SNES 1-Chip + THS7374 = I Never Knew What I Was Missing
Is it okay to say you grew up poor if you know there were a lot of people who grew up poorer than you did? You're right, it is what it is.
When the SNES came out, I was obsessed with it. The financial disposition of my family did nothing to diminish my passion, and I was the king of delayed gratification. It is an odd coincidence that like my first NES, I received my first SNES while my family was utterly without a TV. The first time first time I played it, I did so by connecting the audio portion of the multi-out to a stereo I had recycled from somewhere. I popped in Super Mario World, and listened to the opening sequence. I hit the start button and mashed random buttons until the game started and I could hear Mario jump. I started trying to time my jumps by counting the seconds between the stage music starting and the sound of Mario dying. It was crude, and I have no idea how far I managed to get or what stage I might have been on. If my parents weren't worried after I insisted that I didn't want anything for my birthday or for Christmas, just a Super NES, and I didn't care if we didn't have a TV right now, I knew we'd have one eventually, the sight of me playing SNES on my stereo day after day might have made them think twice.
Why bring this up? I think it qualifies nicely as the worst picture quality ever, which is a perfect starting point to walk through the gradual increase in the fidelity of my Super NES experiences.
Probably a month after my parents exchanged worried stares watching me play SNES blind, my step-father managed to find a TV. It was the oldest TV I had ever seen. Instead of the standard rectangular box shape, it appeared more experimental like something inspired by the Jetsons. You didn't hear me complain, though. Any picture was a 1000% improvement over what I had. So my first _sighted_ SNES experience was on that old B&W using RF Out through a 75-300 ohm matching transformer (the thing that converts coax into the two wires which attach under the antenna screws.) Super Mario World, resplendent in gray-scale, was almost everything I had hoped it would be. Since all of the Koopa shells (except the flashing ones) were the exact same shade, I had to experiment to figure out which were which. (For the uninitiated, in Super Mario World you ride a little dinosaur that eats things, and when he eats a turtle shell, different things happen according to the color of the shell. If it's red, he spits out fire, if it's blue he grows wings and flies, and if it's yellow he stomps the ground violently when you jump).
My next visual upgrade to color and direct-coax RF was when my parents dropped me off at my grandmother's apartment and I convinced her I was not going to damage her TV by playing my game on it. (Honestly I had it up and working before we finished the conversation where she gave her permission - partly because I was adept at connecting a Nintendo to a TV, and partly because my parents had implied that she had already said it was okay when in fact the matter was still being debated. ) Familial tension aside, color was bliss.
We eventually moved to another state for reasons which I can't remember, and after spending a few nights sleeping in a car, we ended up living in a hotel room for about 6 months. The hotel had a new-ish TV and the best picture I had seen to date. I remember it had knobs in the back for adjusting the h-size and v-size, and I used to turn the h-size all the way down because the pixel pitch was smaller and the picture seemed clearer. I spent many a day in that dark room playing through Final Fight and Super Smash TV over and over and over until I could almost finish each one with a single life. My stepfather and I also rented Joe & Mac, HAL's HyperZone, Bill Lambeer's Combat Basketball and Super Baseball Simulator 1.000.
We eventually moved to yet another state and again slept in a car for several days, then rented a very small house, and again had no TV. By that point I was a freshman in high school and I had fallen in love with the place we lived. When my parents once again started coming up short with the rent, I made the sacrifice of selling off my NES and SNES and all of my games to get enough money to pay the next month's rent. At the time it seemed like everything would be okay if we could just get through that one month, and the prospect of staying was well worth it to me. Had I known then that my mother was hell bent on leaving no matter what, I might have gone another way, but hindsight is 20/20. My SNES, like the ring of power was lost and passed out of all knowledge.
...Until a friend I had lent money to was unable to pay me back and suggested I might accept a SNES instead of cash. Fond memories won the day, and like that I was back in - still connecting my SNES through RF.
When I was 18 and living on my own, with one of the first chunks of disposable income I ever had, I went to a local pawn shop and very carefully selected a TV with stereo speakers, and RCA inputs to ensure that I got the best picture from my small but growing collection of game consoles. On that TV I played Final Fantasy II(IV) and Final Fantasy III(VI), Chronotrigger, The Secret of Mana, Super Castlevania IV, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island and dozens of others. As far as I was concerned, that was the best it was ever going to get.
...Then I got a new job with better pay, and was determined to get a TV with S-Video. I bought an S-Video SNES cable, and a 36-inch Sony WEGA. The SNES looked phenomenal on the TV, but unfortunately the set suffered from a terrible vertical banding problem which Sony refused to recognize as a defect, so I returned the TV before the return window expired, and a couple of months later pulled the trigger on a Samsung Widescreen CRT HDTV. The Samsung looked Amazing for DVD content, and it supported progressive-scan so it looked great with most of the newer consoles, but the SNES was kind of disappointing on it, even with the S-Video cables. I decided that when I could, I would need to get another SDTV CRT to keep around just to play older game systems on.
Eventually I bought another 36-inch WEGA from Craigslist and reveled in the beauty of S-Video with my SNES (and other consoles - I even S-video modded my Genesis, lol) on a proper SDTV.
Now _THAT_ was the best it was going to get.
Then I stumbled across this on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/SPECIALTY-AV-SCART-Component-Converter-Genesis/dp/B004XSSDPO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517885374&sr=8-1&keywords=scart+to+component
My WEGA had component video inputs which offers an even higher level of fidelity than S-Video, but this was a different color standard from the rest of the world and though many of my game consoles were capable of outputting RGB, it was not compatible with the standard adopted in the US (known as "component", YUV, or YPBPR) but this little adapter thingy could supposedly convert the signal. It was too delicious an opportunity to pass up so I ordered one along with an RGB SCART cable for the SNES to see this for myself.
The picture quality was a noticeable jump - not as dramatic as the jump to S-Video, but the colors were more vibrant and distinctive, and of course there was no going back. I quickly bought up SCART cables for every console I had that would support them (and then later had to buy replacements because not all SCART cables are created equal, lol), and after researching SCART switches, ended up buying a set of bad-but-not-terrible Mad Katz physically switched switch boxes and daisy-chaining them together. Buying them was somewhat of an adventure because at the time, Amazon had inextricably labeled SCART switches as a non-exportable item, so I had to broker the deal with the seller via messaging in Amazon. But Amazon scans your messages for signs you're doing this and blocks them, so we had to resort to crypic phrases like "send me a rhymes with wind voice, through rhymes with play pal" (Translation: "send me an invoice through PayPal").
As my obsession with RGB grew, I ended up finding sites like retrorgb.com and videogameperfection.com which both had excellent resources and eventually I snagged one of the quick-to-disappear gscartsw RGB switches, and some premium SCART cables.
As an aside, part of the reason that my SNES picture was terrible when it was connected to an HDTV was because older game consoles took liberties with the video standards of the time and sort of made their own. The shortcoming of that is that because it wasn't part of the standard, rather just something that took advantage of the characteristics of CRTs, when HDTVs came out, most of them didn't account for this standards deviation. Even when an HDTV supported the ad-hoc standard, the scaler (the thing that turns your standard-def output into something that fills the whole hi-def screen) was designed to upconvert old TV content, not video games. One very excellent solution to this problem is the "OSSC" the Open-Source-Scan-Converter. It's a device that takes the RGB signals from your old game consoles and scales them perfectly on an HDTV in such a way that it doesn't introduce input lag. I still prefer my CRTs, but the OSSC solved this problem thoroughly enough that I could definitely and finally really enjoy SNES on an HDTV.
My consoles had never looked better and I really thought what I have now is surely the best it's going to get. If you've been following along, it should be no surprise that I was once again wrong.
The latest (I dare not call it the final) iteration of improving the SNES picture comes courtesy of the later model SNES consoles - a.k.a. "1-Chip". They're called this because Nintendo consolidated several of the IC's (Integrated circuits - black rectangle thingies) into a single chip to save costs, and also because the phrase "1-Chip" is silkscreened onto the PCB itself. I'm by no means an expert so I'm relating what is probably an imperfect understanding here. With the original SNES design, the image processing passed through several chips causing the signal to degrade slightly and resulting in an overall blurrier and softer look. Since the 1-Chip design processed most, if not all, picture information within the same chip there was less space to become degraded and so the picture coming out of a 1-Chip is noticeably sharper (when using RGB output). However there were two drawbacks - one, the 1-Chip did not properly attenuate the signal, resulting in a picture that was too bright causing it to lose some of the color detail, and because the design was so radically different from the earlier revisions of the system, certain games have minor issues when played on one of these consoles.
So the original SNES design resulted in a soft/blurry picture, but with accurate colors and brightness, and the 1-Chip had a sharper picture but lost color accuracy and was too bright, so it was a trade-off no matter what you had. The difference with the 1-chip, however is that the problem is correctable. By bypassing the onboard RGB amplifier and running the signals coming out of the encoder through a properly tuned amplifier, you can get the sharpness of the 1-Chip design, plus accurate colors and brightness.
It seemed like a fun project, so I hunted through all of my SNES consoles hoping that I already had a 1-Chip model. Unfortunately I didn't, and neither did any of the local game shops in my city, so I had to resort to eBay where most of the sellers expect a premium for them, even if they don't exactly understand why people want them. I was able to get one at a fairly reasonable price - probably because it was dirty and barely worked (The seller initially emailed me to cancel the sale because the system wouldn't turn on, but then he took it apart and replaced the power switch and it seemed to work normally).
My new 1-Chip console arrived about two weeks ago. When it arrived I stripped it down and cleaned every inch of it, including using Deoxit on the pin connectors and the controller ports. After cleaning and reassembly, I played a couple of games on it, and to be honest I didn't see a dramatic difference between it and the older model I have been using for years. Was it a little sharper? Maybe, but it wasn't dramatic enough that I would feel confident trying to pick it out of a lineup.
At the same time I ordered an RGB bypass board based on the THS7374 chip from Voultar's mod shop.
The chip arrived this weekend and as with any work like this, I read the instructions at least 3 times to make sure I don't mess something up. The product listing for the bypass board only addresses the SNES Jr/Mini console. While the same chip is suitable for either of them, the installation process is different because the SNES Jr/Mini console shipped without an RGB amp at all. You just install the bypass board and you're done. With the full-sized 1-Chip models you first have to disconnect the existing RGB lines. This isn't mentioned or linked-to from the product page as far as I can tell, but i eventually found the correct instructions and the mod went in on Saturday.
The difference was utterly fantastic. The first thing I noticed was that everything was sharp and the colors were crystal clear - the same level of clarity I get from my Genesis RGB output. The second thing I noticed was that the image was "straighter" and more solid.
I spent a good portion of the day playing Star Fox, Super Castlevania IV, Star Ocean and Super Turrican. The quality is just amazing.
Now there's just one more modification I need to make before I'll consider it done. When connecting a SNES to a digital upscaler like the OSSC, there's an odd "ghosting" effect - there's a video below that shows what's going on.
The new capacitor is in the mail, and will hopefully go in this weekend.
UPDATE: I installed the new capacitor to fix the "ghosting" before verifying that I was experiencing it. Oddly enough the new capacitor actually made things worse. I didn't do any extensive testing, but I noticed that when using the Super Gameboy the top row of pixels constantly flickered, and the overall picture seemed duller. I restored the original capacitor and everything went back to being awesome. It was only then that I checked it on the OSSC for "ghosting". If it's happening I cannot tell at all. So I suppose the ghost fix isn't for everyone.
Where to buy the rgb bypass chip
http://voultar.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=51
How to install it
http://retrorgb.com/snes1chip7374.html
Bonus Round - "Ghosting" Fix
https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=61072&start=95
What It's Actually Fixing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TnScaNWo0M
When the SNES came out, I was obsessed with it. The financial disposition of my family did nothing to diminish my passion, and I was the king of delayed gratification. It is an odd coincidence that like my first NES, I received my first SNES while my family was utterly without a TV. The first time first time I played it, I did so by connecting the audio portion of the multi-out to a stereo I had recycled from somewhere. I popped in Super Mario World, and listened to the opening sequence. I hit the start button and mashed random buttons until the game started and I could hear Mario jump. I started trying to time my jumps by counting the seconds between the stage music starting and the sound of Mario dying. It was crude, and I have no idea how far I managed to get or what stage I might have been on. If my parents weren't worried after I insisted that I didn't want anything for my birthday or for Christmas, just a Super NES, and I didn't care if we didn't have a TV right now, I knew we'd have one eventually, the sight of me playing SNES on my stereo day after day might have made them think twice.
Why bring this up? I think it qualifies nicely as the worst picture quality ever, which is a perfect starting point to walk through the gradual increase in the fidelity of my Super NES experiences.
Probably a month after my parents exchanged worried stares watching me play SNES blind, my step-father managed to find a TV. It was the oldest TV I had ever seen. Instead of the standard rectangular box shape, it appeared more experimental like something inspired by the Jetsons. You didn't hear me complain, though. Any picture was a 1000% improvement over what I had. So my first _sighted_ SNES experience was on that old B&W using RF Out through a 75-300 ohm matching transformer (the thing that converts coax into the two wires which attach under the antenna screws.) Super Mario World, resplendent in gray-scale, was almost everything I had hoped it would be. Since all of the Koopa shells (except the flashing ones) were the exact same shade, I had to experiment to figure out which were which. (For the uninitiated, in Super Mario World you ride a little dinosaur that eats things, and when he eats a turtle shell, different things happen according to the color of the shell. If it's red, he spits out fire, if it's blue he grows wings and flies, and if it's yellow he stomps the ground violently when you jump).
My next visual upgrade to color and direct-coax RF was when my parents dropped me off at my grandmother's apartment and I convinced her I was not going to damage her TV by playing my game on it. (Honestly I had it up and working before we finished the conversation where she gave her permission - partly because I was adept at connecting a Nintendo to a TV, and partly because my parents had implied that she had already said it was okay when in fact the matter was still being debated. ) Familial tension aside, color was bliss.
We eventually moved to another state for reasons which I can't remember, and after spending a few nights sleeping in a car, we ended up living in a hotel room for about 6 months. The hotel had a new-ish TV and the best picture I had seen to date. I remember it had knobs in the back for adjusting the h-size and v-size, and I used to turn the h-size all the way down because the pixel pitch was smaller and the picture seemed clearer. I spent many a day in that dark room playing through Final Fight and Super Smash TV over and over and over until I could almost finish each one with a single life. My stepfather and I also rented Joe & Mac, HAL's HyperZone, Bill Lambeer's Combat Basketball and Super Baseball Simulator 1.000.
We eventually moved to yet another state and again slept in a car for several days, then rented a very small house, and again had no TV. By that point I was a freshman in high school and I had fallen in love with the place we lived. When my parents once again started coming up short with the rent, I made the sacrifice of selling off my NES and SNES and all of my games to get enough money to pay the next month's rent. At the time it seemed like everything would be okay if we could just get through that one month, and the prospect of staying was well worth it to me. Had I known then that my mother was hell bent on leaving no matter what, I might have gone another way, but hindsight is 20/20. My SNES, like the ring of power was lost and passed out of all knowledge.
...Until a friend I had lent money to was unable to pay me back and suggested I might accept a SNES instead of cash. Fond memories won the day, and like that I was back in - still connecting my SNES through RF.
When I was 18 and living on my own, with one of the first chunks of disposable income I ever had, I went to a local pawn shop and very carefully selected a TV with stereo speakers, and RCA inputs to ensure that I got the best picture from my small but growing collection of game consoles. On that TV I played Final Fantasy II(IV) and Final Fantasy III(VI), Chronotrigger, The Secret of Mana, Super Castlevania IV, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island and dozens of others. As far as I was concerned, that was the best it was ever going to get.
...Then I got a new job with better pay, and was determined to get a TV with S-Video. I bought an S-Video SNES cable, and a 36-inch Sony WEGA. The SNES looked phenomenal on the TV, but unfortunately the set suffered from a terrible vertical banding problem which Sony refused to recognize as a defect, so I returned the TV before the return window expired, and a couple of months later pulled the trigger on a Samsung Widescreen CRT HDTV. The Samsung looked Amazing for DVD content, and it supported progressive-scan so it looked great with most of the newer consoles, but the SNES was kind of disappointing on it, even with the S-Video cables. I decided that when I could, I would need to get another SDTV CRT to keep around just to play older game systems on.
Eventually I bought another 36-inch WEGA from Craigslist and reveled in the beauty of S-Video with my SNES (and other consoles - I even S-video modded my Genesis, lol) on a proper SDTV.
Now _THAT_ was the best it was going to get.
Then I stumbled across this on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/SPECIALTY-AV-SCART-Component-Converter-Genesis/dp/B004XSSDPO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517885374&sr=8-1&keywords=scart+to+component
My WEGA had component video inputs which offers an even higher level of fidelity than S-Video, but this was a different color standard from the rest of the world and though many of my game consoles were capable of outputting RGB, it was not compatible with the standard adopted in the US (known as "component", YUV, or YPBPR) but this little adapter thingy could supposedly convert the signal. It was too delicious an opportunity to pass up so I ordered one along with an RGB SCART cable for the SNES to see this for myself.
The picture quality was a noticeable jump - not as dramatic as the jump to S-Video, but the colors were more vibrant and distinctive, and of course there was no going back. I quickly bought up SCART cables for every console I had that would support them (and then later had to buy replacements because not all SCART cables are created equal, lol), and after researching SCART switches, ended up buying a set of bad-but-not-terrible Mad Katz physically switched switch boxes and daisy-chaining them together. Buying them was somewhat of an adventure because at the time, Amazon had inextricably labeled SCART switches as a non-exportable item, so I had to broker the deal with the seller via messaging in Amazon. But Amazon scans your messages for signs you're doing this and blocks them, so we had to resort to crypic phrases like "send me a rhymes with wind voice, through rhymes with play pal" (Translation: "send me an invoice through PayPal").
As my obsession with RGB grew, I ended up finding sites like retrorgb.com and videogameperfection.com which both had excellent resources and eventually I snagged one of the quick-to-disappear gscartsw RGB switches, and some premium SCART cables.
As an aside, part of the reason that my SNES picture was terrible when it was connected to an HDTV was because older game consoles took liberties with the video standards of the time and sort of made their own. The shortcoming of that is that because it wasn't part of the standard, rather just something that took advantage of the characteristics of CRTs, when HDTVs came out, most of them didn't account for this standards deviation. Even when an HDTV supported the ad-hoc standard, the scaler (the thing that turns your standard-def output into something that fills the whole hi-def screen) was designed to upconvert old TV content, not video games. One very excellent solution to this problem is the "OSSC" the Open-Source-Scan-Converter. It's a device that takes the RGB signals from your old game consoles and scales them perfectly on an HDTV in such a way that it doesn't introduce input lag. I still prefer my CRTs, but the OSSC solved this problem thoroughly enough that I could definitely and finally really enjoy SNES on an HDTV.
My consoles had never looked better and I really thought what I have now is surely the best it's going to get. If you've been following along, it should be no surprise that I was once again wrong.
The latest (I dare not call it the final) iteration of improving the SNES picture comes courtesy of the later model SNES consoles - a.k.a. "1-Chip". They're called this because Nintendo consolidated several of the IC's (Integrated circuits - black rectangle thingies) into a single chip to save costs, and also because the phrase "1-Chip" is silkscreened onto the PCB itself. I'm by no means an expert so I'm relating what is probably an imperfect understanding here. With the original SNES design, the image processing passed through several chips causing the signal to degrade slightly and resulting in an overall blurrier and softer look. Since the 1-Chip design processed most, if not all, picture information within the same chip there was less space to become degraded and so the picture coming out of a 1-Chip is noticeably sharper (when using RGB output). However there were two drawbacks - one, the 1-Chip did not properly attenuate the signal, resulting in a picture that was too bright causing it to lose some of the color detail, and because the design was so radically different from the earlier revisions of the system, certain games have minor issues when played on one of these consoles.
So the original SNES design resulted in a soft/blurry picture, but with accurate colors and brightness, and the 1-Chip had a sharper picture but lost color accuracy and was too bright, so it was a trade-off no matter what you had. The difference with the 1-chip, however is that the problem is correctable. By bypassing the onboard RGB amplifier and running the signals coming out of the encoder through a properly tuned amplifier, you can get the sharpness of the 1-Chip design, plus accurate colors and brightness.
It seemed like a fun project, so I hunted through all of my SNES consoles hoping that I already had a 1-Chip model. Unfortunately I didn't, and neither did any of the local game shops in my city, so I had to resort to eBay where most of the sellers expect a premium for them, even if they don't exactly understand why people want them. I was able to get one at a fairly reasonable price - probably because it was dirty and barely worked (The seller initially emailed me to cancel the sale because the system wouldn't turn on, but then he took it apart and replaced the power switch and it seemed to work normally).
My new 1-Chip console arrived about two weeks ago. When it arrived I stripped it down and cleaned every inch of it, including using Deoxit on the pin connectors and the controller ports. After cleaning and reassembly, I played a couple of games on it, and to be honest I didn't see a dramatic difference between it and the older model I have been using for years. Was it a little sharper? Maybe, but it wasn't dramatic enough that I would feel confident trying to pick it out of a lineup.
At the same time I ordered an RGB bypass board based on the THS7374 chip from Voultar's mod shop.
The chip arrived this weekend and as with any work like this, I read the instructions at least 3 times to make sure I don't mess something up. The product listing for the bypass board only addresses the SNES Jr/Mini console. While the same chip is suitable for either of them, the installation process is different because the SNES Jr/Mini console shipped without an RGB amp at all. You just install the bypass board and you're done. With the full-sized 1-Chip models you first have to disconnect the existing RGB lines. This isn't mentioned or linked-to from the product page as far as I can tell, but i eventually found the correct instructions and the mod went in on Saturday.
The difference was utterly fantastic. The first thing I noticed was that everything was sharp and the colors were crystal clear - the same level of clarity I get from my Genesis RGB output. The second thing I noticed was that the image was "straighter" and more solid.
I spent a good portion of the day playing Star Fox, Super Castlevania IV, Star Ocean and Super Turrican. The quality is just amazing.
Now there's just one more modification I need to make before I'll consider it done. When connecting a SNES to a digital upscaler like the OSSC, there's an odd "ghosting" effect - there's a video below that shows what's going on.
The new capacitor is in the mail, and will hopefully go in this weekend.
UPDATE: I installed the new capacitor to fix the "ghosting" before verifying that I was experiencing it. Oddly enough the new capacitor actually made things worse. I didn't do any extensive testing, but I noticed that when using the Super Gameboy the top row of pixels constantly flickered, and the overall picture seemed duller. I restored the original capacitor and everything went back to being awesome. It was only then that I checked it on the OSSC for "ghosting". If it's happening I cannot tell at all. So I suppose the ghost fix isn't for everyone.
Where to buy the rgb bypass chip
http://voultar.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=51
How to install it
http://retrorgb.com/snes1chip7374.html
Bonus Round - "Ghosting" Fix
https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=61072&start=95
What It's Actually Fixing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TnScaNWo0M
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