RGB upgrade

Usually this is quite expensive. How much was the upconvert?

It does sound awesome.  Got any screenshots?

RGB SCART in general sucks pretty bad though, the sound signal is significantly degraded compared to composite and the visual upgrade doesn't do any favors to older systems, quite the contrary, especially Mega Drive and Saturn which relies entirely on the pixel merging blurriness of composite (and RF also has this) to create smooth gradients, additional colors on screen and transparency effects for shadows, lighting, water, fire, ice etc., without them you get ugly pixelated check pattern meshes or vertical lines all over the place for shadows and smoke and stuff.

Older machines require composite to look the best as they were designed with that cable standard in mind, however, for more modern systems S-Video is great, for Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox and such as it gives the same additional pixel clarity as RGB SCART but it keeps the superior audio quality of composite cables.

RGB SCART should only be used for arcade cabinets and systems where you hook up separate audio, like fiber optic surround sound, never use RGB SCART for sound, you'll think your old consoles have broke their sound cards if you do, I thought my Xbox broke when I switched to RGB back in the day, turned out RGB is just overrated garbage with lots of problems.

Speaking of RGB SCART problems, there's more than just bad audio and lack of special effects in older games, it also carries an electrical charge that can damage equipment if plugged in/out during operation, unlike other types of cables that only send signals from the source to the TV, and it can also force incorrect aspect ratios (like forced 16:9 when you have a 4:3 system and vice versa) and can force your TV to automatically switch to AV even if you don't have the system running (giving you a nice black screen to look at every time you power on your TV) because it prioritises SCART devices.

Most TVs also have problems displaying anything else while a SCART device is running, it will instead scramble the visuals together or completely overlay the SCART video so you can't switch over to another source (like regular TV channels) and watch something else even for a moment, you have to power off the SCART device to use your TV normally again.

And because SCART is dangerous to plug in and out during operation due to the electrical charge it carries, you have to turn everything completely off to plug in/out any SCART cables you have if you experience any of these many issues (stand-by's not good enough, there's still an active electrical current through SCART when in stand-by!).

SCART plugs are also very awkwardly shaped making them extra cumbersome to plug in and out when the outlet is around the back of a big TV where it's dark and cramped for space, you need millimeter exact precision every time, it's by far the worst offender in this area compared to other cable standards.

If you're lucky and your TV is not that bad at handling SCART devices you can avoid most of these problems, the audio quality will still be inferior and can be downright broken when used with some systems, the original Xbox being especially noteworthy for this, and the plug in/out problems will also still be there, but at least some TVs don't let the SCART take over and ruin your regular TV usage, so with the right TV you can potentially enjoy a the one and only positive aspect of RGB SCART cables; pixel perfect SD video quality, like for arcade cabinets and some newer systems with separate audio cables being the best situations to have RGB SCART.

That's why I upgraded back to composite for older systems and to S-Video on newer systems when using an SDTV, literally best image and sound quality all across the board.
Additionally I can report after many years of this setup that the image bleeding myth of S-Video is highly exaggerated and only occurs if the color settings on the TV are set far too high, when set accordingly to normal levels the bleeding is eliminated 99~100% and will not be noticeable.

I will try to get the NES Classic and SNES Classic to see what all the fuzz about pixel perfect is all about. Although I don't know if the tech would work for me as that is supposed to work on 1080p displays, my main TVs are 4K and that ruins it even more for lower resolution content, unless it's second gen stuff. For some reason second gen stuff looks better on 4K, and I mean the arcade ports of course.

I guess I could use the TV on the other room one. That one is 1080p. I already have the Wii U on that one.

Also for PS2 and PS3 RGB SCART syncs on green, so unless you have a sync-on-green compatible TV you won't be able to play DVD's on neither PS2 nor PS3, you'll just get a green screen, also Bluray playback doesn't work on PS3 at all with any SD cables, including SCART, you need HD cables for that, like Component or HDMI.

Well, that's factually incorrect.

First of all I'm not exaggerating anything in any way, I'm presenting as many of the important objective facts I know about what RGB SCART cables are beyond the already well known fact about the pixel perfect video quality for CRT SDTVs.

As for games using the video standards of the time, composite cables in this case, we need look no further than the Sonic games for example, with composite cables you get transparent waterfalls and more colors on screen, they heavily used the vertical lines technique to take advantage of the blurriness of composite cables (and RF for those who used that), as did countless other games, again especially on Mega Drive and Saturn.

You can see what the raw rendered game looks like when using an emulator without any filters or on the real hardware with higher quality video cables like RGB SCART, you will then see the vertical lines clearly and there will be no transparency effect at all, then turn on a blur filter (where available, Kega Fusion has a couple that are good, CVBF is the one closest to what composite cables do in real life) or switch back to composite cables with the real console and you'll see transparent waterfalls and more shades of colors that weren't there before appear before your very eyes as if by magic, the vertical lines are all gone and the game now looks to have better color gradients and transparency effects.

This was mostly used on Mega Drive and Saturn as they both handle transparency very poorly/not at all and also handle colors quite poorly with small color palettes compared to other systems, with Mega Drive only having a color palette of 64 colors on screen compared to the Super Nintendo's 256, using composite cables allowed developers to make their games significantly more colorful on Mega Drive as any additional colors were welcome when dealing with such rather strict hardware limitations, Mega Drive on the other hand does have a hardware accelerated highlight/lowlight mode that could be used to create real transparency effects, but that had very strict limitations and not many developers even knew how to use it and the few that did didn't begin doing so until much later in the console's lifespan.

Another game that heavily relies on composite cables to look a lot better with far more colors and plenty of transparency effects is Eternal Champions.

There are plenty of games on Mega CD and 32X that also use the same techniques. T-MEK on 32X without composite cables is a pixelated mess and very hard to see as all the hovering weapon pickups use dithered check pattern pixels to create transparencies when using composite cables and there can be quite a lot of them on screen sometimes.

The Saturn was far more complicated and there is a good video on youtube you can search for (I recall it's been posted on this forum in the past as well) that explains very well why the Saturn had such problems with transparencies, far better than I can do. But the case is the same, almost all developers used rendering techniques that took advantage of composite cable blurriness to give their games higher color depth and transparency effects to make up for the Saturn not being able to do so itself.

The Sonic games were ported to Saturn so the same example can be made as on Mega Drive.


But this is all widely known and has been a strong source of criticism toward those systems since the days they were new, especially when compared to games on Super Nintendo and PlayStation as both of those had better transparency and color management, they didn't always make great use of that on Super nintendo but it had a proper layer assigned for transparencies specifically and PlayStation handled it very well as seen in countless games, it's very rare to see bad transparencies on PlayStation, I can't think of a single case where it wasn't because it was a game ported from older formats where the problem simple wasn't updated for playstation but left in the game, like in ports of older arcade games for example, and besides, PlayStation also used composite cables back then as the common standard so they'd look fine anyway back in the day.

Using RGB SCART cables on a Mega Drive/Saturn is effectively like running a PC game at a slightly higher screen resolution but at the same time turning off all special effects and lowering the color depth to do so, but I explained this already in my previous post, as I did with all the other facts and problems with RGB SCART cables.

And Composite is widely synonymous with RCA, at the very least when talking about video cables for consoles like we're doing here.
I've never had to specify that before and I see no reason to do so now, "confusing" in my opinion would be to start using composite and RCA separately to talk about what is effectively the same exact thing in this situation.
Going into the technical differences between composite and RCA would add unnecessary confusion in an already technical discussion, with lots of other facts to keep track of, and complaining about me not doing so as if that somehow changes or undermines any of the facts I posted is just a very strange thing to do.
It just makes you seem overly pedantic and unable to see the bigger picture.

I'm just trying to inform about the numerous important and good to know problems and shortcomings of the far too commonly highly overrated RGB SCART cable standard for videogame consoles, that's all.

I still have RGB SCART cables for PS3, GameCube and Wii myself, mostly because I haven't been able to get hold of S-Video cables for those three yet.
I have a compatible S-Video cable for PS3 but my PS2 is using it atm so when I wanted to use my PS3 on my SDTV I had to use the best compatible cables available I had left, and because PS3 is an HD system, composite cables wouldn't have been enough to make small HD text readable, SCART on the other hand showed it fine and I could read even the smallest text in games no problem, DVD and Bluray playback is unavailable as I mentioned earlier but at least it looks good, the audio is okay enough on PS3 when using SCART, not anywhere near as bad as it was on Xbox, that's for sure, but still not as good as when using S-Video and composite cables.

In the past I had RGB SCART for almost all my consoles at one point, and pretty much all the problems I listed arose for me.

I had no idea any of those problems existed before experiencing them myself, as nobody seemed to want to talk about it, all I ever heard was how pretty the pixel definition becomes and how RGB SCART is therefore the bestest thing ever.
And even now when we who know about these problems try to inform others about them, as I am trying to do in this very thread, it's not exactly uncommon that those who are new RGB SCART fans start to become maybe just a tad bit aggressively defensive about it, as if I'm throwing firecrackers at their dog or something.

You have no obligation to defend RGB SCART cables as if they have no flaws despite having more than most other cable standards, so I don't understand why you're doing so.

The fact of the matter is there are many problems with SCART, some more serious than others, and I will not sit idly by and let other people fall for the same over exaggerated hype for something that can straight up hurt them and their equipment if handled incorrectly.

All the things I've presented can easily be looked up and/or tested by all who are eager to learn more and I recommend anyone who has an interest is switching video cables to do so properly with as many different sources as possible to get an as good idea as possible of what it is they truly want before making any rash decisions.

RGB SCART cables will most certainly not solve all your retro gaming problems, no matter how perfect some people out there make them seem.

Well, from what I've tested the difference is night and day. The last time I saw such an upgrade was when I went from using component to HDMI on my 360. And I think your choices of cables are very weird if you're not using HDMI on your PS3. Why would anyone in their right mind choose S-video over HDMI on a 7th gen console?