We're going to Japan in March and we made it through the hardest part of it: we bought the plane tickets!
Earlier this month, one day we checked the plane tickets, chose which one we wanted to buy and because it was late, we went to sleep. The next day we checked it again and the price has almost doubled! Lussy had to check a whole lot of options until she found a plane that had available seats and was reasonably priced. She's a hero - I was freaking out the whole time.
Also, we bought an Open Source Scan Converter - or OSSC for short.
We have a lot of old consoles, and it's hard to make them look right on an HD flat screen. But that is where the OSSC comes into picture - literally -, because it turns the RGB analogue signal to digital. It also has awesome latency-free upscale options and can add customizable scanlines to the image.
The PS2, Gamecube, XBOX and Wii are alright, but there's no real reason to upscale a 480p image, although if the image is 480i, the OSSC can de-interlace it, which is pretty cool.
The most problematic consoles to connect are the N64 and the NES, because they have no RGB out, so the OSSC is just not compatible with them. For us, the N64 was the priority, because Lussy loves that console and the image quality of that hardware is just not good in general.
So we bought an RGB amp mod chip for the N64, and installed it just yesterday. What that little chip does is, it takes the raw RGB image from the motherboard and adds it to the output. And it helps a lot!
We connected the now RGB N64 output to the OSSC and it worked fine... but that console changes resolutions so frequently and uses such weird pixel amounts that the OSSC just can't keep up, and sometimes it only shows a black image for seconds before it cuts back to the game. So it's not optimal.
So we're trying to achieve video-perfection. Next, we have to do something about the NES.
