Yesterware

When choosing my "modern" TV, I did a lot of research and comparison and wound up with the very excellent KDL-70R550A which has so far supported everything I have thrown at it.  Every console via the OSSC just works, every scaling mode, every oddball resolution, every janky sync signal, everything. A few weeks ago, I installed an NESRGB on an NES for a friend.  He was using an OSSC to scale it to his PC monitor and a Panasonic Plasma, but could never get better than 2x.  He wasn't terribly concerned as those were stopgaps until his "real" gaming TV arrived.  Unfortunately the TV he bought couldn't tolerate the NES's irregular sync signal.  Fiddling with OSSC settings made it possible to display in 5x mode, but it would randomly lose sync. Some Background Others have analyzed and explained it far better than I, but the gist of the problem my friend was having was because of a design flaw in the original NES/SNES video output.  CRT televisions were cons...

Short story long, most 80's and 90's era game consoles used off-the-shelf integrated circuits for video/picture processing, and most of those integrated circuits generated RGB as well as composite video.  As a result, even when the console manufacturers didn't bother to connect the RGB lines, RGB could still be enabled by tapping the RGB lines from the IC directly and connecting an amplifier to drive them.  The best example of this is the Turbo Duo/PC Engine Duo. When it comes to the NES/Famicom, things become a bit more interesting.  Nintendo used a custom "PPU" chip to drive video, and as a result, RGB is not exposed, and can't simply be "tapped and amplified". Enter the NESRGB.  Rather than trying to tap RGB from somewhere on the board, the NESRGB actually hijacks the entire PPU chip. You literally have to desolder the PPU from the board and place a device in between it and the system.  I mean, look at this thing, it's crazy. NES RGB Mod - the...