I’m Ruby。 I’m roughly 20 apples tall
ルビーです。背がりんごを20つぐらいです。

I drew my profile pic and banner. The gameplay in the banner is from dragon quest 1 for game boy that I recorded myself.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

I'm not much of a programmer or EE. I've dabbled, but I've never really done anything serious and I think the concepts are beyond me. Trouble is, I know enough to understand how things work, even though I can't make use of that knowledge, which makes me something absolutely detestable: An Ideas Guy.

Thing is, I think I have some pretty good ideas. Several of them eventually materialize when other people finally have the same thought. But then there's stuff that sits in my head for years and years and I don't see any hint that someone else is looking into those same concepts, and it's a bummer because I know exactly what needs to be done, I just can't execute any of it.

So basically I nerdsnipe myself periodically, and then I just have to sit around and fantasize about my idea existing, because it never will unless, basically, I hire someone to implement it. Which won't ever happen. Anyway, here's one of those ideas, in two parts.


YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

I use a $15 hdmi to composite converter and the latency is… practically nonexistent… I run whatever I want on the crt through OBS and full screen the source onto the CRT, resolution is fully customizable with that obviously, sometimes I even run my actual hardware through OBS and onto the CRT for G-d knows why and I do not notice input delay with that even, and like, I do speedruns of Mario and shit, maybe it’s just my computer is a genius or I’m blessed but it really isn’t a problem, also with the desktop icons going all crazy not an issue for me either because I extend my display instead of mirroring it, also my original gaming hardware is unmodified so honestly emulators running to the CRT look “better” than my NES or super famicom do using my methods, but yeah maybe my setup is just built different or something, or maybe you’re looking for something beyond my understanding!


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

do you need an FPGA to do the analog video generation part? I always thought there were dedicated output chips that will wrap your RGB[24:0] digital signal into analog with appropriate vsync/vblank/etc. It's interfacing that with USB that might potentially be an FPGA problem.

I agree there may be dedicated chips you could use, but an FPGA would make it incredibly easy to prototype a working solution up, since you could just reconfigure the thing if you need to. Stuff some existing IP blocks into it, maybe later replace them with prefab parts. I don't really know.

It does seem very strange that for all the work I've seen go into retro input, I have seen almost nothing that goes the other way.

Like, where's the "reverse RetroTINK"? Even just something as simple as "I plug HDMI into it, and composite comes out the other end, seems the exclusive domain of shitty AliExpress specials at this point.

I realize regular consumer interest is mostly long past except maybe for a few aging boomers, but it's disappointing the retro scene seems less interested in preserving the experience of quality analog output.

From what I (loosely) understand, doing good composite is very device-specific. Do not quote me on this.

There are really good cheap HDMI to Component or VGA converters, and ways to use those for S-Video, I have one of the HDMI to Component converters (ironically as part of a digital output chain for very goofy reasons), but you can't just use those for all the standard SDTV you'd find in the US most of the time.