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Dreygor

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While not a monitor issue .. it is monitor related so I guess this could go here. I am more looking for people's thoughts and opinions on the best way to take a standard arcade CGA/CRT signal to VGA to use on a modern flat panel. Preferring a stand alone device that does not cost a fortune. Something reliable that does a fairly descent job. Please post links where to buy or video demonstration of said device.

I do not want to get into the whole keep the cab original CRT debate .. I always do when I can. This is more of a technical discussion.
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If I understand correctly, you are looking for an upscaler and to my understanding the OSSC seems to be what you are looking for.
 
GBS-8200

Cheap and does exactly what you want. Not perfect but good enough.
 
If I understand correctly, you are looking for an upscaler and to my understanding the OSSC seems to be what you are looking for.
Nah not upscale so much .. but to take a signal from an arcade PCB and display it on a VGA monitor or TV. OSSC might be the way to go but at what cost. I am thinking more along of what Frank posted with the Gonbes. I was just wondering if there was a better solution that I was not aware of.
 
Thanks @Dreygor. The use case would be for model a twin VOOT 5.2, no monitors looking to replace with 32 in widescreen.

Couple of questions.

The retrotink 2x does not do RGB so that's a no go correct?

How does the GBS 8200 compare to the 8220?

Anyone have experience with the Chinese knockoff OSSC?
 
The Taito Scaler is the best/only direct to VGA line doubler I know of.
It's not going to be easy to find, it was only sold as a part of the official Taito Vewlix JAMMA kit that has now been discontinued.
I think @ekorz had a loose one for sale?
You'll also need to amplify any/all SCART signals, as this was designed for arcade level RGBs and keep in mind it may not work with every 15khz source.

You can use a OSSC with a cheap HDMI-to-VGA adapter...
The nice thing about most of these cheap adapters is they do not add any additional lag, its a strictly digital to analog conversion with line decimation (set to 640x480).

I say avoid the GBS 82** at ALL costs!
It's conversion process is not only laggy but very very poor quality/looking.
I hated mine so much I gave it to @werejag for free (but I almost feel like I should have paid him to take it, it sucks that fucking bad).
AVOID!!
 
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the problem with the gonbes converter is that they're "frame" based converters... meaning it waits for the whole frame to collect in it's buffer, (which takes 16ms at 60Hz) then it upscales the frame (which takes some amount of ms) then it outputs to your LCD (which adds additional input lag).

the OSSC is a "line" based converter which means it only waits for 1 line of pixels to get loaded into the buffer and then upscales just that line before the next line is set, this means it only takes a fraction of a ms to do the conversion (so for 240P60Hz that would be 16/240 or 0.07ms of lag) as opposed to 16ms+ for the gonbes.
 
Any chance that will do DOWN-scaling?

I think the OSSC does a good job of up-scaling but other than the UVC there's no good option to convert 31KHz down to 24Khz or 15Khz.

downscaling is useful for things like running Model 2/3 or System 24 on a 15KHz monitor or running Xbox 360, Lindbergh, or TTX on a 24KHz or 15KHz monitor.
 
Shameless plug, things are looking good for a 2019 release of https://irkenlabs.com/retro-scaler-a1/introduction
It blows the Taito scaler out of the water quality wise, IMHO - did A/B testing with it.
@invzim
What resolution does that output at ? What kind of input are on it? What are the two connectors in the middle for? What's the SD card connector for ? Price point? .. yep im intrigued :)
Input is either Arcade or console RGB, and arcade/computer sync or console sync - all via the HD15 connector. SD card is for firmware update and likely settings. Connectors in the middle are just development connectors, they will not be on the shipped product which looks a bit more like this:
https://irkenlabs.com/32-new-upscaler-prototype
I'm up to rev 1.5 now, which will hopefully be the last :)

Vertical resolution is line doubled, so 240 lines becomes 480 lines. Compared to the OSSC the differences is it's a 4 layer PCB (OSSC is 2 layer), different ADC, analog output instead of HDMI, dedicated sync processing circuitry outside the ADC, and a dedicated ARM cpu to handle house-keeping without eating FPGA resources.

Design goal was to make something like the xrgb2, but readily available. I'm pretty pleased with the image quality, which is (again in my opinion) far superior to the xrgb2.

Price point is not set, as I don't have the assembly quotes in yet - it will be more expensive than the OSSC (parts cost is higher & lower volume) - but hopefully still good value.

Kind of hard to take snaps, but did this earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ODdy0zBgvM

What to look for is 'stable pixels'
 
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Yes it's an option, the monitor in the video is 31K only.
 
Yes :) It has an option to output with scanlines, pretty much the same as OSSC and XRGB2 (and probably a few others).
 
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