Premade pure sync cables at last!

If you have read our gamers guide to SCART cables you might be aware that almost all the SCART cables available for retro gaming systems use composite video for sync. While this isn’t normally a problem, it can cause dot-crawl on an otherwise perfect RGB picture or, in the case of the XRGB3, cause the picture to disappear for a second when the screen gets too bright.

It’s taken a while for the retro-gaming community to cotton on to the fact that most of the old consoles actually offer pure or raw sync output as well as composite video. For users that needed pure sync cables, usually the only choice was to modify an existing cable or create a cable of their own. Not easy in many cases, try finding those 10 pin mini-din connectors the Saturn uses, for instance.

Luckily, a seller who goes by the name of Retro_Console_Accessories on E-bay has come to the rescue, offering pure sync cables for both SNES/Super Famicom and the Sega Saturn. I purchased these cables to test and I can confirm they are perfectly wired for pure sync, there’s no picture dropout problems when using the XRGB3 and no dot crawl effect. The cables themselves are good quality though there is still significant audio noise on the SNES cable (this might actually be picked up internally rather than as the signal goes down the SCART lead since noisy audio on the SNES seems very common). The Saturn cable had next to no audio noise added at all. Picture wise, both cables worked perfectly and gave a crisp, perfect RGB image. If you need a pure/raw sync cable for your SNES or Saturn these come highly recommended. Hopefully Retro_Console_Accessories will start offering pure sync cables for the Genesis soon too.

Use this link to jump directly to Retro_console_accessories E-bay page.