SCART With VGA CRT Monitor

[grandta13]

I am wondering if there is a practical way to use SCART from a PAL game console on a VGA CRT Monitor. I live in the US and getting a PAL CRT TV seems near impossible without paying several hundred dollars. I would like a way to play PAL region games without quality loss or lag, but I'm not sure if there is a way that this is practically possible.

(I don't have an HDTV, and I wouldn't want to have to pay for one in addition to a scaler.)

(I'm not sure if I worded this effectively, so if you would like clarification on anything, just ask.)

[Cronozilla]

SVGA isn't a good choice (which is what American monitors generally were).

The easiest solution would be you find a nice CRT TV that supports component video, there's tons of them out there (Sony's Trinitron TV line is very good, There's also a thread on here about NetTV) then use a converter like this

It will convert the RGB signal to YPbPr / YUV.

[theclaw]

That will leave the video 50hz, ordinary TVs may or may not like it.
Something like an Amiga monitor or PVM is worth a look.

[grandta13]

Something like an Amiga monitor or PVM is worth a look.

Could you give me some model numbers? I looked those up and I couldn't find one that supported SCART.

Also, I'm trying to stay under $100 USD, so most of these rare monitors are out of the question (usually; sometimes they can be found relatively cheap).

SVGA isn't a good choice (which is what American monitors generally were).
The easiest solution would be you find a nice CRT TV that supports component video, there's tons of them out there (Sony's Trinitron TV line is very good, There's also a thread on here about NetTV) then use a converter like this

It will convert the RGB signal to YPbPr / YUV.

Thanks for the suggestion; that seems like a good idea, but that particular adapter won't work, as it loses audio output from the system. Do you know of any converters that allow audio passthrough?

Also, why is SVGA a poor choice? (Just curious)

[theclaw]

US CRTs don't use SCART for their RGB.
Commodore had DIN or d-sub, professional monitors are BNC.

VGA monitors if they handle low resolutions, expect MS-DOS related video modes. Not console modes.

There's adapters to separate audio from SCART. "breakout" is one word to try when looking for them.

[grandta13]

US CRTs don't use SCART for their RGB.
Commodore had DIN or d-sub, professional monitors are BNC.

That's something I may look more into, but wouldn't there be an issue with the refresh rate?

VGA monitors if they handle low resolutions, expect MS-DOS related video modes. Not console modes.

Would I need a special converter, or would I be able to wire it directly (either with a premade cable or one I wire myself)? And once again, I must ask if the refresh reate would be an issue.

There's adapters to separate audio from SCART. "breakout" is one word to try when looking for them.

Thanks for the information; I thought there might be something like that but I had no idea how to search for it.

[theclaw]

Refresh rate is an issue on TVs or VGA monitors. Not so much the hard to find old monitors.

[grandta13]

Refresh rate is an issue on TVs or VGA monitors. Not so much the hard to find old monitors.

Can RGB SCART be wired directly to one of these old monitors, or is some type of intermediary device necessary?

EDIT: One other thing I would like to ask is: What resolutions can these older monitors handle? While I don't know about the monitors, I was looking at a PVM and it was labelled as being able to handle 250 lines. I'm trying to find a way to maintain the 525 line resolution without loss.

[theclaw]

It depends. A few monitors are said to dislike composite video for sync, as far as I know not usually used by computers and professional equipment (or arcade games).

Resolutions I'm not sure. Later PVMs accept 480p and greater but that shouldn't matter.

[Cronozilla]

Sorry, I wasn't really giving a full answer, just giving some nudges in a viable direction.
Yes you need a breakout cable to get the audio.

Every other place the Transcoder is listed it's claimed NTSC compatible, so it'll work with standard US sets. All reviews say it works great. And forums with people using this explicitly to get easy RGB onto a US CRT say it works well. (And, there's some old threads here on RB about the breakout adapter to use with it)

It's also one of the only ones out there for conversion to component.

Your setup would end up looking like this:


The other alternatives are find a PVM, or an arcade monitor you want to adapt. But both of those would be significantly more expensive options. Though they would look better than most CRT TVs.

I'm not the best person to explain why a VGA/SVGA/XGA/etc monitor isn't a good option, but I can say that the refresh rate of the monitor is the largest issue. Consoles in RGB expect 15Khz, computer monitors go as low as 31Khz. Then the sync is also different, consoles output (generally) with composite sync, monitors expect horizontal and vertical sync to be separated.

You can look around here to get a better idea: http://retrorgb.com/
And there's a lot of resources if you Google for it.

But, as far as I know, this hardware should do what you want. It's not going to be the highest quality output from the consoles, for that you'd need a PVM where the RGB color space wouldn't be converted at all.