TV tuner for ye olde tyme console gaming?

Cutshaw

Cutshaw

Cutshaw

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14 Nov 2007
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Short version: I want a tv card that will let me play old consoles on my lcd monitor.

Long version!
I've done away with my tv as I never watched the thing and a huge widescreen crt was taking up a far larger chunk of the room than I was happy with. Now I've decided I want a go on the gamecube, ps2, xbox, and I fancy a wii, but I don't want to buy a buy an expensive tv for a few hours here and there.

I know a lot of the PVR type cards will give me a delay that will make playing a game impossible, but I've seen an external box by gadmei and the Compro VideoMate W800F and they claim to be exactly what I'm looking for, but haven't reviewed awfully well. I'm just wondering if there are any other options I may have missed?
 
What are the specs of your PC? You may want to consider emulation, which I believe is technically legal if you own the games and just play backups of games you already own- however please don't quote me on this.

Also, what is the model of the monitor you are using? If you have a VGA input then you should be able to play consoles on it directly via a Component video to VGA adapter. However, how well this works will depend on the scaling options of your monitor.
 
I don't fancy going the emulation route. I've got a benq v2420h and it does have a currently doing-nothing vga port.

I've since had a look around and seemingly there's been a fair amount of success using really cheap tv cards to get the wii working on a lcd monitor. I think the cheaper cards don't do any hardware encoding/decoding and it eliminates the lag, but then I'm thinking that it's nothing more than just an adapter and maybe a cheap component to vga will do the same thing.

I should look into this more and get a handle on the basics.
 
It would be worth checking out how the monitor handles (scales) lower resolution content. Obviously the Wii is only displaying at 640x480, but your monitor is 1920x1080. It may be an idea to hook up your PC via the VGA connection (the same way the wii would be connected) and set the graphics card video output to 640x480 (if it will let you) and see how it deals with it.

Ideally it will blow up the image, but preserve the aspect ratio (with black bars at the side).
 
I finally got around to finding the VGA cable and trying to mess with the res on the gpu. No dice. Unless I've missed something in the monitor options, it just stretches whatever resolution it gets to fill the screen.
 
Ok, that is interesting.

TBH, if you are using a Wii this should not be a massive issue as most widescreen TVs do something similar to the image and it seems to look fine (even though the wii is only outputting a 640x480 4:3 signal).

Was the monitor OK accepting a 640x480 signal from your PC when you set the graphics output that low?
 
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TV cards will always add a bit of lag so you might want to buy one of those composite/component to VGA converters to lower lag.
 
cmndr_andi said:
Was the monitor OK accepting a 640x480 signal from your PC when you set the graphics output that low?
Click to expand...

It flashed up a box saying that it wasn't the recommended res then left me alone.



richb93 said:
TV cards will always add a bit of lag so you might want to buy one of those composite/component to VGA converters to lower lag.
Click to expand...

I'll give that a go, they aren't expensive. I'll try one the old eggbox and gamecube and see what happens.
 
one of my friends wanted to do this once, decided not too because of the resolution difference... would be like playing a PS2 game on a PS3 w/ HDTV w/o smoothing
 
I used a Hauppauge TV card years ago, to play the PS2 on my monitor.

Not sure if it's sill on development, but I used DScaler for viewing the picture.

Worked with both composite and old analogue (needed to be 'tuned in' though)
 
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