Sup wizards, You may remember me from such threads as Gimme miracle TV, in which LocalH posted a link that incidentally provided some background information about, but no solution to, this issue. Whereas that was slightly more general, I think this sufficiently technical to warrant posting here; move it if I've judged wrongly, of course. In short, my Saturn looks terrible on my CRT TV, to which it is connected via an RGB SCART cable. Or rather: it looks pretty great until things start moving. Then there's interlacing everywhere. This shouldn't happen, should it? The Saturn almost always outputs 240p, an LDTV format that should be supported by almost everything. I'm presuming my TV isn't familiar with this—possibly because of some difference introduced by the NTSC encoding?—and therefore is trying to deinterlace a signal that isn't interlaced, thus creating novel interlacing. The TFT doesn't look great with the Saturn either, but the problem appears to be upscaling and not interlacing. That figures, since the TFT can handle NTSC signals better in my limited experience. Wat do? I noticed this a few years ago (when I last played my Saturn ;_; ) but had less knowledge of video-related phenomena such as interlacing, so I was just as likely to attribute it to a bad output and/or cable as to the encoding. Is it as simple as needing a better TV? Tell me this isn't some unique problem of my lovely skeleton Saturn! TELL MEEE. I'm fine with buying a new cable, but I have no idea how that could be the cause. TIA.
Do you have these quality issues with other consoles that output a 240p signal? If there is no issues with them, perhaps the software you are running on the Saturn is actually running at 480i.
Thanks for the reply. I have no others to test! There's an old MD, but it'd be RF and so it'd look awful in any case (that is, it'll be a confounding factor in any investigation of quality), and more so: It's not NTSC, leaving me unable to test my only lead as to a possible cause. There's probably a way to get the Wii outputting 240p using one of the retro emulators or something, but I haven't specifically tried that; if it has happened automatically (due to my no-filters-allowed, originalpixelfaggoty settings), I've not noticed any problem like this. And again, that would probably run in PAL 240p, not NTSC; I don't know if Genesis Plus GX or SNES9XGX offer any way to force a non-native encoding. It's highly doubtful. Very few games used the Saturn's 'high-res' (480i) mode, and I don't believe I have any of them; the interlacing I referred to was observed in NiGHTS into Dreams..., which certainly hasn't come up on any lists I've seen. — Is my theory about it being due to NTSC and my TV's poor support thereof way off, or not? I really don't want to find out it's some problem with my Saturn, but it looks way too much like deliberate interlacing to be a hardware accident; I'd imagine that a chip or cable problem would produce a picture that was just bad, not good-but-horrifically-interlaced. Are you even supposed to run an NTSC Saturn through a SCART? I'm just confusing myself now. :v:
NTSC Saturns do not have 12V for SCART autoswitch signal but Csync instead and if you use EU SCART cable on it it will drain Csync and it will cause you all kind of image problems.
Thanks! We may be getting somewhere; I didn't know there were such significant differences. Could you explain that more for a layman? Out of interest as well as practicality. I'm glad you saw this and helped out; I know you're an expert on all this stuff! [edit] It seems this is where you heard about it – http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?13966-Mod-How-to-make-an-NTCS-Saturn-work-with-an-EU-scart-cable – I'm currently Googling for more information myself, but it'd still be cool if you have energy to provide a summary. [/edit]] Does it mean I just need to buy a SCART from Japan/the US? postan from Wii ololo Edit: (no longer on Wii as that was excruciating) Do I just need this? http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sega-Saturn-stereo-RGB-SCART-cable-RAW-SYNC-NTSC-model-Saturn-lead-cord-/160727288133?pt=Video_Games_Accessories&hash=item256c17c945#ht_1829wt_1037 This is me assuming csync = composite sync. Good old eBay! I can't wait to order and receive this, if it's what I need.
The bad news: the custom-made cables (one spare) I bought on eBay are total shit. YMMV and all that, but beware in any case. The good news: My new Sony Trinitron 28" CRT TV displays this Saturn perfectly, without any wrongly added interlacing, dot-crawl, or anything. Whether this is because the TV just rules, or because my failed attempts to remove pin 8 from the cable were just sufficient to break the wire connected to it, I don't know—and I guess I don't really care! But that provides a hint for anyone else who runs across this or a similar problem: thanks to TmEE (via PM), I learned that you shouldn't need to buy a custom-made cable; rather, you should just be able to use a standard official European SCART cable and remove the connection to pin 8 (composite sync, which you definitely don't want alongside an RGB signal), whether by pushing the pin in, pulling it out, twisting it off, cutting the wire in the cable, or anything else that works. (Some guides detail how to cut the connection in your Saturn itself, but I think that's an unnecessary serious hardware modification and therefore a load o’ bollocks.) Picture soon, maybe.
Correction, it is Composite Sync only on NTSC machines, on PAL machines it is 12V for SCART autoswitch. But the problems come from the Csync signal being drained by the 12V input on TV which causes loss of sync.
