Running old consoles on today's TVs.

[randal]

I'm getting the itch to climb into the loft, retrieve my SNES, N64 and Gamecube and get the lads over for an old school gaming night in a couple of weeks.

Now obviously old RF/scart connections to today's large screen TVs looks appalling, so I'm looking at various converter boxes to sort out the interlace/progressive scan etc.. woes.

Can anyone recommend a converter box, preferably one that takes inputs from either scart/RF/s-video and dumps out to HDMI and does the conversion in between?

edit - I've found this little doozy:

http://www.cypeurope.com/Synergy/Other-converter-products/CM-397-CGA-to-VGA-Converter-/-Scaler.html

Need to find a cable on the back end to connect between the various consoles though.

Alternatively, I was wondering if a suitable AV receiver would be able to scale the content appropriately...?

Cheers

 

[DaveyD]

I wouldn't trust converter boxes to be honest unless they've come on in the past 2 or 3 years since I used one. The best bet is get the best quality cable available for said console and hook that up to your TV, you TV will then scale accordingly (however SD often looks pretty poor on modern HDTVs). Usually that's an RGB SCART or S-Video (or even component on some).

You could use a half decent AV Amp that'll accept a multitude of inputs and then output upscaled in HDMI, however that would set you back a couple of hundred quid.

At the end of the day, the analogue input will be as bad as the worst cable, and you'll probably find the converter box just muddies it even more!

Dave

 

[Nikumba]

Hooked mates SNES up to his 40" tv with red/white/yellow cable and looked ok once we put the tv to 4:3 mode

Kimbie