Some exciting developments this month. First of all, more exciting for me than anyone else is the news I finally got my XRGB Mini. Currently I’ve mostly been playing PC Engine games on it, since that never worked with my old setup. So far it’s been great. I had one random drop-out from the PC Engine last night out of several hours gaming. I don’t know what that was down to, cosmic rays perhaps? Only drawback of the unit at the moment is that my RGB modded N64 won’t work with it at all. I’ll be looking into it hopefully it’s just a simple cable problem. I have one of Retro Console Accessories enhanced sync boosters on order so maybe that will help.
The latest firmware on the mini fully supports PAL sources too. I know a few people are keen for me to try my Amiga with it, however the latest firmware also breaks English language support. I was hoping Micomsoft would have a fix ready by the time I got my unit, though they seem to be dragging their heels a little at the moment. I will try the latest firmware at some point, though since I’m new to the mini I don’t want to sacrifice the English menus just yet.
The other exciting news this month was an amazing discovery by RGB2E over on the Shmups forum. Do you want to capture your retro consoles in FULL RGB? Even 240p native (yes native, without deinterlacing)? How about 480p, VGA and 720p support too? Amazingly you can for around £130. A StarTech.com PEXHDCAP capture card, coupled with a sync splitter (to split RGB SCART into RGBHV) will capture virtually any source, without a video processor needed to unlock the output frame rate. I don’t have one of these cards yet but I intend to pick up one next month.
