exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi friends, I see a lot of RGB2HDMI love and native ST monitor love but I haven't seen much about using an STE on a traditional 31khz CRT VGA monitor.

What's the ideal way to use this configuration? I simply don't have room for multiple monitors so have many of my retro machines sharing my 17" CRT. It can't handle the 15khz scans so help here is appreciated.

Thanks!

The way to do this would be to use a scandoubler or similar device. Your main options are the newer and better OSSC (open source scan converter), and the older, cheaper, GBS-8220 devices.

The GBS-8220 works by sampling the whole image at the native frequency, but playing it back at a different frame rate and resolution that you specify. It's designed for interlaced NTSC television signals, so it introduces picture artefacts and is generally not great picture quality, as well as the fact that it inserts a small but noticeable lag into the video stream.

I don't have an OSSC but from what I gather, they are very, very, good - but can be difficult to find. They are true scan doublers in that they operate on one single scanline at a time, and produce an image at the original frame rate with virtually no delay. Be aware that not all 31KHz monitors can operate at 50Hz and a OSSC cannot solve that obstacle.

There are probably other ones out there that I don't know about!

I have a GBS fully modded with all the community mods and firmware, while it works great at low and medium res it doesn't work in mono, so that can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people.

I use an OSSC and it's very good across all 3 ST resolutions, but bear in mind that it only outputs HDMI so you'd also need an HDMI to VGA converter. More boxes and possibly some artefacts in the resulting image.

https://junkerhq.net/xrgb/index.php?tit ... s_for_OSSC

It would solve the refresh rate incompatibility though