Reply To: General help with a Dreamcast, please?

[nmalinoski]

– Wasn’t the external RF box on the NES just a switch to select either antenna or console?

Sort of. That particular piece of hardware is known as an RF Switch. It’s designed to fit inline with your cable or antenna input on your TV, and it has a long cable that connects to the NES’s RF output. By default, the switch lets the input from the other cable pass through, but it disconnects that and switches over to the console’s RF signal when it’s detected on that cable.

For later consoles that use Nintendo’s AV Multi-Out port, or at least the N64 (because I own one of these) Nintendo released a small module that fits into the AV port, has an RF-out jack, and a channel 3/4 selector switch. This module is paired with the exact same RF switch that was released for use with the NES, and it works the same way.

– According to the SegaRetro, there has been only one VGA Box model and it was only released in Japan. From the photos on eBay, there’s only composite, S-Video and DB-15 outputs. And the SCART cable was only released in Europe as a simple cable.

Seems legit, though, even in the absence of the official accessory, there was an abundance of VGA boxes available here in North America, and most games still supported it (in contrast to many HDD-capable games for the PS2, where HDD support that was available in Japan was stripped from otherwise identical North American releases, even though North America did end up getting the HDD).