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Retro Scaler A1

Seems like the stock Vewlix C monitor may just suck at taking the video from the A1 and doing its own up-scaling thing to get to it’s native 768p. Would be good to hear if other C owners have the same experience, but I’m just going to blame the jitter I’m seeing on the Vewlix monitor’s internal scaler.

I plugged the source into two more 1080p monitors including the one I’m planing on installing in this C, and those looked great. Very happy with this combo!
 
ekorz said:
I’m just going to blame the jitter I’m seeing on the Vewlix monitor’s internal scaler.
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One other thing you might try is checking all of your grounds. usually when I have video issues like that it's either a bad ground or noise being introduced into the ground.

are you powering the A1 from the Wei-Ya PSU/step down? maybe try a different PSU without a step-down?
 
@twistedsymphony the jammafier was always powered by the wei-ya but I did try sourcing power for the scaler from elsewhere. But maybe I will try powering the whole shebang from something else and then just feeding that monitor video, to isolate it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that POS is the source of the issue. At least only the stock monitor suffered, the others did look fine despite the wei-ya’s involvement.
 
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radiantsvgun said:
Double dragon 2- not good, game comes up, but the screen is overly blue.
Cadash- boots but has odd shimmering but does work with sound.
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radiantsvgun said:
Futari BL another version and Ibara Black- they work, but have a very weird refresh? It’s consistently jittering and shaking. Seems like all the cv-1000 hardware does it.
Sand Scorpion - has some choppy horizontal lines but does work and colors look great

Sky shark- syncs, has the same choppy horizontal lines as sand scorpion but I was not expecting this to work.
Gradius 2- works, screen is dark, looks washed out. On gameplay it’s like you can see the refresh rate- a constant black area keeps scrolling up and down.
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Glad you like it! Interesting results, and thanks for pulling out all this stuff - I added the ones without issues.

It's always a bit hard to describe video oddities, and this is old analog stuff, so the A1 will not make it look mame-perfect all the time.

On colors - the A1 does "white-balance" as part of it's gain adjustments, it's assumed that every game has a good white. I think Gradius is an example of this, I think it looks more like it does in mame than directly to an old 15khz when being run through the A1.
It doesn't adjust this all the time, but once on startup and then again a few seconds later, and then again later if the levels are clipping. You can trigger this re-adjustment by pressing the A button. Can you try this on
  • Double Dragon 2 and Gradius 2?

Cadash - I have heard of one or two boards that have the speaker stuff inverted, so in this rev I put a toggle switch on the Jammafier, you can try to flip the switch to "-" to see if it makes a difference.

I have CV1K (EspGaluda 2) and Gradius 2, and they should work well. On CV1K it was a bit of bowing on top right corner when used with an LCD, video showing the issue at the tested sources page. Just did a quadruple-check on Gradius 2, and this is what it comes up like on my desk LCD:
gradius2.JPG

CV1K bowing on a particular LCD:
https://irkenlabs.com/images/scaler-a1/2019-12-20_pink_sweets.gif

Can you snap a picture/video of some of the games with issues -Sand Scorpion/SkyShark good enough to be put in the no issues category?
 
I tried to get some video/photographs but it does show up well. It is completely possible that it’s the lcd at play- the black diamond lcd is very picky. Hopefully by this weekend I can do some crt testing- I need some parts to make an adapter to run the sun power supply off of an outlet.
 
Double dragon 2 can be counted as working now- tried a new vga cord and it works. Has a little bit of vertical line jitter but looks good overall.
 
Just got my A1 today, and i can confirm it gives amazing picture quality. It's crisp, clean, vibrant, no lag, it's just great.

I haven't tried it on my Supergun because i'm dumb and forgot to order what's necessary to build a cable, but on a Naomi Nanao CRT it's looking great. The only small caveat is that i can't adjust the picture to the full size of the screen, settings pots to the maximum H/V size don't give 100% full picture, but maybe i've done something wrong (it could be my screen but it was fine with JVS system so i'm not really sure about this)

I can't wait to test it on my PC CRT !
 
Catzoo said:
The only small caveat is that i can't adjust the picture to the full size of the screen
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Adjust your vertical and horizontal size limits. The pots are on the chassis (H.S.LIM and V.S.LIM IIRC).
 
Catzoo said:
Just got my A1 today, and i can confirm it gives amazing picture quality. It's crisp, clean, vibrant, no lag, it's just great.

I haven't tried it on my Supergun because i'm dumb and forgot to order what's necessary to build a cable, but on a Naomi Nanao CRT it's looking great. The only small caveat is that i can't adjust the picture to the full size of the screen, settings pots to the maximum H/V size don't give 100% full picture, but maybe i've done something wrong (it could be my screen but it was fine with JVS system so i'm not really sure about this)

I can't wait to test it on my PC CRT !
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Please tell your fellow countrymen :) The original JVS-PAC had a lot of French users, but for my later stuff the US is dominating by a good margin.

H/V size of the image is dependent on the source, i.e. game, so it will be different. I think old games have more borders than newer (black), and the A1 simply doubles this. Fixing that in the A1 would not be easy, but probably not impossible.
What I have been thinking about though is an 'auto-center' thing so you you don't have to mess with H/V position.
 
invzim said:
Please tell your fellow countrymen :) The original JVS-PAC had a lot of French users, but for my later stuff the US is dominating by a good margin.
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Will do ! As a matter of fact, i spent all day trying to write and shoot a video to raise awareness about it, but i felt into the rabbit hole by trying to explain to "non tech user" what it is, what it does, and what it could be used for. Not sure i'll see the end of it D:


nem said:
Catzoo said:
The only small caveat is that i can't adjust the picture to the full size of the screen
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Adjust your vertical and horizontal size limits. The pots are on the chassis (H.S.LIM and V.S.LIM IIRC).
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Oh so you can make it bigger on the chassis than what's available on the remote ? Great to know !

Here's a few phone pics, for what it's worth (it's really hard to capture how clean this is with just my phone obviously)
 

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invzim said:
I was not actually aware of this, any negatives in doing so?
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Not that I know of. I'm sure they're there for a reason, but I haven't blown a chassis yet. I've been running a Sanwa PM1745 at max values for a few months (max horizontal width, max horizontal size limit) and no issues yet.
 
Stuff below this line will be tested on both the Vewlix Diamond monitor, and a 480P CRT-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Works perfectly on both:
In the Hunt
Librero Grande
The Final Blow
Dancing Eyes
PGM2 - Oriental Legend 2
PGM2 - Knights of Valor 3
PGM2 - DoDonPachi DaiOuJou Tamashii

Works on CRT but not LCD:
Outzone
Atomiswave
DJ Boy
Magical Drop
Power Instinct

Oddities:
Crystal System - cuts off the top pixel line or two on LCD, perfect on CRT.


Out of Range/otherwise not displaying anything on either monitor:
Combatribes
Analogue Nt Mini (A1's light flickers between colors, doesn't seem to be catching sync)
 
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@invzim are the A1's that went out in this last batch already on current firmware? And by chance do you know anything about if the Nt Mini could be persuaded to work somehow (even if it means throwing another device in the chain to change the sync?).
 
rewrite said:
@invzim are the A1's that went out in this last batch already on current firmware? And by chance do you know anything about if the Nt Mini could be persuaded to work somehow (even if it means throwing another device in the chain to change the sync?).
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Good thing majority worked. If you place a file called "rsa1debug.txt" on an sd-card and start with that, it will do all kinds of logging and we can see details on what's going on - it will also show firmware version which I'm 99.8% sure is the latest.

Did you try sync=scart for the nt mini?
 
invzim said:
Did you try sync=scart for the nt mini?
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I was unaware this is an option. I'll look into it. It works over a VGA cable in my usual setup so I didn't think about it syncing differently.

I'll toss that file on there and see what it logs!
 
@rewrite - added your latest tests to the list. Would be interesting to get to the bottom of what's up with Combatribes. I decided to give up on keeping track of titles with issues on specific vewlix LCD's, but instead put this caveat on top of the list

Caveat for Vewlix owners - the LCD in one or more models of the Vewlix, particularly the Diamond variety, may not process the scaled output of the A1 properly or at all for some of the titles below. The majority of titles work without issues.


Do you (and other vewlix owners, @Derick2k) feel this is correct and fair?
 
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