I have been looking into improving the video output on my Amiga 500 that I use for playing, capturing screenshots and capturing video. Not that the video quality was bad, but you could notice that there were distortions in the screenshots and the captured videos. It was more noticeable on my 1080p monitor that I had connected to it. Lines would be blurry and there would – at times – be a jittering of pixels. So not an overall very good experience.
So the setup, so far, was:
- The Amiga 500
- The Amiga A520 TV adapter
- An S-Video to HDMI converter box
- The 23″ 1080p monitor
Reading a few articles and the learnings from the community, the TV adapter seems to have been the problem, because it’s not made for high resolution output, as discussed https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6009/how-can-you-connect-an-amiga-500-600-1000-2000-to-a-modern-monitor and https://www.retro32.com/gaming/amiga/06042020571-how-to-connect-your-amiga-to-a-modern-tv-capture-card-rgb-scart-to-hdmi-not-composite. The latter even suggests the right tools to improve the overall experience – suggesting a converter box and a SCART cable.
The new setup looks like this:
- The Amiga 500
- A Amiga video to SCART cable
- A SCART to HDMI converter box
- The 23″ 1080p monitor
It became apparent that the change in video components creates a far better defined, sharper picture that non-jittering that lets the pixel graphics shine. The pixels show more, but I feel that the colors come out far better than they did before.
There are few screenshots to compare. From Lemmings:
Before (A520 adapter):
After (video to SCART):
From Loom, before:
and after:
And from Monkey Island’s title screen:
and after:
Not all of the pixel estate is used with the Acer monitor that I have – still only a portion of the screen displays the video output from the Amiga, leaving large black frames around the picture. The output also isn’t really centered – maybe that’s something I’ll be able to fix eventually.
Overall, I am far happier with the output now, I like that the pixel graphics and the colors shine a lot better now than before.
FRICKELSOFT 