So, after years of playing Gamecube games on the Wii, and months of having to reach behind the TV to switch cables from the Wii U to the Wii to play them, I finally picked up a Gamecube and moved the Wii out of my living room. Running some tests on it, I noticed the picture seems blurry. Mega Man X in particular, I remember looking much crisper running from the Wii. After doing some research and finding that the Wii does not upscale Gamecube games, I want to figure out why it's blurry now. It's an SDTV running from a composite cable.
Tried running it from a Component cable?... presuming you have the money for one. Composite is practically blurry by nature, especially via NTSC.
I don't have a component cable, and looking online, it's almost impossible to buy one for under $100 nowadays. Also looking at the cables, how exactly do they work? I see absolutely no audio cords on it.
The Component cable plugs into a different slot. I presume you'd still use the RCA plugs from your normal cable for audio.
I'd like to add that GameCube with component cables are generally considered to provide better video quality than Wii with component cables. If component cables are not an option, then S-video should give a fair improvement assuming you got an NTSC cube (for a PAL cube you want an RGB cable, which should give even better quality than S-video) and be affordable. Just make sure it's a S-video cable for an NTSC cube, cause Nintendo did some weird stuff with their AV cables, with PAL cables adding additional resistors and/or capacitators not found in the NTSC cables.
If your Gamecube is DOL-101, it doesn't support component output. I'll second what Phredreeke said and suggest that you try s-video if this applies to you.
Of course, my TV doesn't have an S-Video connector. All it's got is composite, component, and coaxial. I suppose now isn't the best time to be fixing this problem, seeing as how I'm going to college in 2 months, where I'll be relying on my roommate to bring the TV, which I would imagine would be an HDTV. Fixes playing a Wii U on this TV, but then we're up with a whole other problem playing a Gamecube on that and making it look good. And it's 101 anyway. Since I have a return from the store I bought it from, I just need to know if this is actually a problem with the system or something. Everything else looked fine through composite on the TV, so is it just the way the Gamecube runs?
Annoyingly, some HDTVs are phasing out S-Video, too. I know my relatively-expensive Panasonic Plasma completely excised the input. Fortunately, I bought that for the family, and the relatively cheap-ass HDTV that the family bought for me a Christmas or two earlier does have S-Video. (It's got halos everywhere, making Earthbound look like ass with its black outlines everywhere around brightly-colored objects - but the TV seems to do well on the Sega CD version of this 240p test suite, so it's passable until I opt for an XRGB-mini or something. Someday...)
I'm surprised anything else looked good on that TV in composite, in comparison to what you were used to. Composite sucks when there are other options, there's a hard limit on horizontal resolution because everything is modulated onto a single signal. I know the PS2 looks like ass over composite, even on a CRT, but even more so on an HDTV.
Well, it turns out I'm an idiot. Not actually trying to focus on video quality this time, I started playing Mega Man X once again on the Gamecube. This time, I didn't see a graphical difference between this and the Wii. So I was probably just really wrong the first time.
Well yeah but the.GameCube component cables have a chip in to process the digital signal or something, as the GameCube doesn't have the stuff built in it to do so from scratch. My component cable cost me just over £80 quid, but the difference in quality is fantastic and I play a hell of a lot of it, as it's my first own home console and has so many good games.
The component cables have a DAC in them that makes you the analog signal out of digital input it receives. It is why the cable is expensive.
That's why I suggest a Wii for Gamecube gaming when possible, as its component cables are a lot cheaper than the Gamecube's. Plus, you can softmod it and most games work fine from a USB HDD.
Huh. That's pretty odd. Component is simply RGB converted to YUV, which UV are then merged into C (S-Video), and then C is merged into Y to create composite. If it had composite or YC output, why not output YUV as well? It surely must be generating YUV at some point during encoding to create S-Video or composite. I figure it's 'cause they used off-the-shelf parts that didn't support it, but it's still bad and nonsensical design. Having to use an external converter just blows. Might as well just opt for real RGB so you can get great quality out of everything without jumping through hoops. Problem is, even getting raw RGB inputs itself is a hoop to jump through if you're unfortunate enough to live in NA.
Yeah, really. I want a Jungle Green N64, and I want an N64 that can be modded for RGB, but these two are not one and the same - only earlier motherboard revisions of the N64 support RGB with some modding, not any of the later ones, including the Jungle Green ones I want. Not that I use anything better than S-Video right now, but y'know, options.
Do GC component cables output higher resolutions ? If so then that explains why the internal DACs are not used to make the component signal.
It allows for 31.47 kHz (aka "480p"), in addition to 15.6/15.734 kHz. The only reason they insisted on a second cable was because there wouldn't be any way for the system to tell if a component cable was connected to the regular AV port, since it doesn't have any mode sense pins. It's a rather stupid reason to add a whole other video port that requires an external DAC though, especially since they could have just added an extra 'pin' somewhere else in the connector, similar to USB 3.0. Addendum: On the Wii's AV port, the "RGB" lines are mapped directly to "YPbPr" when a component cable is connected, rather than using the logical order of mapping Y to G, Pb to B, and Pr to R. No idea why.
The internal DACs most probably cannot handle 12MHz bandwidth needed for "480p". 15KHz needs only ~6MHz of bandwidth on the DAC. You can push higher rates but there's gonna be severe horizontal blurring. Y is on Green because it there is Sync on Green connection and Y is probably only of the 3 DACs that can do sync insertion. In SCART RGB connection sync comes from the composhit signal though...
