Getting the best out of your old consoles

Thought it might be a good idea to write up a guide as to how to get the best display out of your consoles for anyone who is a bit unsure. I've been hearing people mention RF cables and LCDs. (The horror)

Starting with the wiring -

RF - chances are, your older console had one of these when you took it down out of the attic. A lot of people are going to be taking this and connecting it to an LCD. The result will look like ass. In fact it'll be worse than ass. Ass you can barely see. Detail is blurred, colours washed out and you might even have some nasty interferance. Good luck reading small text too. Take these cables and burn them. Or throw them in the bin. They do not deserve to exist.

RGB/Fake RGB

Oh look, it's two scart cables.



No wait, it's not.

On closer inspection, one looks like this -



The other, this -



The first one is fake scart. This is pretty much just AV. They give the false illusion of being scart due to the casing. Don't be fooled.

The second one is true RGB scart. This has all the pins, including the ones that support RGB. These are the best audio/video quality cables for your older consoles and you'll want to be buying one for every unit you own. The increase in quality is dramatic. If a console supports this (Most do, bar the N64 and RF only units like the Atari 2600) then get one. They're between 10-15 euro on average.

/edit - RGB scart only requires eight pins. So it is possible you have a cable missing pins but it still supports RGB.

Check the pinout diagram here on the Scart wikipage to make sure -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART

RGB scart also has another fantastic little up side. You can use RGB cables to play NTSC consoles on your PAL television without the image turning black and white. Hurrah! Time to start importing NTSC consoles.

With RGB, the main thing here is to make sure you plug the cable into the right scart socket on the back of the TV. As most of them only have one that is capable of supporting RGB, the other isn't. You'll also probably want to invest in a scart switch box to go to this connection if you have multiple consoles. Make sure to get one of the boxes with buttons. As far as I am aware, the auto detection ones can cause loss of quality.

Televisions -

I guess for many, widescreen LCDs are going to be the only option. Which is a shame as the picture really does looks ****e. I weep for the day when this is all we can use.

Anyway, if you can, salvage an old CRT.

Aspect ratio and size are always going to be debatable, but personally after a few different sized sets I've found that 28 inch 4:3 aspect ratio is the best for older games. The screen is big enough to go 'wow, a nice big image!' but not too big as to make everything look like lego blocks. Plus you don't get any of that widescreen distortion.

Anyway, that's it for the moment. I hope as a result of that many RF/AV cables get thrown in the bin