mark_k wrote:
A cheap alternative to a hardware line doubler/scaler is to use a video capture device with your PC and suitable software. You might think the added latency of doing that would suck, but in fact -- depending on the capture hardware -- it's not too bad at all. PCI (Express) capture cards should give lower latency than USB capture devices, but some USB devices give a very acceptable result. You can buy them for a few dollars on eBay.
I'm doing exactly this, since I don't actually own a TV. I have a PAL NES and a PAL SNES here.
I've used different devices to get the NES video onto my computer and the results were always pretty bad.
First a USB device often called Logilink Video Grabber. I say "often called", because there is a variety of devices by different companies using the same hardware and driver. Some of you might know it under the name EasyCap Audio/Video Grabber.
This thing sucks!
It has really bad latency and colors are altered.(Suprisingly only when using an NES/SNES, PS2 looks fine).
Also sometimes there were weird color artifacts appearing in the picture. We all know the vertical lines of the NES 2. Imagine the same horizontally and with broader lines. It seems to happen on very light colors more often, than on darker ones.
Audio is awful. Most of the time, I can get it to work properly. If it does it's distorted.
Now, I use a PCI TV-card (I think it was made by Typhoon, but it shows up as a Phillips device when I run lspci) which has an Audio-In(never got that to work, not even on Windows with the original driver) and a composite Video-In.
It's old, but it works okay. There is no (noticeable) latency, but the colors are somewhat of again, but not as bad as with the Logilink device.
Btw, I'm comparing the colors to what I see, whenever I get a chance to use my NES on a TV(I don't have...doesn't mean I never get to use one), not what can be seen in emulators.
There is one catch though.
As far as I know, it does support both PAL and NTSC signal (as well as SECAM I think, but really I have only tried PAL).
The problem is, it only shows you half the frames of the input.
That means I only get 25 fps from my consoles and all intentional flicker effects or fast color changes are blurred out.
Prime example is Megaman 2. Whenever you get a new weapon after defeating a robot master, Megaman is shown on the screen rapidly changing his suit's color for a moment.
I only get to see him in a mixture of both colors.
Maybe I just should have spend more money on the devices and maybe I should have made sure that I get something of actual quality, but for me the TV-card does the job, until I can get a good TV and until I have the room for it.
However, If you have the chance to use a TV or you really want a quality picture and not all the hassle with the drivers/programs just to get bad video, then I'd say, don't go with this method unless you really know that what you're getting is top quality.