**Upscaling Retro Systems for Streaming and Capture**

As someone who has plenty of experience handling the analog output from old video game systems, I wanted to share my knowledge on how to upscale retro systems for streaming and capture. This process can be complex, but with the right tools and techniques, you can achieve a clean 4x output without any further scaling or OBS distortion.

**Meeting Your Own Needs**

For me, this means creating a clean 4x output from the ossc as purely as possible without any further scaling and OBS possibly distorting the result. I don't really consider myself to be streaming or recording experts specifically, but I do fancy myself as having plenty of experience in handling the analog output from old video game systems and the idiosyncrasies of how those resolutions are scaled. My approach may not be perfect, but it works for me, and I hope some of you find that information useful.

**A 1280x960 Canvas: Keeping Recordings Consistent**

When using a 1280x960 canvas, it's essential to keep your recordings consistent in size with a consistent aspect ratio. This can be achieved by outputting the video from your retro system at the correct resolution and scaling factor. I've found that this approach helps maintain a clean and crisp image without any unnecessary distortion.

**Handing It Back Over to the Stream Professor**

While my approach works for me, there's always more to learn and discover when it comes to upscaling retro systems for streaming and capture. For more hardcore OBS usage, I'll hand it back over to the stream professor, who will provide expert advice on how to take your streaming setup to the next level.

**Honorable Mentions**

Of course, there are alternative ways to play some of your favorite retro games that you might want to consider before relying solely on upscaling methods. For example, HD collections on the PS3 and PS4 can be a great option, offering improved graphics and sound quality while still retaining the original charm of the game. The God of War collection on PS3 is another excellent choice, bypassing the PS2 and letting you play games in 720p, which is quite impressive.

**Retro Gaming Options Beyond Upscaling**

Some retro games are available on modern systems through virtual console services or other platforms. This can be a convenient option if you only want to play one game, as it saves you from having to deal with the complexities of upscaling and scaling. Additionally, some original consoles have backwards compatibility, allowing you to play older games on newer hardware.

**The Xbox One X: A Great Option for Retro Gaming**

For those looking for a more high-quality experience, the Xbox One X is an excellent option for retro gaming. While it's not entirely accurate in terms of how the game originally looked and felt, the team behind the Xbox One has put in significant work to improve backwards compatibility. Games like Halo 3 on Xbox 360 or original Xbox games like Crimson Skies, Black, Ninja Gaiden, and Star Wars: Republic Commando are available on the Xbox One X, with some even upgraded to native 4K resolution and increased frame rates.

**Conclusion**

This was an insane video, my throat is so tired from talking, but I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot, and ultimately, get some S-Video cables for your console of choice. For the most part, you're good with the nuance involved in upscaling retro systems. There's always more to learn and apply, though, and that's what this series is all about.

**Future Content**

In future videos, we'll be covering HDmi mods, FPGA versus clone consoles, and reviewing capture cards for your retro game formats. We'll also explore the world of fpga consoles, which offer improved performance and customizability compared to traditional clones. And, as always, I'll share my expertise on capture card reviews, providing you with valuable insights into how they support your favorite retro games.

**Join Our Discord Server**

If you're interested in learning more about upscaling retro systems for streaming and capture, join our Discord server where you can chat with fellow enthusiasts, ask questions, and get tips from experienced streamers. You'll also find exclusive content, including my entire analog vibes stream pack, which is free to download.

**Subscribe and Like**

Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to my channel for more tech education and stream guides, and hit the link in the description to join our Discord server. Your support means a lot to me, and I'm excited to share this knowledge with you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso i promised you guys a part two in my upscaling gretcho systems for streaming video i don't think you all expected for it to be as big as it ended up being because i'm me i make everything way more difficult than it needs to be and i refuse to leave any stone unturned so instead of just a part two it's a mini master class featuring try from my life and gaming we have a lot to talk about here it's gonna be pretty insane i'm gonna have time codes linked in the description which means there'll be chapter markers on the video i recommend bookmarking this watching watching it as you can coming back to it when you need to reference because we are gonna put everything in this video that you need to know at least reasonably to upscale all of your old retro systems whether you're streaming ps2 original xbox nintendo 64 atari pretty much anything and stream it or record it for your youtube channel for yourself or for twitch or you know whatever there's going to be a lot in here now i'm calling this a mini master class because it's only going to be one video even though it's going to be a long video we're going to have links and everything in the description but there is a deeper rabbit hole to go down and with that i'm primarily going to point you to my life and gaming's rgb 101 master class series they have hundreds of videos at this point talking about every best possible way to upscale or playback individual consoles what each of the connectors mean and things like that we're going to kind of condense it and reapply it because they mainly focus on people who just want to play on their tvs and just enjoy their games and that's most people but i'm focusing on specifically streaming and content creation here so we're going to tweak some of that and apply it in a different direction and kind of condense it down before we go too deep we need to talk about why this is needed why can't you just take your original playstation or nintendo system and stream it like normal in some situations you kind of can but you're going to get really poor results or it's just not going to work because you see modern tvs and displays often either no longer even have the standard rf or rca composite red white or yeah red and white audio or s video or even component in some cases hookups or your old retro systems and when they do have those connections they don't often handle 240p or 480i which is what these older systems output very well at all either it'll be handled either either they'll just reject them entirely or it'll be handled with low quality upscaling which will just look like a blurry disaster or there will be a lot of added lag through the upscaling process of playing those odor signals and in fact you can see massive results just from going from 480i interlaced to 480p progressive which is what devices like this will do that we'll be talking about in the video as well the same applies to modern capture cards even the original elgato game capture hd which did support composite ns video and people used that as a streaming option for a long time it still handled those signals very poorly the results from it weren't great it was a convenient and accessible option at the time but a lot of people complained because the d interlacing was crap and the quality was not up to par for those kinds of signals now if you're playing your older retro games on a crt you may notice that they still look as you remember for the most part and still look beautifully sharp because good crts can actually render them out and still look pretty well but the same signal side by side on your crt and then digitize can look super soft and blurry and these upscaling tools and processes help bridge that gap to where you can get them looking more like you remembered back in the day you'll want your stream to be a high quality stream that viewers can actually see and enjoy not a blurry goop that no one has any idea what's going on so your stream quality and what we can do with it starts at the cables well without modifying systems the quality increase or quality dependency starts at the cables what kind of cables you're using i will say right off the bat if you don't want to deal with any of this when in doubt s video out s video is generally the way to go it gives you the highest video quality increase over composite compared to anything else the jump from composite to s video is pretty massive the jump from s video to rgb or component is less massive s video already makes a world of difference even cheaper s video cables look miles better than composite does so the tiers of video quality for video cables goes like this you have rf which you never want to mess with in the streaming realm just avoid at all possible cost composite s video and then component or rgb and then of course there's direct native hdmi mods so s video is the tried and true way to go if you just want to have cheaper except more accessible cables you want it to be natively compatible with just about any system on the planet that's the way to go if you want the extra step to get even better there's component or rgb cables these are two separate types of cables rgb is typically run through a scart connection and was not common in the united states on basically any tv ever and we didn't really see cables that much component however provides the exact same video quality but was something we actually had here in the united states and a lot of systems actually natively output component video playstation 2 playstation 3 original xbox the wii and then technically the gamecube although the component cables were originally basically impossible to find and were super expensive and those are generally the way you want to go if you are looking for the best quality you know and you're wanting analog video cables you want to use component or rgb and i recommend sticking with one if possible where if you do everything through component then your life will be a lot easier than say component and rgb mixed or if you do everything through rgb scart instead of component it's easier if you don't mix them up so keep that in mind you want to commit i recommend sticking with component there are still people who stick with rgb and then of course there is still quality of cables and that is kind of unfortunate mostly it's fine the wii third-party cables mostly seem fine the ps2 third-party cables mostly seem fine the original xbox third-party component cables seem to be really bad like they support 480p but then they look like the quality of composite and it just looks terrible so i do recommend picking up some first party component cables if you want for the original xbox however there is a new device out there which will take the component output of the original xbox and give you a wii component output jack because we component cables are very easy to find and you can get an upgraded model which i'll talk about in a moment so if you are struggling to find an original xbox uh you know first party hd kit for it for component cables then i recommend getting the xbox the wii adapter there is a specific company however that makes dedicated component cables for most systems that are fine-tuned in terms of voltages and resistance and all of that they're you know specifically engineered with the output signals of each individual console in mind which is very important in cases like the playstation 2 and they work with systems that don't natively output component by transcoding the rgb signal because the rgb and component signals are basically the same thing just in two different formats one is rgb the other is ypbpr and so you can actually completely lag free transcode rgb to ypbpr component and use component cables and get the same identical result and so that ends up with situations like the genesis the playstation 1 the super nintendo the nintendo 64 if you have it rgb modded all of those systems that already output rgb but did not output component you can now use their component cables with and have a fully component system so that's hd retrovision they make some of the best and highest quality component cables for basically every system all of that to say if that was too much for you there is virtually no excuse to stick with composite for your retro game system even if you don't care that much about video quality even if you're just trying to get it connected you'll be able to notice the jump from composite to s video and your viewers will appreciate it immensely the difference between composite and s video is the dot crawl that crawls all over the screen the checkerboarding that is sometimes removed with s video and the general like flicker of every little pixel dot on the screen flickers back and forth and looks interferency in composite it doesn't look that way in as video and think about it you're upscaling your video from this tiny 240p 480i source all the way to 720p or 1080p or whatever on top of then compressing it with video compression when you're streaming or encoding for youtube the more interference filled and messy your video signal is the worse it's going to look after you go through all of that process i wanted to take a brief break from the nerdy info to have a little bit of a real talk about this video i originally shot this entire thing in august of 2020 and it quickly between busyness with just the fall season and then we bought a house and moving it was a bear to produce and i realized quickly when the raw footage was over an hour and a half long that it was going to be just way too big of a project that i would have to cut down for the youtube copy and that's what i've done here i've actually posted the full just uncut version that has all the information and all the details over on my own streaming service called nebula and it's over an hour long you guys get the kind of cut down version because that's what is more appropriate for youtube but if you haven't heard of nebula it's a site that my fellow youtube creators and i have built together to make it so that we don't have to worry about things like watch time or audience retention or you know how long a video should be for the platform or any of those weird algorithmic things and it's ad free and our videos are higher quality there with that we it also features youtube's top education creators such as thomas frank legal eagle lowspecgamer and mkbhd and we've partnered with curiositystream because they saw what we were doing over on nebula for educational content and they wanted to partner up with their library of thousands of documentary and educational titles that you can watch so when you sign up with the link down below that's curiositystream.com epos you not only get access to curiosity stream and all of their great educational and documentary content but you get access to nebula for free as well for the entire duration of your subscription to curiosity stream for a limited time curiosity stream is offering 26 off of their annual plan making it less than fifteen dollars a year for both cs and nebula that is two streaming services for under fifteen dollars per year and you get to support myself and other educational creators as well as getting tons of content to binge for yourself and while you're there check out meet the avatars a a brief documentary into the idea of basically cloning human beings into technological replicants to then spend the rest of your life life with and some some things that we got to start considering in that the next 50 or 100 years and it's really interesting to think about go check that out head on over to curiositystream.com epos for the best deal in streaming and get access to both sites for under 15 a year it's crazy go do it now all right now we can talk about scaling hardware now you have a few different options when it comes to scaling hardware for your retro systems you have actual upscaler units such as the xrgb mini mini framemeister there's the iscan product line of upscaler units and these are upscalers these are different products we'll talk about the differences in a moment then you have line doublers which are effectively the same purpose for you but they are different products and these include the open source scan converter or the ossc and then the retro tink line of products which i've talked about quite a bit and talked about in part one of this series and there's the retro tank pro the multi-format and now the retrotech mini as well as i'm gonna throw in here the rad2x and we'll talk about why in a moment then there's plug-and-play solutions that are individual per console basis such as the eon super 64 for the nintendo 64. the eon uh gamecube hd mark ii for the gamecube the carby gchd for the gamecube then you have pound hdmi cables i consider those plug and play the rad 2x is technically plug and play and then there's actually a specific xbox uh hdmi output that's actually pretty good that just takes the component signal for that that's from a different company and then you have a lot of these cheap plug and play ones off of amazon such as the ps2 to hdmi adapter from panlong or the we to hdmi from 3c smart these are mostly going to be crap but we'll talk about why they matter and what they are as well again if this has already been a lot for you just bookmark the video you can come back to it i have time-coded sections you can you know pick and choose which information you need to gather at your whim all right first let's talk about the difference between scalars and line doublers an example of a scalar is the xrgb mini framemeister this was for a long time the device that everyone recommended for connecting all of your retro systems to it has composite s video rgb and component inputs as well as a couple of hdmi passthroughs it'll upscale everything to 1080p you can use custom profiles such as the ones from firebrand x which are per system i even have written down which profile does what here because there's a lot of them and they are really really good profiles that make your systems look a lot better and you can scale and tweak and de-interlace to your heart's content and it looks great but it is a different process from line doubling as it takes the signal does whatever processing to it in a frame buffer and then spits it out it's great it's convenient but it was very expensive it was like 330 dollars new when it was being sold and then i believe almost two years ago now they announced that they will no longer be making new ones as the original chips that they use for it and everything like that uh they've just can't source them anymore and so the prices are gonna keep scaling up as they run out of stock and people keep scalping them and whatever and so the difference is here i mentioned it processes everything in a frame buffer that means that it operates with about one frame of input lag as it has this frame buffer a frame buffer is basically it takes the video signal takes that frame it sits in a buffer like with anything else you know it sits there it does whatever it needs to do it within a set amount of time and then it spits it out the other end there's no processing line by line or anything like that it accepts the frame processes the frame spits it out this is how most digital systems work these days line doublers on the other hand operate line by line on the signal that they you know take so every line that they receive they double it spit it back out as it comes and so it builds the frame line by line and there's basically no input lag for it they're basically like free as the process is fairly instant it's literally just taking it spitting it back out two times taking it spitting back out two times taking it spitting back up two times and so it literally just doubles the lines if you have a 240p signal every line gets doubled it's now a 480p system however since it is literally just doubling the lines and spinning it out back at the other end there can be weird video output specs with these devices that can cause compatibility issues for example in all of my capture card reviews i have a test for the open source scan converter to see if the capture card you know plays along with it very well because it can output some weird formats uh it doesn't always fill the frame it because it's not just upscaling it to 1080p it's just multiplying it by 2x 3x 4x or 5x and then the refresh rate of the original system which with a lot of original systems like the super nintendo is a very weird not standard refresh rate that can cause compatibility issues with displays as well as capture cards and so that's why i test for it because it can be a little finicky now the retro tink line of line doublers only goes up to 480p in the first place whereas these go up to 1080p and 1200p these only go up to 480p in the first place which makes the signal a lot more compatible because most devices can mostly handle 480p but neither of these usually end up filling the frame because that's not an even scale these are based on even integer scales and you know it's going to be formatted specifically on a 2x 3x 4x or 5x basis whereas the framemeister specifically is designed to just scale up to 1080p now you can customize how much the overscan and underscan actually zooms in and out on the image and you can do a lot with it in the framemeister but the goal is to just upscale it to 1080p and so it can actually fill your 1080p canvas there's also de-interlacing issues if you have a 480i input source well then this de-interlaces that using what's called bob d interlacing and spits it back out as 480p bob the interlacing is a little bit more flickery than people are probably wanting it's a little bit less desirable in that regard because it bounces back and forth as it basically shows each set of fields separately and then bounces back and forth but compared to a dedicated scaler unit like the framemeister which can get smooth 60fps out of it without flickering it's a less desirable outcome for some however with some devices at least with the the retro tank you can actually pass through that 480i if your capture card supports it and dnr lays it in software to bypass this but generally the point of this is to de-interlace it in the device so there's two things to consider here with the scalers you're actually getting a native 1080p output which means you don't need say a capture card with 444 rgb chroma subsampling which i recommend a lot with capture cards uh that basically keeps all the color information you don't really need that if it's already upscaled to 1080p you can capture it at whatever you're probably not scaling it anymore so that's not a factor so you can just take it straight 1080p to 1080p and compress and good to go if you're using a line doubler that's say only giving you 480p then you need a high quality capture card that can do 444 because you're going to be stretching that 480p back up you know two times or four times for 4k to scale it even further in software and you need that extra information so and the framemeister which is a scalar already outputs 1080p only even outputs 422 in the first place so you really don't got to worry about that and that is definitely an advantage in the field of you know actual scalar devices so next let's talk about my favorite device to recommend the retro tink 2x line of products you actually have three available and i want to talk about the different options and which one you should choose based on the situation you're going to be using because it can be a little confusing but it doesn't have to be because there's kind of a default option as well so the default option that pretty much anyone can go with is the retro tank 2x mini this is more affordable at only 69 or 70 dollars it's missing a few of the features such as scan line generation and component inputs from the bigger ones which we'll talk about but it takes composite or s video as well as rca audio input and line doubles it up to 480p to output to your live stream it even supports s video from pal nintendo 64's with a little hacky work around which most devices don't those nintendo 64s are a little funky so that's pretty cool as well it has a smoothing filter if you want to use it for 3d games which kind of blends it together keeps the hard pixel edges from being a thing most people don't like that so it is completely optional this is the cheapest and the most reasonable option as if you don't plan on using any component hookups or anything like that you're like i just got some older systems i got some s video cables you can just plug it in here hdmi out to your capture card and tv and you're good to go and it is a wonderful option the quality you can get from it again especially with this video is pretty solid and you can use it with your vhs player which the comb filter will help with as well so that's pretty cool and we'll talk about that in my hopefully finally get to it vhs digitization video as well these videos are really big it takes me a long time to get them done so moving up from the mini you move on to the retro tank 2x pro the retro team 2x pro is the upgraded model it takes composite s video and component input and it supports 240p line doubled up to 480p it supports 480i the interlace to 480p but there's no 480p input support so if you're playing on original xbox playstation 2 wii or gamecube and you have 480p games you can't run them at 480p or it won't know what to do with it so that's the one downside of it it has hdmi output of course to then send 480pg your capture card to your tv it has filter options for a scanline overlay if you like that i'm not a huge fan of it i think it makes the whole image a little bit darker and doesn't really rep like i like chunky scan lines on an actual crt like my bbm here but the fake scanline look has just never been a thing for me and then it also has a smoothing filter option if you wish to smooth out your 3d games and not have the hard pixel edges which again most people want this one as well as the mini these both use integer scaling also known as nearest neighbor scaling where it's a hard double line up from 240p to 480p or what have you which is more flattering towards 2d games you know sprite based pixel art based video games that integer scaling keeps those pixels exactly as they were just multiplied which keeps those hard pixel edges and keeps the game looking exactly like they should these the mini and the pro are what you want if you're using predominantly 2d based games especially from the super nintendo the nintendo you know ps1 games that are very pixel art in nature are going to look best on the mini or the pro as it uses this integer scaling algorithm so that's the mini and the pro the multi-format is the third retrosync 2x that you should consider and this one is especially useful for the generation of consoles that outputs 480p so the gamecube the xbox the wii the playstation 2 all of these systems can output at least some portion of their library at 480p and more with modding and this passes through 480p so it's like the pro but it passes through 480p so you can still get the benefit of nice progressive scanned games without needing to use a separate device for it or something like that it still does line doubling from 240p to 480p and still does the interlacing from 480i to 480p and all of these use the same bob d interlacing method but the difference here is that the scaling method used in the multi-format is no longer integer scaling it is bilinear scaling which means it smooths things out a little bit more it looks better for 3d games it makes 3d games look great because you know they're not meant to have these hard pixel edges and it makes them look more smoothed out in 3d but it doesn't look quite as good for 2d and pixel art games because you're getting kind of blurring of the pixels and things like that it doesn't represent them how you would expect them to see with the hard pixel edges blown up but it does introduce the nice comb filter that's improved for composite video so if you're using composite video for like specific sources or for a vcr then the multi-format actually has an improved comb filter which will make those look better than some of the other systems so the multi-format is specifically great again for the ps2 the xbox and the gamecube which is really nice 480p is wonderful avoids the obnoxious de-interlacing flicker of course it requires component cables to get 480p out of systems cannot be done over composite and s video but it is worth noting that not all games on these systems support 480p so you're not going to be you're still going to be doing dealing with the d interlacing for some games for example there's a whole ps2 wiki that shows which games can support uh 480p and which ones don't because unlike the xbox boxes which indicate whether hdtv or edtv480p is supported playstation 2 and gamecube games do not indicate this so there i'll have a link in the description for the ps2 wiki at least which indicates it however there is a weird exception to this in that there are some games that just don't give you that option some games either prompt it whenever it knows you have component cables detected are like hey you want to try 480p some of them also support 16x9 like god of war 2 and god of war but some games don't give you any indication sometimes they bury it in the menus sometimes you have to hold x and triangle while the game is booting and then it'll prompt you this is also the case for some gamecube games by the way so those are your direct retro tink options i'm also going to mention here which also gets mentioned under the plug and play solutions because that's what it is the rad2x the rad2x is a collaboration project branched from the retro tink line of project products that takes the retrosync concept and makes it easier to use for those who just have one or two consoles they want to hook up and they want individual dongles per console because the difference here is is the red 2x units b they plug into your playstation or your nintendo 64 or what have you plugged directly into your system and just have an hdmi output there's no ability to use it on multiple systems at a time whereas something like the mini the pro or the multi-format you can hook up to a switch or a splitter or whatever and use with all of your systems at once pretty much the rad2x is a plug-and-play pre-product setup but otherwise it's pretty much the exact same product it does integer scaling 480p line doubling and it's built off of the same retro tank classic original design as all of the retro tank products have stemmed from so next up in the line doubler space we have the legendary open source scan converter or ossc after the framemeister came out this came out later and was the next kind of all-in-one swiss army knife tool that everyone started recommending and for good reason it's a pretty powerful product this is a line doubler that can line double up to 5x output for 240p sources giving you up to 1600 or 1920 by 1200 output although most people stick with the 1920x1080 canvas and you have all the way from a 480p 2x line double output to 3x to 4x and a 5x if your capture card supports it or tv supports it because it gets kind of finicky this is the kind of the problem child product and why i test it in all of my capture card reviews now because for example the super nintendo does not output a exact 60 hertz signal it's slightly off of 60 hertz and so once you run it through here line double it to what could be an odd resolution like 960p or 4x and include the weird oddball resolution it kind of starts to break compatibility with a lot of products but if it works in your setup it is beautiful you have rgb input through a vga connector which you could use for older computers although signal support is going to be kind of hit or miss i've tried using this for my windows xp and windows 98 computers and it'll pass through some signals but otherwise it gets really picky about like high refresh rate stuff you've got component input and you have rgb start input and then a 3.5 millimeter audio input that you can then break out to rca we've got rgb component and another form of rgb the only thing you're missing in terms of inputs on this is composite and s video and with this then you can set up all sorts of settings and honestly they are beyond what i recommend anyone deal with there's so much like there's so many settings that it becomes a true headache because there's just so many options it's kind of overwhelming because you can tune in sampling options and phase to get the exact sharpness like you can get really freaking sharp output out of this but it requires a lot of manual work and more manual profiles from uh firebrand x and those are a little bit more complicated than the framemeister profiles the framemeister profiles you slap up to i think you can support up to ten on one or 14 on one memory card you put the micro sd card in the back of it you're good to go just load them up on the ossc you have to like build them on the computer first even when you take them from him you got to like fine-tune them and then you put them on here and then you load them and then you dial in phase and then the the setup of just plugging in and going versus the tuning for this is pretty bonkers but if you want the ultimate control that's what the ossc is for and then it gives you an hdmi output with that signal now the osse versus the retro tank they are both line doublers but this one gets you a much more potentially sharp out of the box image for your stream than the retro tank 2x in the sense that this can go up to 1080p output you know it won't be fully matted right depending on how your settings are set up but you know the actual video frame will be 1080p and it can go up to 5x whereas this is only 2x so if you don't have a 444 rgb from a sub sampling capture card that can scale better you could get cleaner output out of the oss than the retro tank just due to having to scale the retro tank more in your capture the oss can output 480p with the 2x mode but it's mainly meant to push higher to 3x 4x or 5x to 1080p resolution or you know close to it for that higher resolution signal and like i said it's it's generally less compatible than the 480p output of the retro tank this the lssc is much less convenient of a solution but more of a power users like ultimate tool especially for a higher quality initial result than the retro tank all right that was a lot of talk about line doublers upscalers and so on let's talk about a bit more of a simple solution and why i don't always recommend them let's talk about plug-and-play hdmi solutions for your game consoles i'm going to start with the worst of the worst pound cables they are some of the you know less technically inclined retro youtubers best friends they are dirt cheap and super easy to use because you just plug them into the back of your system and you get an hdmi output but they are bad they are just bad no one's paying me to say this they are just not great the output that you get from them in most cases is low quality they build it based off of composite maybe s video sources even for systems that support component and there is variable input latency that is not good now normal input latency which even like the framemeister has you can learn to deal with and compensate because if it's like an extra frame of lag you just you may get frustrated first but then you eventually learn to just hit the button one frame later not that you're actually measuring frames but you get what i mean and it's fine variable lag means at one point in time it's x lag at the next point in time it's a longer lag and then shorter you can never quite get used to it and that's that means you can never really compensate for it and so it becomes so much worse of a result this is one rare instance where i genuinely just wholeheartedly cannot recommend a specific product to pretty much anyone especially when there are better plug and play options out there like the rad2x or even you know you you can hook up a couple cables to the retro tank and figure it out i believe in you next you have the eon super 64. i reviewed this last year this is basically a retro tink for the nintendo 64. it is the rad2x but cloned by eon it uses s video for ntsc composite for pal and does not you know upgrade signal with upgraded rgb modded nintendo 64. next we need to talk about the gamecube as a console like well with regards to plug and play solutions so specifically to get great video out of the nintendo gamecube especially with plug and play solutions you need one of the models that has the digital av outport on the bottom you have the standard nintendo av analog connector that was on the super nintendo and the nintendo 64. all gamecubes have this but most of the runs of the gamecube have this digital av port as well there are some super late runs that don't have it but personally i've never seen one in real life that doesn't have it but if you're missing that port you're kind of screwed in terms of video quality and it would be easier just to buy another or at least buy s video cables and retro tank but if you want much higher quality video out we're going to utilize this digital av port now this was something that was originally used for first party nintendo component cables for the gamecube they supported it from day one the problem is for whatever reason at least in the states and it seems to be in other countries as well they did not sell these component cables for very long maybe because the system was too early most people didn't have tvs with component inputs at the time or at marketing or whatever they did not seem to sell them for very long and those cables became fairly rare and highly sought after because of the higher quality and 480p output results that they were incredibly expensive for a long time finally 2017 you know we're talking so many years after the gamecube was released finally people finished reverse engineering that digital av output and we started to get other options this is part of the open source gc video project now first and foremost we have other component cables we can use we have the new carby component cables that i mentioned before these are great they have bnc connectors or they ship with bnc to rca connectors so you can just plug them right into your crt or upscaler and you're good to go and most for the most part it is a completely slot in place replacement for the original component cables if you don't have them but what they also made was an hdmi carby that plugs into the back of it and gives you hdmi out there we go now we're talking it gives you 480p over hdmi line double ready to go and then you run the audio separately with the normal av cables this is what most people should get it is fairly straightforward it's easy to use it's a great option high quality as high quality as everything else will be with component cables it's what most people probably want and you're good to go with that however eon the company that made the super 64 also released their own gchd products and they actually released two they originally released the original eon gamecube hd but then they released a second one the mark ii and that's the one i have and that one's interesting for a specific reason the mark ii is pretty cool because not only does it give you hdmi out for your gamecube at 480p line doubled ready to go or pass through for native 480p games and all of that with audio and everything else you also have a couple extra outputs you have a 3.5 millimeter or toslink breakout for digital or for audio coming out of this as well to run to a separate audio system you also have a wii component cable output here as well which means that you can connect this and it this is dual output capable so that means you can connect this run hdmi to your capture card or modern tv for capturing and streaming and then you can run using wii component cables which are much easier to find and you can use hd retrovision ones as well and run those out to your crt for more analog play completely lag free which means like for smash players or something you could play on your crt you have completely lag free video for playing smash and then still have a native clean digital output that you're running to your capture card or your live stream really freaking cool the mark ii also has a button to let you add scan lines to the output as well which i don't really see the point of especially for 480p games what's handy here is that it will output 480p60 regardless of what game the game is sending be it interlaced or progressive uh but it maybe doesn't handle the interlacing as well as you might prefer what's cool though is that with swiss the homebrew software for nintendo gamecube you can force most games to actually dm release in the gamecube and output 480p and then it doesn't have to do the dnr lacing on the you know on them pass through so you're good to go there so that's pretty cool and the results are basically identical to the component cables there's one other plug-and-play solution available that i've been trying to get my hands on for a while but haven't been able to and that is the chimeric systems hdmi video adapter for the original xbox this plugs into the component output of the original xbox and gives you hdmi the cool thing about component video is that it's the video like signal is compa hdmi is backwards compatible with it you can send component video over hdmi so that means unless you're doing some weird scaling inside of it component video to hdmi or hdmi to component video is a lag free transfer process so this just converts the component video over to an hdmi signal be it at 480p 720p whatever your xbox is said to output and you're good to go and again i would be remiss if i didn't mention again the rad2x is a plug and play solution and they look great and is basically the retro tank and is what most people should be doing if you're looking for plug and play solutions imo unless specifically you're on the xbox where you want that extra 720p support now you have crappy plug and play adapters as well such as the ps2 hdmi adapters on amazon which i've actually covered in the past as well as these wii hdmi adapters and for the most part these are using s video or composite instead of component and the results you get from it while de-interlaced potentially less flickery than the retro tanks or what have you it's super soft it's super blurry sometimes it's stretched out these are convenient but you can see for yourself imo the video quality results do not match what you're getting from everything else i'm not sure i can recommend it all right so you've got your signal digitized it's coming into your computer and your capture card and you're good to go you've got yourself a nice capture card what do you do with it from there now i've already released in part one a video that tells you about my favorite scaling algorithm within obs studio which is area and why that matters for upscaling your video definitely go watch that if you haven't seen it already there's a lot to do with aspect ratios and overall like how you should approach how the video looks in your stream that i honestly don't have a ton of experience with since i don't stream those games as often as i do say pc games and for that i wanted to make sure we had you know information from the people who did it the most so i've got tri from my life and gaming here who's going to tell you his experience of streaming retro games for years now with obs studio when capturing output from classic consoles for my life and gaming i usually try to present a realistic view of what the output from any given upscaler device might look like when playing on your tv at home now i know some of our friends like bob from retro rgb are big into capturing uncompressed footage at a game's native resolution and then using editing tools to resize it after the fact and that pixel perfect capture process can be an excellent goal in certain scenarios but for our show since we're often trying to convey the capabilities of various devices in terms of how they look for play more so than capture it makes the most sense to capture the scaled output now one thing that i think is important to address is that pre-hd consoles with the exception of the relatively few games for ps2 xbox gamecube that support proper widescreen modes and the wii most wii games are widescreen but otherwise games should be represented with a 4 3 aspect ratio no matter whether a game's horizontal resolution is 256 320 512 or something else nearly all console games were designed for ntsc crts with a 4 3 aspect ratio which means that depending on the resolution the console outputs the pixels are either wider than they are tall or skinnier than they are tall almost never square so my philosophy is that game capture should err on the side of respecting the 4 3 aspect ratio this means that i do not use optimized sampler profiles on the open source scan converter not only because they can be a lot of work and vary from console to console but also because perfectly sharp pixel edges would result in the aspect ratio being slightly off i recommend the average user go with the generic 4 3 setting on the ossc which still gives the impression of very sharp pixels with just a touch of horizontal interpolation and that's just the way i like it i prefer to use obs for recording because it allows me to set my desired canvas size which is 1280 by 960 for the vast majority of my recordings and here's why the open source scan converter has multiple modes for various input signals that result in 960p output 4x240p 4x480i and 2x 480p are all 960p 1280x960 is a perfect 4 3 aspect ratio which means i can manually resize the capture input within the canvas if for any reason the capture card interprets it improperly for example while my particular capture card displays 240p 4x from the ossc perfectly within the frame without any need for adjustments 480p2x appears slightly too wide the set canvas size lets you easily see any anomalies like this you can hold shift to unconstrain the proportions and correct it before recording i like to manage this by making separate scenes where the capture card source is already sized for different signals this way i don't have to make adjustments every time i record a different signal and actually i like to use the 1280 by 960 canvas even when recording a retro tank device or the framemeister in the case of the retro tink i simply fill the 960p frame with its 480p output the reason for this is that if recording compressed video native 480p recording will have more visible compression issues whereas the integrity of the pixels is better maintained by the video compression if recorded at a larger size as for the framemeister while it does output 1080p the actual game image should still fit within the 1280x960 frame if using a screen mode like smart 2x there's no real upside to doing it this way instead of 1080p but it does keep my recording style consistent across a range of devices and by the way for widescreen games i use 1707 by 960 and stretch the input to fit technically that's one pixel column shy of 16.9 you actually can't get 69 exactly when using 960 as your vertical resolution but you won't be losing any of the game image now if you're editing your content you are most likely using a 1080p or 2160p sequence in which case you'll need to scale your 960p capture to fill the frame which is easy to do in premiere and matches the size that 960p would appear it on your tv now since we do use a 1080p canvas for our streams on my life and gaming i created a 4 3 crt frame that is designed for unscaled 960p input this means that 240p games should not need to be resized at all for the stream but 480p games will need a manual horizontal squishing i like doing things this way because even though the stream bitrate is lower than our recording bit rate it still presents a clean 4x output from the ossc as purely as possible without any further scaling and obs possibly distorting the result keep in mind this is just what i do to meet my own needs to match my own views on how i prefer to represent the games from original hardware i don't really consider myself to be streaming or recording experts specifically but i do fancy myself as having plenty of experience in handling the analog output from old video game systems and the idiosyncrasies of how those resolutions are scaled so i hope some of you find that information useful for how a 1280x960 canvas can keep your recordings a consistent size with a consistent aspect ratio but for more hardcore obs usage i'll hand it back over to the stream professor lastly before we wrap up this video i just wanted to give some honorable mentions to some alternative ways that you could play some of your favorite retro games first and foremost are of course hd collections on the ps3 and ps4 you've got collections of say final fantasy 10 and 10 2. you've got the god of award collection on ps3 which bypasses the ps2 and lets you play them some of the games output 720p on it which is pretty impressive they're not always perfect recreations but sometimes there are great ways to go and you know that may be what you want if you have a specific game you're looking into you might see if it was re-released on a different platform or through the you know you can play some retro some retro games on modern systems like through virtual console and things like that see if that's not an option to you just to save you some headache and time if that's the only game you want to play but secondly there's also backwards compatibility if you had an original fat ps3 you could play ps1 ps2 and ps3 games on it and play them all through the ps3 it was a good all-arounder but perhaps not at as high quality at just scaling as some of the dedicated scaling options for ps2 or ps1 games provided but for a lot of people it was more than good enough then of course you have the xbox one x which it's not at all accurate in terms of like true how the game originally looked and felt for backwards compatibility but that team has put in so much work especially for the xbox one x to do some amazing things you have games like halo 3 on xbox 360 or original xbox games like crimson skies black ninja gaiden black star wars republic commando a lot of them that they have upgraded on xbox one x to then output native 4k and in some cases even increase the frame rate which you know native 4k only looks so good based on the original assets in the game but it's still a cleaner signal that you can capture and scale with properly that is much much better looking and so while again it's not going to be true to the original experience in some regards it's still an option worth considering so this was an insane video my throat is so tired from talking i'm sure you're tired of hearing from me on hopefully you bookmarked this video so you could watch it in multiple sessions as you actually apply the knowledge that you learned but this has been my mini master class on upscaling your retro systems for streaming and capture i hope you enjoyed i hope you learned a lot ultimately get some s video cables and a retro tank 2x mini and most of you are good like if you take anything away from that go buy a retro tank 2x mini now make sure he can never keep them in stock because you just bought them all get yourself some s video cables for your console of your choice and for the most part you're good with the nuance involved there's a lot more you can learn and apply as well and i hope you took anything away from this and i think in future videos again we're going to cover the uh the hdmi mods we're going to cover some more of the fpga versus clone consoles and check out all my capture card reviews if you're interested in you know learning how they support your retro game formats and things like that i do hope you enjoyed the video if you did hit the like button share it with a friend who wants to learn about playing their own video games hopefully this can help them out share this series with them it would mean a lot to me hit the like button subscribe for more tech education and stream guides i'm your stream professor eposvox and join our discord server where you can chat about retro games scaling them up streaming and all of that get lots of tips and even free stream resources including my whole analog vibes uh stream pack as well link in the description eposvox.jd slash discord thanks so much i'll see you next time i need a big old glass of water nowso i promised you guys a part two in my upscaling gretcho systems for streaming video i don't think you all expected for it to be as big as it ended up being because i'm me i make everything way more difficult than it needs to be and i refuse to leave any stone unturned so instead of just a part two it's a mini master class featuring try from my life and gaming we have a lot to talk about here it's gonna be pretty insane i'm gonna have time codes linked in the description which means there'll be chapter markers on the video i recommend bookmarking this watching watching it as you can coming back to it when you need to reference because we are gonna put everything in this video that you need to know at least reasonably to upscale all of your old retro systems whether you're streaming ps2 original xbox nintendo 64 atari pretty much anything and stream it or record it for your youtube channel for yourself or for twitch or you know whatever there's going to be a lot in here now i'm calling this a mini master class because it's only going to be one video even though it's going to be a long video we're going to have links and everything in the description but there is a deeper rabbit hole to go down and with that i'm primarily going to point you to my life and gaming's rgb 101 master class series they have hundreds of videos at this point talking about every best possible way to upscale or playback individual consoles what each of the connectors mean and things like that we're going to kind of condense it and reapply it because they mainly focus on people who just want to play on their tvs and just enjoy their games and that's most people but i'm focusing on specifically streaming and content creation here so we're going to tweak some of that and apply it in a different direction and kind of condense it down before we go too deep we need to talk about why this is needed why can't you just take your original playstation or nintendo system and stream it like normal in some situations you kind of can but you're going to get really poor results or it's just not going to work because you see modern tvs and displays often either no longer even have the standard rf or rca composite red white or yeah red and white audio or s video or even component in some cases hookups or your old retro systems and when they do have those connections they don't often handle 240p or 480i which is what these older systems output very well at all either it'll be handled either either they'll just reject them entirely or it'll be handled with low quality upscaling which will just look like a blurry disaster or there will be a lot of added lag through the upscaling process of playing those odor signals and in fact you can see massive results just from going from 480i interlaced to 480p progressive which is what devices like this will do that we'll be talking about in the video as well the same applies to modern capture cards even the original elgato game capture hd which did support composite ns video and people used that as a streaming option for a long time it still handled those signals very poorly the results from it weren't great it was a convenient and accessible option at the time but a lot of people complained because the d interlacing was crap and the quality was not up to par for those kinds of signals now if you're playing your older retro games on a crt you may notice that they still look as you remember for the most part and still look beautifully sharp because good crts can actually render them out and still look pretty well but the same signal side by side on your crt and then digitize can look super soft and blurry and these upscaling tools and processes help bridge that gap to where you can get them looking more like you remembered back in the day you'll want your stream to be a high quality stream that viewers can actually see and enjoy not a blurry goop that no one has any idea what's going on so your stream quality and what we can do with it starts at the cables well without modifying systems the quality increase or quality dependency starts at the cables what kind of cables you're using i will say right off the bat if you don't want to deal with any of this when in doubt s video out s video is generally the way to go it gives you the highest video quality increase over composite compared to anything else the jump from composite to s video is pretty massive the jump from s video to rgb or component is less massive s video already makes a world of difference even cheaper s video cables look miles better than composite does so the tiers of video quality for video cables goes like this you have rf which you never want to mess with in the streaming realm just avoid at all possible cost composite s video and then component or rgb and then of course there's direct native hdmi mods so s video is the tried and true way to go if you just want to have cheaper except more accessible cables you want it to be natively compatible with just about any system on the planet that's the way to go if you want the extra step to get even better there's component or rgb cables these are two separate types of cables rgb is typically run through a scart connection and was not common in the united states on basically any tv ever and we didn't really see cables that much component however provides the exact same video quality but was something we actually had here in the united states and a lot of systems actually natively output component video playstation 2 playstation 3 original xbox the wii and then technically the gamecube although the component cables were originally basically impossible to find and were super expensive and those are generally the way you want to go if you are looking for the best quality you know and you're wanting analog video cables you want to use component or rgb and i recommend sticking with one if possible where if you do everything through component then your life will be a lot easier than say component and rgb mixed or if you do everything through rgb scart instead of component it's easier if you don't mix them up so keep that in mind you want to commit i recommend sticking with component there are still people who stick with rgb and then of course there is still quality of cables and that is kind of unfortunate mostly it's fine the wii third-party cables mostly seem fine the ps2 third-party cables mostly seem fine the original xbox third-party component cables seem to be really bad like they support 480p but then they look like the quality of composite and it just looks terrible so i do recommend picking up some first party component cables if you want for the original xbox however there is a new device out there which will take the component output of the original xbox and give you a wii component output jack because we component cables are very easy to find and you can get an upgraded model which i'll talk about in a moment so if you are struggling to find an original xbox uh you know first party hd kit for it for component cables then i recommend getting the xbox the wii adapter there is a specific company however that makes dedicated component cables for most systems that are fine-tuned in terms of voltages and resistance and all of that they're you know specifically engineered with the output signals of each individual console in mind which is very important in cases like the playstation 2 and they work with systems that don't natively output component by transcoding the rgb signal because the rgb and component signals are basically the same thing just in two different formats one is rgb the other is ypbpr and so you can actually completely lag free transcode rgb to ypbpr component and use component cables and get the same identical result and so that ends up with situations like the genesis the playstation 1 the super nintendo the nintendo 64 if you have it rgb modded all of those systems that already output rgb but did not output component you can now use their component cables with and have a fully component system so that's hd retrovision they make some of the best and highest quality component cables for basically every system all of that to say if that was too much for you there is virtually no excuse to stick with composite for your retro game system even if you don't care that much about video quality even if you're just trying to get it connected you'll be able to notice the jump from composite to s video and your viewers will appreciate it immensely the difference between composite and s video is the dot crawl that crawls all over the screen the checkerboarding that is sometimes removed with s video and the general like flicker of every little pixel dot on the screen flickers back and forth and looks interferency in composite it doesn't look that way in as video and think about it you're upscaling your video from this tiny 240p 480i source all the way to 720p or 1080p or whatever on top of then compressing it with video compression when you're streaming or encoding for youtube the more interference filled and messy your video signal is the worse it's going to look after you go through all of that process i wanted to take a brief break from the nerdy info to have a little bit of a real talk about this video i originally shot this entire thing in august of 2020 and it quickly between busyness with just the fall season and then we bought a house and moving it was a bear to produce and i realized quickly when the raw footage was over an hour and a half long that it was going to be just way too big of a project that i would have to cut down for the youtube copy and that's what i've done here i've actually posted the full just uncut version that has all the information and all the details over on my own streaming service called nebula and it's over an hour long you guys get the kind of cut down version because that's what is more appropriate for youtube but if you haven't heard of nebula it's a site that my fellow youtube creators and i have built together to make it so that we don't have to worry about things like watch time or audience retention or you know how long a video should be for the platform or any of those weird algorithmic things and it's ad free and our videos are higher quality there with that we it also features youtube's top education creators such as thomas frank legal eagle lowspecgamer and mkbhd and we've partnered with curiositystream because they saw what we were doing over on nebula for educational content and they wanted to partner up with their library of thousands of documentary and educational titles that you can watch so when you sign up with the link down below that's curiositystream.com epos you not only get access to curiosity stream and all of their great educational and documentary content but you get access to nebula for free as well for the entire duration of your subscription to curiosity stream for a limited time curiosity stream is offering 26 off of their annual plan making it less than fifteen dollars a year for both cs and nebula that is two streaming services for under fifteen dollars per year and you get to support myself and other educational creators as well as getting tons of content to binge for yourself and while you're there check out meet the avatars a a brief documentary into the idea of basically cloning human beings into technological replicants to then spend the rest of your life life with and some some things that we got to start considering in that the next 50 or 100 years and it's really interesting to think about go check that out head on over to curiositystream.com epos for the best deal in streaming and get access to both sites for under 15 a year it's crazy go do it now all right now we can talk about scaling hardware now you have a few different options when it comes to scaling hardware for your retro systems you have actual upscaler units such as the xrgb mini mini framemeister there's the iscan product line of upscaler units and these are upscalers these are different products we'll talk about the differences in a moment then you have line doublers which are effectively the same purpose for you but they are different products and these include the open source scan converter or the ossc and then the retro tink line of products which i've talked about quite a bit and talked about in part one of this series and there's the retro tank pro the multi-format and now the retrotech mini as well as i'm gonna throw in here the rad2x and we'll talk about why in a moment then there's plug-and-play solutions that are individual per console basis such as the eon super 64 for the nintendo 64. the eon uh gamecube hd mark ii for the gamecube the carby gchd for the gamecube then you have pound hdmi cables i consider those plug and play the rad 2x is technically plug and play and then there's actually a specific xbox uh hdmi output that's actually pretty good that just takes the component signal for that that's from a different company and then you have a lot of these cheap plug and play ones off of amazon such as the ps2 to hdmi adapter from panlong or the we to hdmi from 3c smart these are mostly going to be crap but we'll talk about why they matter and what they are as well again if this has already been a lot for you just bookmark the video you can come back to it i have time-coded sections you can you know pick and choose which information you need to gather at your whim all right first let's talk about the difference between scalars and line doublers an example of a scalar is the xrgb mini framemeister this was for a long time the device that everyone recommended for connecting all of your retro systems to it has composite s video rgb and component inputs as well as a couple of hdmi passthroughs it'll upscale everything to 1080p you can use custom profiles such as the ones from firebrand x which are per system i even have written down which profile does what here because there's a lot of them and they are really really good profiles that make your systems look a lot better and you can scale and tweak and de-interlace to your heart's content and it looks great but it is a different process from line doubling as it takes the signal does whatever processing to it in a frame buffer and then spits it out it's great it's convenient but it was very expensive it was like 330 dollars new when it was being sold and then i believe almost two years ago now they announced that they will no longer be making new ones as the original chips that they use for it and everything like that uh they've just can't source them anymore and so the prices are gonna keep scaling up as they run out of stock and people keep scalping them and whatever and so the difference is here i mentioned it processes everything in a frame buffer that means that it operates with about one frame of input lag as it has this frame buffer a frame buffer is basically it takes the video signal takes that frame it sits in a buffer like with anything else you know it sits there it does whatever it needs to do it within a set amount of time and then it spits it out the other end there's no processing line by line or anything like that it accepts the frame processes the frame spits it out this is how most digital systems work these days line doublers on the other hand operate line by line on the signal that they you know take so every line that they receive they double it spit it back out as it comes and so it builds the frame line by line and there's basically no input lag for it they're basically like free as the process is fairly instant it's literally just taking it spitting it back out two times taking it spitting back out two times taking it spitting back up two times and so it literally just doubles the lines if you have a 240p signal every line gets doubled it's now a 480p system however since it is literally just doubling the lines and spinning it out back at the other end there can be weird video output specs with these devices that can cause compatibility issues for example in all of my capture card reviews i have a test for the open source scan converter to see if the capture card you know plays along with it very well because it can output some weird formats uh it doesn't always fill the frame it because it's not just upscaling it to 1080p it's just multiplying it by 2x 3x 4x or 5x and then the refresh rate of the original system which with a lot of original systems like the super nintendo is a very weird not standard refresh rate that can cause compatibility issues with displays as well as capture cards and so that's why i test for it because it can be a little finicky now the retro tink line of line doublers only goes up to 480p in the first place whereas these go up to 1080p and 1200p these only go up to 480p in the first place which makes the signal a lot more compatible because most devices can mostly handle 480p but neither of these usually end up filling the frame because that's not an even scale these are based on even integer scales and you know it's going to be formatted specifically on a 2x 3x 4x or 5x basis whereas the framemeister specifically is designed to just scale up to 1080p now you can customize how much the overscan and underscan actually zooms in and out on the image and you can do a lot with it in the framemeister but the goal is to just upscale it to 1080p and so it can actually fill your 1080p canvas there's also de-interlacing issues if you have a 480i input source well then this de-interlaces that using what's called bob d interlacing and spits it back out as 480p bob the interlacing is a little bit more flickery than people are probably wanting it's a little bit less desirable in that regard because it bounces back and forth as it basically shows each set of fields separately and then bounces back and forth but compared to a dedicated scaler unit like the framemeister which can get smooth 60fps out of it without flickering it's a less desirable outcome for some however with some devices at least with the the retro tank you can actually pass through that 480i if your capture card supports it and dnr lays it in software to bypass this but generally the point of this is to de-interlace it in the device so there's two things to consider here with the scalers you're actually getting a native 1080p output which means you don't need say a capture card with 444 rgb chroma subsampling which i recommend a lot with capture cards uh that basically keeps all the color information you don't really need that if it's already upscaled to 1080p you can capture it at whatever you're probably not scaling it anymore so that's not a factor so you can just take it straight 1080p to 1080p and compress and good to go if you're using a line doubler that's say only giving you 480p then you need a high quality capture card that can do 444 because you're going to be stretching that 480p back up you know two times or four times for 4k to scale it even further in software and you need that extra information so and the framemeister which is a scalar already outputs 1080p only even outputs 422 in the first place so you really don't got to worry about that and that is definitely an advantage in the field of you know actual scalar devices so next let's talk about my favorite device to recommend the retro tink 2x line of products you actually have three available and i want to talk about the different options and which one you should choose based on the situation you're going to be using because it can be a little confusing but it doesn't have to be because there's kind of a default option as well so the default option that pretty much anyone can go with is the retro tank 2x mini this is more affordable at only 69 or 70 dollars it's missing a few of the features such as scan line generation and component inputs from the bigger ones which we'll talk about but it takes composite or s video as well as rca audio input and line doubles it up to 480p to output to your live stream it even supports s video from pal nintendo 64's with a little hacky work around which most devices don't those nintendo 64s are a little funky so that's pretty cool as well it has a smoothing filter if you want to use it for 3d games which kind of blends it together keeps the hard pixel edges from being a thing most people don't like that so it is completely optional this is the cheapest and the most reasonable option as if you don't plan on using any component hookups or anything like that you're like i just got some older systems i got some s video cables you can just plug it in here hdmi out to your capture card and tv and you're good to go and it is a wonderful option the quality you can get from it again especially with this video is pretty solid and you can use it with your vhs player which the comb filter will help with as well so that's pretty cool and we'll talk about that in my hopefully finally get to it vhs digitization video as well these videos are really big it takes me a long time to get them done so moving up from the mini you move on to the retro tank 2x pro the retro team 2x pro is the upgraded model it takes composite s video and component input and it supports 240p line doubled up to 480p it supports 480i the interlace to 480p but there's no 480p input support so if you're playing on original xbox playstation 2 wii or gamecube and you have 480p games you can't run them at 480p or it won't know what to do with it so that's the one downside of it it has hdmi output of course to then send 480pg your capture card to your tv it has filter options for a scanline overlay if you like that i'm not a huge fan of it i think it makes the whole image a little bit darker and doesn't really rep like i like chunky scan lines on an actual crt like my bbm here but the fake scanline look has just never been a thing for me and then it also has a smoothing filter option if you wish to smooth out your 3d games and not have the hard pixel edges which again most people want this one as well as the mini these both use integer scaling also known as nearest neighbor scaling where it's a hard double line up from 240p to 480p or what have you which is more flattering towards 2d games you know sprite based pixel art based video games that integer scaling keeps those pixels exactly as they were just multiplied which keeps those hard pixel edges and keeps the game looking exactly like they should these the mini and the pro are what you want if you're using predominantly 2d based games especially from the super nintendo the nintendo you know ps1 games that are very pixel art in nature are going to look best on the mini or the pro as it uses this integer scaling algorithm so that's the mini and the pro the multi-format is the third retrosync 2x that you should consider and this one is especially useful for the generation of consoles that outputs 480p so the gamecube the xbox the wii the playstation 2 all of these systems can output at least some portion of their library at 480p and more with modding and this passes through 480p so it's like the pro but it passes through 480p so you can still get the benefit of nice progressive scanned games without needing to use a separate device for it or something like that it still does line doubling from 240p to 480p and still does the interlacing from 480i to 480p and all of these use the same bob d interlacing method but the difference here is that the scaling method used in the multi-format is no longer integer scaling it is bilinear scaling which means it smooths things out a little bit more it looks better for 3d games it makes 3d games look great because you know they're not meant to have these hard pixel edges and it makes them look more smoothed out in 3d but it doesn't look quite as good for 2d and pixel art games because you're getting kind of blurring of the pixels and things like that it doesn't represent them how you would expect them to see with the hard pixel edges blown up but it does introduce the nice comb filter that's improved for composite video so if you're using composite video for like specific sources or for a vcr then the multi-format actually has an improved comb filter which will make those look better than some of the other systems so the multi-format is specifically great again for the ps2 the xbox and the gamecube which is really nice 480p is wonderful avoids the obnoxious de-interlacing flicker of course it requires component cables to get 480p out of systems cannot be done over composite and s video but it is worth noting that not all games on these systems support 480p so you're not going to be you're still going to be doing dealing with the d interlacing for some games for example there's a whole ps2 wiki that shows which games can support uh 480p and which ones don't because unlike the xbox boxes which indicate whether hdtv or edtv480p is supported playstation 2 and gamecube games do not indicate this so there i'll have a link in the description for the ps2 wiki at least which indicates it however there is a weird exception to this in that there are some games that just don't give you that option some games either prompt it whenever it knows you have component cables detected are like hey you want to try 480p some of them also support 16x9 like god of war 2 and god of war but some games don't give you any indication sometimes they bury it in the menus sometimes you have to hold x and triangle while the game is booting and then it'll prompt you this is also the case for some gamecube games by the way so those are your direct retro tink options i'm also going to mention here which also gets mentioned under the plug and play solutions because that's what it is the rad2x the rad2x is a collaboration project branched from the retro tink line of project products that takes the retrosync concept and makes it easier to use for those who just have one or two consoles they want to hook up and they want individual dongles per console because the difference here is is the red 2x units b they plug into your playstation or your nintendo 64 or what have you plugged directly into your system and just have an hdmi output there's no ability to use it on multiple systems at a time whereas something like the mini the pro or the multi-format you can hook up to a switch or a splitter or whatever and use with all of your systems at once pretty much the rad2x is a plug-and-play pre-product setup but otherwise it's pretty much the exact same product it does integer scaling 480p line doubling and it's built off of the same retro tank classic original design as all of the retro tank products have stemmed from so next up in the line doubler space we have the legendary open source scan converter or ossc after the framemeister came out this came out later and was the next kind of all-in-one swiss army knife tool that everyone started recommending and for good reason it's a pretty powerful product this is a line doubler that can line double up to 5x output for 240p sources giving you up to 1600 or 1920 by 1200 output although most people stick with the 1920x1080 canvas and you have all the way from a 480p 2x line double output to 3x to 4x and a 5x if your capture card supports it or tv supports it because it gets kind of finicky this is the kind of the problem child product and why i test it in all of my capture card reviews now because for example the super nintendo does not output a exact 60 hertz signal it's slightly off of 60 hertz and so once you run it through here line double it to what could be an odd resolution like 960p or 4x and include the weird oddball resolution it kind of starts to break compatibility with a lot of products but if it works in your setup it is beautiful you have rgb input through a vga connector which you could use for older computers although signal support is going to be kind of hit or miss i've tried using this for my windows xp and windows 98 computers and it'll pass through some signals but otherwise it gets really picky about like high refresh rate stuff you've got component input and you have rgb start input and then a 3.5 millimeter audio input that you can then break out to rca we've got rgb component and another form of rgb the only thing you're missing in terms of inputs on this is composite and s video and with this then you can set up all sorts of settings and honestly they are beyond what i recommend anyone deal with there's so much like there's so many settings that it becomes a true headache because there's just so many options it's kind of overwhelming because you can tune in sampling options and phase to get the exact sharpness like you can get really freaking sharp output out of this but it requires a lot of manual work and more manual profiles from uh firebrand x and those are a little bit more complicated than the framemeister profiles the framemeister profiles you slap up to i think you can support up to ten on one or 14 on one memory card you put the micro sd card in the back of it you're good to go just load them up on the ossc you have to like build them on the computer first even when you take them from him you got to like fine-tune them and then you put them on here and then you load them and then you dial in phase and then the the setup of just plugging in and going versus the tuning for this is pretty bonkers but if you want the ultimate control that's what the ossc is for and then it gives you an hdmi output with that signal now the osse versus the retro tank they are both line doublers but this one gets you a much more potentially sharp out of the box image for your stream than the retro tank 2x in the sense that this can go up to 1080p output you know it won't be fully matted right depending on how your settings are set up but you know the actual video frame will be 1080p and it can go up to 5x whereas this is only 2x so if you don't have a 444 rgb from a sub sampling capture card that can scale better you could get cleaner output out of the oss than the retro tank just due to having to scale the retro tank more in your capture the oss can output 480p with the 2x mode but it's mainly meant to push higher to 3x 4x or 5x to 1080p resolution or you know close to it for that higher resolution signal and like i said it's it's generally less compatible than the 480p output of the retro tank this the lssc is much less convenient of a solution but more of a power users like ultimate tool especially for a higher quality initial result than the retro tank all right that was a lot of talk about line doublers upscalers and so on let's talk about a bit more of a simple solution and why i don't always recommend them let's talk about plug-and-play hdmi solutions for your game consoles i'm going to start with the worst of the worst pound cables they are some of the you know less technically inclined retro youtubers best friends they are dirt cheap and super easy to use because you just plug them into the back of your system and you get an hdmi output but they are bad they are just bad no one's paying me to say this they are just not great the output that you get from them in most cases is low quality they build it based off of composite maybe s video sources even for systems that support component and there is variable input latency that is not good now normal input latency which even like the framemeister has you can learn to deal with and compensate because if it's like an extra frame of lag you just you may get frustrated first but then you eventually learn to just hit the button one frame later not that you're actually measuring frames but you get what i mean and it's fine variable lag means at one point in time it's x lag at the next point in time it's a longer lag and then shorter you can never quite get used to it and that's that means you can never really compensate for it and so it becomes so much worse of a result this is one rare instance where i genuinely just wholeheartedly cannot recommend a specific product to pretty much anyone especially when there are better plug and play options out there like the rad2x or even you know you you can hook up a couple cables to the retro tank and figure it out i believe in you next you have the eon super 64. i reviewed this last year this is basically a retro tink for the nintendo 64. it is the rad2x but cloned by eon it uses s video for ntsc composite for pal and does not you know upgrade signal with upgraded rgb modded nintendo 64. next we need to talk about the gamecube as a console like well with regards to plug and play solutions so specifically to get great video out of the nintendo gamecube especially with plug and play solutions you need one of the models that has the digital av outport on the bottom you have the standard nintendo av analog connector that was on the super nintendo and the nintendo 64. all gamecubes have this but most of the runs of the gamecube have this digital av port as well there are some super late runs that don't have it but personally i've never seen one in real life that doesn't have it but if you're missing that port you're kind of screwed in terms of video quality and it would be easier just to buy another or at least buy s video cables and retro tank but if you want much higher quality video out we're going to utilize this digital av port now this was something that was originally used for first party nintendo component cables for the gamecube they supported it from day one the problem is for whatever reason at least in the states and it seems to be in other countries as well they did not sell these component cables for very long maybe because the system was too early most people didn't have tvs with component inputs at the time or at marketing or whatever they did not seem to sell them for very long and those cables became fairly rare and highly sought after because of the higher quality and 480p output results that they were incredibly expensive for a long time finally 2017 you know we're talking so many years after the gamecube was released finally people finished reverse engineering that digital av output and we started to get other options this is part of the open source gc video project now first and foremost we have other component cables we can use we have the new carby component cables that i mentioned before these are great they have bnc connectors or they ship with bnc to rca connectors so you can just plug them right into your crt or upscaler and you're good to go and most for the most part it is a completely slot in place replacement for the original component cables if you don't have them but what they also made was an hdmi carby that plugs into the back of it and gives you hdmi out there we go now we're talking it gives you 480p over hdmi line double ready to go and then you run the audio separately with the normal av cables this is what most people should get it is fairly straightforward it's easy to use it's a great option high quality as high quality as everything else will be with component cables it's what most people probably want and you're good to go with that however eon the company that made the super 64 also released their own gchd products and they actually released two they originally released the original eon gamecube hd but then they released a second one the mark ii and that's the one i have and that one's interesting for a specific reason the mark ii is pretty cool because not only does it give you hdmi out for your gamecube at 480p line doubled ready to go or pass through for native 480p games and all of that with audio and everything else you also have a couple extra outputs you have a 3.5 millimeter or toslink breakout for digital or for audio coming out of this as well to run to a separate audio system you also have a wii component cable output here as well which means that you can connect this and it this is dual output capable so that means you can connect this run hdmi to your capture card or modern tv for capturing and streaming and then you can run using wii component cables which are much easier to find and you can use hd retrovision ones as well and run those out to your crt for more analog play completely lag free which means like for smash players or something you could play on your crt you have completely lag free video for playing smash and then still have a native clean digital output that you're running to your capture card or your live stream really freaking cool the mark ii also has a button to let you add scan lines to the output as well which i don't really see the point of especially for 480p games what's handy here is that it will output 480p60 regardless of what game the game is sending be it interlaced or progressive uh but it maybe doesn't handle the interlacing as well as you might prefer what's cool though is that with swiss the homebrew software for nintendo gamecube you can force most games to actually dm release in the gamecube and output 480p and then it doesn't have to do the dnr lacing on the you know on them pass through so you're good to go there so that's pretty cool and the results are basically identical to the component cables there's one other plug-and-play solution available that i've been trying to get my hands on for a while but haven't been able to and that is the chimeric systems hdmi video adapter for the original xbox this plugs into the component output of the original xbox and gives you hdmi the cool thing about component video is that it's the video like signal is compa hdmi is backwards compatible with it you can send component video over hdmi so that means unless you're doing some weird scaling inside of it component video to hdmi or hdmi to component video is a lag free transfer process so this just converts the component video over to an hdmi signal be it at 480p 720p whatever your xbox is said to output and you're good to go and again i would be remiss if i didn't mention again the rad2x is a plug and play solution and they look great and is basically the retro tank and is what most people should be doing if you're looking for plug and play solutions imo unless specifically you're on the xbox where you want that extra 720p support now you have crappy plug and play adapters as well such as the ps2 hdmi adapters on amazon which i've actually covered in the past as well as these wii hdmi adapters and for the most part these are using s video or composite instead of component and the results you get from it while de-interlaced potentially less flickery than the retro tanks or what have you it's super soft it's super blurry sometimes it's stretched out these are convenient but you can see for yourself imo the video quality results do not match what you're getting from everything else i'm not sure i can recommend it all right so you've got your signal digitized it's coming into your computer and your capture card and you're good to go you've got yourself a nice capture card what do you do with it from there now i've already released in part one a video that tells you about my favorite scaling algorithm within obs studio which is area and why that matters for upscaling your video definitely go watch that if you haven't seen it already there's a lot to do with aspect ratios and overall like how you should approach how the video looks in your stream that i honestly don't have a ton of experience with since i don't stream those games as often as i do say pc games and for that i wanted to make sure we had you know information from the people who did it the most so i've got tri from my life and gaming here who's going to tell you his experience of streaming retro games for years now with obs studio when capturing output from classic consoles for my life and gaming i usually try to present a realistic view of what the output from any given upscaler device might look like when playing on your tv at home now i know some of our friends like bob from retro rgb are big into capturing uncompressed footage at a game's native resolution and then using editing tools to resize it after the fact and that pixel perfect capture process can be an excellent goal in certain scenarios but for our show since we're often trying to convey the capabilities of various devices in terms of how they look for play more so than capture it makes the most sense to capture the scaled output now one thing that i think is important to address is that pre-hd consoles with the exception of the relatively few games for ps2 xbox gamecube that support proper widescreen modes and the wii most wii games are widescreen but otherwise games should be represented with a 4 3 aspect ratio no matter whether a game's horizontal resolution is 256 320 512 or something else nearly all console games were designed for ntsc crts with a 4 3 aspect ratio which means that depending on the resolution the console outputs the pixels are either wider than they are tall or skinnier than they are tall almost never square so my philosophy is that game capture should err on the side of respecting the 4 3 aspect ratio this means that i do not use optimized sampler profiles on the open source scan converter not only because they can be a lot of work and vary from console to console but also because perfectly sharp pixel edges would result in the aspect ratio being slightly off i recommend the average user go with the generic 4 3 setting on the ossc which still gives the impression of very sharp pixels with just a touch of horizontal interpolation and that's just the way i like it i prefer to use obs for recording because it allows me to set my desired canvas size which is 1280 by 960 for the vast majority of my recordings and here's why the open source scan converter has multiple modes for various input signals that result in 960p output 4x240p 4x480i and 2x 480p are all 960p 1280x960 is a perfect 4 3 aspect ratio which means i can manually resize the capture input within the canvas if for any reason the capture card interprets it improperly for example while my particular capture card displays 240p 4x from the ossc perfectly within the frame without any need for adjustments 480p2x appears slightly too wide the set canvas size lets you easily see any anomalies like this you can hold shift to unconstrain the proportions and correct it before recording i like to manage this by making separate scenes where the capture card source is already sized for different signals this way i don't have to make adjustments every time i record a different signal and actually i like to use the 1280 by 960 canvas even when recording a retro tank device or the framemeister in the case of the retro tink i simply fill the 960p frame with its 480p output the reason for this is that if recording compressed video native 480p recording will have more visible compression issues whereas the integrity of the pixels is better maintained by the video compression if recorded at a larger size as for the framemeister while it does output 1080p the actual game image should still fit within the 1280x960 frame if using a screen mode like smart 2x there's no real upside to doing it this way instead of 1080p but it does keep my recording style consistent across a range of devices and by the way for widescreen games i use 1707 by 960 and stretch the input to fit technically that's one pixel column shy of 16.9 you actually can't get 69 exactly when using 960 as your vertical resolution but you won't be losing any of the game image now if you're editing your content you are most likely using a 1080p or 2160p sequence in which case you'll need to scale your 960p capture to fill the frame which is easy to do in premiere and matches the size that 960p would appear it on your tv now since we do use a 1080p canvas for our streams on my life and gaming i created a 4 3 crt frame that is designed for unscaled 960p input this means that 240p games should not need to be resized at all for the stream but 480p games will need a manual horizontal squishing i like doing things this way because even though the stream bitrate is lower than our recording bit rate it still presents a clean 4x output from the ossc as purely as possible without any further scaling and obs possibly distorting the result keep in mind this is just what i do to meet my own needs to match my own views on how i prefer to represent the games from original hardware i don't really consider myself to be streaming or recording experts specifically but i do fancy myself as having plenty of experience in handling the analog output from old video game systems and the idiosyncrasies of how those resolutions are scaled so i hope some of you find that information useful for how a 1280x960 canvas can keep your recordings a consistent size with a consistent aspect ratio but for more hardcore obs usage i'll hand it back over to the stream professor lastly before we wrap up this video i just wanted to give some honorable mentions to some alternative ways that you could play some of your favorite retro games first and foremost are of course hd collections on the ps3 and ps4 you've got collections of say final fantasy 10 and 10 2. you've got the god of award collection on ps3 which bypasses the ps2 and lets you play them some of the games output 720p on it which is pretty impressive they're not always perfect recreations but sometimes there are great ways to go and you know that may be what you want if you have a specific game you're looking into you might see if it was re-released on a different platform or through the you know you can play some retro some retro games on modern systems like through virtual console and things like that see if that's not an option to you just to save you some headache and time if that's the only game you want to play but secondly there's also backwards compatibility if you had an original fat ps3 you could play ps1 ps2 and ps3 games on it and play them all through the ps3 it was a good all-arounder but perhaps not at as high quality at just scaling as some of the dedicated scaling options for ps2 or ps1 games provided but for a lot of people it was more than good enough then of course you have the xbox one x which it's not at all accurate in terms of like true how the game originally looked and felt for backwards compatibility but that team has put in so much work especially for the xbox one x to do some amazing things you have games like halo 3 on xbox 360 or original xbox games like crimson skies black ninja gaiden black star wars republic commando a lot of them that they have upgraded on xbox one x to then output native 4k and in some cases even increase the frame rate which you know native 4k only looks so good based on the original assets in the game but it's still a cleaner signal that you can capture and scale with properly that is much much better looking and so while again it's not going to be true to the original experience in some regards it's still an option worth considering so this was an insane video my throat is so tired from talking i'm sure you're tired of hearing from me on hopefully you bookmarked this video so you could watch it in multiple sessions as you actually apply the knowledge that you learned but this has been my mini master class on upscaling your retro systems for streaming and capture i hope you enjoyed i hope you learned a lot ultimately get some s video cables and a retro tank 2x mini and most of you are good like if you take anything away from that go buy a retro tank 2x mini now make sure he can never keep them in stock because you just bought them all get yourself some s video cables for your console of your choice and for the most part you're good with the nuance involved there's a lot more you can learn and apply as well and i hope you took anything away from this and i think in future videos again we're going to cover the uh the hdmi mods we're going to cover some more of the fpga versus clone consoles and check out all my capture card reviews if you're interested in you know learning how they support your retro game formats and things like that i do hope you enjoyed the video if you did hit the like button share it with a friend who wants to learn about playing their own video games hopefully this can help them out share this series with them it would mean a lot to me hit the like button subscribe for more tech education and stream guides i'm your stream professor eposvox and join our discord server where you can chat about retro games scaling them up streaming and all of that get lots of tips and even free stream resources including my whole analog vibes uh stream pack as well link in the description eposvox.jd slash discord thanks so much i'll see you next time i need a big old glass of water now\n"