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FOUND Hook up Consoles to Retro Scaler A1 (XRGB2+ vs A1 comparison pics)

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GhaleonUnlimited

GhaleonUnlimited

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I've had this Irken Labs Retro Scaler A1 and have not successfully made a cable to actually use it. I need a custom SCART adapter for consoles but no one seems to make a female SCART to male RGB Db15 (pinout in the link).

I've contacted the big SCART cable makers but haven't had luck on my inquiries on a custom cable (I know they're busy).

Here's the item and pinout: https://irkenlabs.com/scalera1/rgb-and-sync/

Either :

1. Do you know anyone who I could just say "Here's what I need, can you make this cable please?"

Or

2. I will happily mail someone all the parts and wires needed if you could just wire it up for me, and I'll pay your rate for the work!

Idk what I'm doing wrong but I've tried and failed to make it myself, and it'd be really helpful to have this for my setup. It's been really frustrating to not understand what I'm doing wrong, tho I know this should be simple and I repair my own cables.

Irken Labs always gets back to my questions, but isn't sure what the trouble couple be.

Thx!
 
What is your intended use case? You mentioned consoles and it should still work fine in most applications but this device is primarily designed for a 15Khz arcade video signal.

From first hand experience I can confirm this can work to take SCART RGB in and push HD15 out in a format that the Retro Scaler A1 will accept:

https://www.arcadexpress.com/en/arc...ga-rgb-a-vga-limpiador-senal-sincronismo.html

Another route could be getting/making an RGB cable that terminates to HD15 and skipping the SCART conversion altogether. Retro Access and likely other vendors sell these for various consoles.

There's still the question of why you might want to go this route at all. Retro Scaler A1 outputs a 31Khz signal and that's only going to be useful with something like a VGA monitor or if your arcade monitor can only handle 31Khz and nothing else. This route can work fine but there's also lots of other line multipliers and video scalers that might be more useful options depending on your setup.
 
Thanks for the info! My main personal retrogame setup is a nice VGA CRT, so that's mainly it. I basically bought it to replace my XRGB2+, to see if the output was a little better.

I also do have superguns and boards, but I'm not sure how much I'll use it for those now that we have a house and I have a place for my cabs.

I also could use it to output VGA to my newer 27" ASUS monitors. 480p looks surpringly good on them.

Does that make sense?

Thanks very much for the link, I'll check this out!

If you have any other suggestions for 240p->VGA, let me know! I just know of the A1 and old XRGBs.
 
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tbh I would stick with XRGB2+. I used mine years ago with a VGA CRT and loved the results. It's really versatile and I like that takes a lot of different input types, not just RGB. Plus there are ways to tweak the image, where you don't really have that kind of control with the A1. It just line doubles and that's it. Admittedly it does a really good job at this and accepts a ton of (often wacky) different signal standards because it was designed with arcade boards in mind.

There are actually a number of great options out there these days. Aside from those two, if 480p is the absolute goal and consoles via RGB SCART are your main input, Retrotink2x paired with HDMI-to-VGA dongle is easy, fairly cheap and works fantastic with a VGA CRT. If you want something a little higher end maybe for more than just 480p output and lots of options built in, Retrotink5x is the best current offering all around for console video upscaling. A nice middle ground could be a GBS-C device - that one might be particularly useful for you since the GBS boards output to a VGA signal natively. You can either mod a GBS board yourself or get a pre-modded setup like GBS-AIO.
 
Thanks for the info! I bought the A1 a few years ago, so at least now I can compare them. I use games on events for entertainment so it's also just nice to have more scalers and options.

I wonder if A1 will work to use midway PCBs on a supergun to a VGA CRT, if the A1 specializes in wood refresh rates, when combined W this sync stripper? That would come in handy for MKII/UMK3. I guess I'll see now!

I use OSSCs for HDMI output, haven't seen the Retrotinks in action yet. I'm not super obsessed with video quality but I have wondered what the difference might be. Thanks for any further insight!
 
Anytime bro. Well aware of your work my friend, I really enjoyed the Seasons Beatings events and everything else you were involved in. Hope you've been doing well.

I've actually never tried the A1 with Midway boards. I'll try to give it a shot soon with a few of mine and let you know how it works out.
 
BroadwayJose said:
Anytime bro. Well aware of your work my friend, I really enjoyed the Seasons Beatings events and everything else you were involved in. Hope you've been doing well.

I've actually never tried the A1 with Midway boards. I'll try to give it a shot soon with a few of mine and let you know how it works out.
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Ah thanks:) I thought I recognized your name!

Is now been 10 years since the last SB so I expect less and less for anyone to remember them. So I'm really happy if people remember them all as a great time.

Thanks for checking it with a midway board in advance!

Yeah, I'm interested to see the difference between the converters. The XRGB2+ has a very slight shimmer on my monitor. I only really notice if I nearly press my nose to the screen, but was hoping the A1, just by virtue of being newer specialty tech, might have some advantages. I'll certainly still have uses for both.
 
I thought it'd be interesting to share pics of my XRGB2+ vs Retro Scaler A1, now that this adapter came and it finally works!

Nice VGA monitor

A1 on top (1st scanline setting) , XRGB on bottom (calibrated long ago)

The A1 is weirdly dark/muted, and jacking up the monitor brightness doesn't really fix it.

It's a SLIGHTLY more clear & stable picture. But the color flickers now and then on certain screens.

The XRGB pixels are slightly more meshed together. But I can only tell a difference if I'm this close to the monitor and doing a side-by-side test like this.

Overall I'll probably keep the XRGB as my main because of the versatility of the image settings.
PXL_20220910_022223546.jpg
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I think you need to configure the sim card correctly if you are seeing dim output. Make sure rgb is set to scart and sync is 75ohm.
 
OK, thanks. His site says try TTL first even for consoles, but I don't understand what either setting actually does. My NESRGB doesn't even connect to it as is. Thanks!

Yup 75-ohm is set.
 
@GhaleonUnlimited finally had a little bandwidth to do some testing. Here is a Midway board (MK2 in this case) operating on 31Khz via Retro Scaler A1:
20220915_122229.jpg

20220915_122234.jpg


Did not think to tweak settings on the A1 and further, I didn't even have an SD card installed into the device as of yet. As you can tell, the image looks really dark and similar results with everything else I've done preliminary testing with on the same monitor up to this point.

I tossed in a spare SD card, restarted the A1 to create the .ini file and the image was much improved this time:
20220915_133729.jpg


As a bonus, I'm running the video through a VGA distribution device, one output to this monitor and another to an LCD monitor. Picture looks good on the LCD also, aside from the v position a bit off initially:
20220915_133754.jpg


Thankfully it's not the resolution being cut off as I would normally expect when capturing Midway arcade video. Shifting the picture down via monitor settings fixed it, so nothing is actually lost in this case - I'm curious if this is a viable streaming solution now because that was always an issue with Midway boards. I'll have to test that eventually as well.

Here are the default settings in the .ini file - I did not tweak anything here yet:
20220915_133057.jpg

Finally, the other bit of possibly useful info is that I get my arcade video in this chain through the HD15 output of a Splitfire passthrough board. I don't know if it there is any attenuation performed there for the video but I'm assuming there is. That's probably going affect how the A1 settings deal with my setup.

It's all anecdotal because everyone's configuration is likely unique but hopefully something in my testing above might help.
 

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Oh nice man! I haven't tried my A1 with an actual board yet, just consoles. I'll try the SCART setting and see if TTL was making it dark for some reason.

Appreciate the testing and results!
 
I missed this thread :)

The A1 has an analog gain stage on R,G and B. It automatically adjusts this every time there is clipping, also after 8 seconds. If you want to manually trigger a re-adjust of analog gain, you can press the B button.

If the input is from a supergun, RGB should probably be set to 75-ohm in the .ini file, as the signal is likely already attenuated - leaving it on defaul arcade will result in double attenuation, and there is not enough head-room in the analog stage to make up for this.

EDIT: reading up on the splitfire, it seems this attenuates and re-amplifies the signal, so definitely 75-ohm for rgb in the .ini file when using this.
 
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