PC Emulation on SD CRT?

[Anapan]

Agreed with the others, but a bit more specific since I've done this a lot before I upgraded (3 Laptops and 2 many-times reused video cards);

Your S-video solution is the best of the least good options.

You will have limited control of the "Safe Area" through your video card's controls - this is much better than a VGA to Composite+S-video box which is all-to-common and I've used 3 of them in the past with my small handheld PC's (OQO and WM devices). Even those did okay back in the day - I played through a lot of PS1 games on 21"-34" LCD screens and my old CRTs through S-video on them. Your Video card will do better than those boxes can. You will likely have control of the SD picture's position and scaling (Good!). This means you can move the picture around your screen, and squash it to almost fit the limitations of your screen. As well, you will probably have control of the "sharpness" of the picture. This is still very far from what even the cheapest transcoder can do (240P scaled to 480i is so much better than the result from that video card). The sharpness control is actually a "flicker filter" - It blurs frames together so they don't flicker as much (ideally in a videogame you have that set to zero). Also, no matter which video mode (emulator) you play everything is Bilear scaled to 640x480, and then interlaced. Bilinear is the least desirable scaling algorithm IMO. I'd take a blurrier one like Spline over it. But that's not possible - hardware limitation.
In any case, with the S-video output of your video card, you will get the equivalent of a modded X-Box using S-video cables. Your picture will show up on the screen at the best of s-video's capabilities if you mess with the video card's capabilities.

IMO that is not good - it's far worse than what any console would output.

Everything else I put in this thread is (I think) above your head. If you ask for a demonstration of the capabilities of that video card with a picture beside the same output of the cheapest transcoder, I'll dig up the hardware and do it.

[Noah98]

I suggest using a new raspberry pi, a 3.5 mm composite cable, and the Recalbox software distro configured for AV out. As a hobby, my wife and I make emulator boxes out of these and sometimes sell them. You can see some examples of them on CRT in my Flickr link:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/shellv/se ... 6943029795

A good raspberry pi with power cord, enclosure, and heat sinks is $55. Good quaility AV cable $7. Excellent retro usb Controllers about $12 (ibuffalo Super Famicom style).

We sell our custom boxes with inputs to house the raspberry pi for $80 - $85 depending on the custom design a person wants and what shape.

It's a cheap way to play most classic consoles on a CRT. For example, Neo Geo looks amazing!

[dogman91]

What video card and transcoder?

I use this: http://www.curtpalme.com/TC1500.shtm
to go from VGA straight to component; the only box I need.
And I use these hacked graphic drivers with a AGP Radeon card, though as you can see they're compatible with many other cards: http://mame.3feetunder.com/windows-ati-crt-emudriver/

Sorry for the late response to your question.