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by MenhirMike 998 days ago
Somewhat OT, but I think that it's really unfortunate that North America got a 60 Hz TV standard, but didn't get the SCART Connector that makes RGB or even S-Video just natural. Composite video is one of those unfortunate mistakes in history, even though it might've been perfectly reasonable back in the day :( And even S-Video seems like a rarity in the US.
1 comments
tredre3 998 days ago
SCART was pretty great but not perfect.

I lived part of the 90s in Europe and you really had to know where to buy your cables if you wanted the best quality. It was essentially a prequel to what we have now with USB-C. Not all cables had all pins wired up, you often ended up with composite quality. S-VIDEO support was very poor, you had to manually select it and not all equipment would accept it. Not all cables were shielded. Some equipment really hated hotplugging so you had to be careful with that too.

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MenhirMike 998 days ago
> Not all cables were shielded

Oh, yeah, that brings back unpleasant memories. Also, if the SCART-end was cheaply made and you pull it out at an angle, the metal part could separate from the plastic part and got stuck in the socket.

Okay, it's not a good connector really, but it was the standard way to get proper RGB in Europe, so I love it for that :)

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toast0 998 days ago
Having a RGB connection is pretty awesome. A better connector would have been nice, but the US never really got RGB for SDTV. Component video is more or less equivalent, but that didn't really appear until around the time of DVDs as I recall. Lots of DVD players supported it, including the PS2; but we had no mainstream way to get RGB from SNES or n64. Some other sixth generation systems also had component video; xbox, gamecube (early models only, there was digital video out and nintendo sold an encoder). Dreamcast could play most games with VGA out, but that's 480p, not 240p/480i.
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plasticbugs 998 days ago
Some older consoles can output RGB natively if you have the correct cable: including most SNES models (not the ‘mini’), every Sega console, Atari Jaguar and the Neo Geo home system. Interestingly, the SNES mini has the cleanest video signal of any SNES model directly out of the GPU but requires a mod to get RGB out of it.
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