar plagued consoles in my lifetime. Famously on cheap FOAC Famiclones, on the SMS (model 1), as well as on the TG-16. 

 

 

Again, I have no banding, and no jailbars on any of my 7 USA Genesis systems. That includes also connecting the Sega CD (model 1), 32X, and Power Base Converters as well.

 

And Yes, perfectly clean video signal without any mods. No bypass, no composite cuts. Just this. 

 

 

And this..

 

 

To get this..

Not accussing you of anything, just saying I'm not gonna judge based off your screenshots.  I'm going by what I and many others have experienced and I can assure you there is a reason why RGB bypass boards exist for Genesis.