A quick question..

[scorch56]

To make a long story short.. basically.. I was "weeding" through a bunch of mixed up A/V cords and power cables trying to sort them out. I think I matched all of them up except for my Saturns. I have a cord that has the small, circular plug on one end; and terminates in red-white-yellow RCA jacks. Looking in the end of the circular plug.. I only see three pins. Yes I tried it.. and it seems to work fine; but this thing ALSO looks like a Genesis model 2 or 3 A/V cable and as I remember.. they had only three pins as well. So my question is.. is that what your Saturn plugs look like? Like I said.. it does work.. but I don't see how or why.. a Saturn plug would be identical to a Genesis one. Especially if it carries a stereo signal and the "female" end ON the Saturn.. has a lot more holes. I can't tell if it's playing in stereo really.

Thanks to all for your time & attention.

 

[Krelian]

I used to have a really cheap Saturn A/V cord like that... for some reason sound wouldn't out to the right hemisphere of my stereo... I got some fake gold plated S-Video A/V on my Saturn right now and it has like eight pins or so I think... anyway I get full stereo with it...

Oh, and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the same pinout as the later model Genesis...

~Krelian

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

The saturn and I would assume the genesis as well both only require 3 pins to have stereo audio and composite video. The ground used in the plugs is actually pulled from the shielding around the a/v port. I've seen 3rd party saturn plugs with only 3 cables in them before.

 

[Krelian]

I was leafing through some of the HUNDREDS of pages of dev documents that I've printed and I found the A/V pinout...

.1..2....3

4..5..6..7

..8..9..0

1 - Vcc

2 - Audio L

3 - Audio R

4 - Composite Sync

5 - RGB R

6 - RGB G

7 - RGB B

8 - Video Out

9 - S Video (Lumi)

0 - S Video (Chromi)

~Krelian

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

or if you want a nice picture, goto gamesx.com

 

[Tagrineth]

Quiz question -

Would it be possible to get Saturn to output Component video via RGB?

 

[Vash]

possibly not, or only with a color shift. But maybe the video chip on the sat can produce a native component signal, so maybe - just maybe - you could get it directly off the chip

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

Originally posted by Scared0o0Rabbit@Jan 10, 2004 @ 04:24 AM

The saturn and I would assume the genesis as well both only require 3 pins to have stereo audio and composite video. The ground used in the plugs is actually pulled from the shielding around the a/v port. I've seen 3rd party saturn plugs with only 3 cables in them before.

From my limityed knowledge the sega does.. I actually used a friends old satrun av wires and spliced them together with my sega RF attachment to allow me to hook up the sega via av cables rather than RF and i only used three wires.

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

being that I built a/v ports onto my saturn, I can tell you for sure that it only needs 3 wires. The saturn can't natively output component. If you wanna connect saturn using component you'd need an rgb to component transcoder, and I haven't ever managed to find one int he little bit of searching I've done.

 

[Tagrineth]

Component cables support an RGB signal. I can set my TV to receive RGB instead of YPbPr, and likewise my PS2 and DVD player both have selections for RGB or YPbPr. I'd assume if RGB pins exist, you could use them, right?

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

from gamesx.com

Colour Difference

or

Component Video

or

ColorStream

Component Video is a bit of a misnomer - RGB is technically also component video, or video whose components are transmitted seperately. Usually, when someone refers to Component Video however, they're referring to Colour-Difference video. Dan's Data explains this three channel (YRB) signal thusly:

The first channel is luminance, (notated Y, the standard abbreviation for intensity). The luminance is the signal’s brightness information only, and includes no colour data. The Y signal by itself gives a black and white picture. The other two channels are called colour difference. They’re notated R-Y and B-Y, and are the difference between red and the luminance and the difference between blue and the luminance, respectively. The colour difference channels can be algebraically recombined with the luminance to give a full colour picture, without having to transmit the green data that, on most video, takes up more bandwidth than the other two colours put together (on average, green is 59% of a video signal).

Now that's not really all there is to it. DVD discs store their video data as colour-difference video, but it's compressed, where the Luminance (Y) channel is mostly left alone and the R-Y and B-Y signals are compressed. In theory this format allows for very little crossover during transmission, but there's a snag: The compression employed does not preserve all of the colour data. The storing of pictures or video in this format trades off some clarity for space saving. It's not always compressed, however - the Playstation 2 for example allows the use of uncompressed component video for the display of games and computer data - but it's DVD output is, of course, compressed. Many modern TVs accept component video but not RGB - which seems odd to me, because component video requires more hardware inside the television for decoding and display. The lack of a standardized RGB connector prohibits the widespread adoption of this standard, unfortunately.

 

[scorch56]

"Many modern TVs accept component video but not RGB..."

If you ask me Scared0o0Rabbit; it's got something to do with us here in America; and our snobby-assed "holier-than-thou" attitude in general. The same reason we never adopted the VCD format.. the same reason we STILL hedge on adopting the metric system; etc. The same reason 95% of us here in the "untied states" will probably never see or have HDTV or didgtal tuners in our TVs.. no matter WHAT congress mandates.. because 95% of us still live in the same backwater sticks that the rest of the world does.. even in this country.

It seems that if Europe or Japan adopts a standard before us.. it somehow "taints" it for us.. and we HAVE to be different or archaic. I'm not gonna' go "dixie-chick" on anybody.. but sometimes I hate the way we think.

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

but sometimes I hate the way we think

Welcome to the club.

'course I'd love to have an hdtv tuner, but I can't afford an hdtv display lol.

 

[Curtis]

Originally posted by Scared0o0Rabbit@Jan 12, 2004 @ 07:52 PM

but sometimes I hate the way we think

Welcome to the club.

'course I'd love to have an hdtv tuner, but I can't afford an hdtv display lol.

Get a PCI DTV tuner. Your monitor will make an excellent HD display.

 

[mal]

That's what I'm planning on doing. :thumbs-up:

 

[Curtis]

Really? Me too! Which card are you looking at? I can't decide between the Nebula DigiTV and the the VisionPlus. I think I like the idea of the Nebula more simply becuase of the analogue inputs.

 

[mal]

I must admit that I'd only recently heard about Digital TV cards for PCs - I can thank my research into media PCs - and I have only decided that it is going to happen.

I hadn't done any homework yet.

[edit again] editing out an edit

 

[Curtis]

Fair enough.

I've been doing homework, and I can say this: avoid the Avermedia cards like the plague. Poor drivers, near non-existant customer support, overall crap product.

Have a look at http://www.dtvforum.info for more research.

 

[mal]

Actually that's not quite true. I had read about the VisionPlus VP-DTV-T, but I haven't read any reviews yet.

 

[Curtis]

Apparently that's one of the good ones. The other being the Nebula DigiTV. The VisionPlus has the advantage of having lower system requirements for HD playback/recording than the DigiTV...but that's not really a huge issue in Aus yet.