Reply To: Just live with it?

[nmalinoski]

Snes, won’t show 1x, 3x or 4x, just says no signal.

Some TVs can be really picky about the types of signals they accept. Generally, 4K TVs have been more flexible than 1080p displays have been, but I think there are still a lot of flat panel displays that won’t tolerate the framerates, resolutions, and/or peculiarities of old consoles that were designed at a time when CRTs, the honey badgers of display technology, were the only type of display available.

The SNES, in particular, has a janky sync signal (the Cliff Notes being that it cuts short the line right before the first visible line of every other frame, which results in an inconsistent horizontal sync), and the fix for that is a dejitter mod, which smooths out that oddity.

Additionally, I don’t think Passthrough/1x would work for most console games from 5th-gen and earlier, because I don’t think a lot of displays actually support 240p over HDMI (even though it’s supposed to be part of the spec now).

On 5x it looks good but cuts off the top and bottom couple of inches, I’ve lived with this and run it in 5x but it’s annoying and I’d love to fix it.
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I have issues with nearly every console cutting bits off, especially on 5x, if I change from 1920 down to 1600 etc the screen just goes black.

Cropping is to be expected when using 240p line5x with the default output mode of 1920×1080. 240 * 5 is 1200, which means that the top and bottom need to be lopped off in order to meet the 1080 line count. The other modes, 1920×1200 and 1600×1200, won’t result in cropping, but it sounds like your display doesn’t support them for some reason. I would try a different HDMI input; perhaps one that’s also labeled “PC” or “DVI” to see if that results in better compatibility with the line5x video modes.

Saturn, same, top to bottom just doesn’t line up and will only show in 1x and 4x.

I’m not sure I understand this bit. What do you mean by “doesn’t line up”? Is the resulting image skewed, or just off-center? Do you have a photo of the problem?

Additionally, what kind of AV cable are you using? SCART, ostensibly; but sync-on-composite, sync-on-luma, native composite sync, or does it have a sync stripper built-in?

I’m close to giving up and trying a framemiester, but I like the way OSSC inputs work and it’s fits my setup really well, I’m just really struggling with this sizing issue.

When a display doesn’t tolerate an imperfect video signal, the best approach to force compatibility is to get a proper scaler, like the Framemeister, or wait for the OSSC Pro, or perhaps track down something like an Extron DSC 301 HD to pair with your OSSC. These devices all have framebuffers (as opposed to the OSSC’s linebuffer), and therefore can use framerate conversion to alter the framerate to something that the display will accept, at the cost of about a frame of lag and some jitter (dropped/repeated frames).

I think, ideally, whatever display you get should have perfect compatibility with anything that gets thrown at it without resorting to alterations, like framerate conversion, as a CRT can, but that’s not always feasible, because that’s not something TV manufacturers bother with.