MiSTer to an HD CRT?

[Deezdrama]

So Ive never really looked into HD CRT tv's before because they were always known to have bad processing/scaling/lag for 240p content.
But with mister you could output native 540p and add scanline filters.
Theres a guy on shmups who found out on Sony HD crt's theres an option in the service menu to disable all scaling/processing but then you have to feed it a native 1080i signal after that. Well the TV doesnt care if its 1080i or 540p they discovered so they contacted mike chi and had him update the firmware of the retrotink 5x to support this resolution and I guess the results have been amazing on these HD sets. Very pvm like with minimal lag.

Well with mister we should be able to add the custom res but with vga scaling it would add some lag. Retrotink has 100% black scanline filters which we never got so thats another issue. Im still surprised noone has tried it.


Any other inherent negatives of doing this with an HD crt set?
Seems like it would enable 240p content while still having the 1080i option available....the ultimate crt solution? If
only we had 100% black scanlines.

Anyone here doing this?

[softtest9]

540p sounds a bit small for any kind of filters, outside of plain bilinear.

[jlancaster86]

540p? That sounds like a nightmare to deal with. You'd likely end up letterboxing NTSC content and cropping PAL content.

Is this also a flat screen CRT? I'm not sure why you'd even bother at that point.

[redsteakraw]

Will still have processing lag unless you get that crazy 1080p widescreen Intergraph InterView 28hd96 CRT that John Carmack had. Then again who here doesn't want that monitor.

[Deezdrama]

Will still have processing lag unless you get that crazy 1080p widescreen Intergraph InterView 28hd96 CRT that John Carmack had. Then again who here doesn't want that monitor.

Theres a guy on shmups who found out on Sony HD crt's theres an option in the service menu to disable all scaling/processing but then you have to feed it a native 1080i signal after that. Well the TV doesnt care if its 1080i or 540p they discovered so they contacted mike chi and had him update the firmware of the retrotink 5x to support this resolution and I guess the results have been amazing on these HD sets. Very pvm like with minimal lag.

Well with mister we should be able to add the custom res but with vga scaling it would add some lag. Retrotink has 100% black scanline filters which we never got so thats another issue. Im still surprised noone has tried it.

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[Deezdrama]

Pic of one of the guys doing it with retrotink 5x
Lightguns work too
Further reading...
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comm ... life_into/

Untitled-1.jpg (2.7 MiB) Viewed 11699 times

[FoxbatStargazer]

vsync_adjust=2 is about the same lag as a Retrotink 5x in no-buffer mode. I.E. its a handful of lines and is near the minimum any scaler could reasonably achieve. So you really only have to worry about the lag on the HD TV side. (Unless you want to use lightguns, it might come up short there...)

Scanline scaling filters really don't work until you get to at least a 3x scale, and that seems to be a limitation of the fact that it is a pixel scaling trick rather than directly drawing a bunch of lines. At 540p most scaling will be 2x so the scandoublerfx are probably the better option, even though they won't hit 100% dark.

[Deezdrama]

vsync_adjust=2 is about the same lag as a Retrotink 5x in no-buffer mode. I.E. its a handful of lines and is near the minimum any scaler could reasonably achieve. So you really only have to worry about the lag on the HD TV side. (Unless you want to use lightguns, it might come up short there...)

Scanline scaling filters really don't work until you get to at least a 3x scale, and that seems to be a limitation of the fact that it is a pixel scaling trick rather than directly drawing a bunch of lines. At 540p most scaling will be 2x so the scandoublerfx are probably the better option, even though they won't hit 100% dark.

Yeah, you could do a step scale but that probably wouldnt look good and so ive never tried step. scandouble with 75% fx might be the ticket. It looked good on one of my 31kHz pc crt's but lacked the glow/brightness to push through the darkened lines- that shouldnt be too much of an issue on a large consumer crt. Would probably leave a little letter boxing.Scandoubling felt pretty damn snappy too, any lag was negligible.

I have the opportunity to grab a nice 32" sony hs500 HD CRT.... I wonder if this is worth messing with.

[akeley]

You could jump through all these hoops and spend all that money (and it's more than likely that there will be a snag or three along the way)...or find a nice higher class SD consumer one, and have no headaches and healthy bank account with the same - or better - results. To me it's a no brainer.

[FoxbatStargazer]

Eh those 34"+ Widescreen CRTs are extremely undesirable, seem pretty easy to find on craigslist for free or close to it. Transportation is a problem but not budget!

[Deezdrama]

Yeah, the one im talking about is in really nice looking shape, said it wasnt used much in basement rec room for its life, and he wants next to nothing. Its 4:3 aspect

I know scandoubling with crt fx on a 31kHz crt has no perceivable lag, and looks great BUT, on pc crt's they lack the crt glow punch to push through the darkened lines, I dont think the consumer hd crt would have a problem by looking at pics of people doing this with the retrotink5x.

Might be the start of ppl going after HD CRT's and HD sony crt's seem to be rarer in my area than SD sets....undesirable- yes but maybe that will change with this discovery. It seems to be catching traction on crtgaming. I already missed the pvm boat, I dont want to miss this if its good, but yeah....could be a huge disappointment as well, im hesitant because I have seen noone do it on mister. A plus is it would be good content for my youtube ...but yea.....close to 200lbs and 1hr away so..... Im on the fence
I have plenty of good sd crt's.... its a sickness

[akeley]

By "spending all that money" I meant Retrotink. This thing costs ~300USD, no? If you don't need the RT and have a friend & transport & space for a 32" behemoth, then sure, you can grab it and experiment away.

Personally, I don't care much for r/crtgaming fads, because I have yet to see anything there (including the above picture) that would be significantly better than one of my better consumer Trinitrons.

[orange428]

540p seems to work on my Sony 36XBR800 with the mister. It's a 4:3 HD set from 2002. To get it working over DVI I had to use a HDMI->DVI converter box though (product 431 at converters.tv). This TV is picky about what it accepts over DVI so the box does some magic to make the Sony happy. I originally bought the converter to fix an issue with the Retrotink2x where the picture was purple.

I'm not using the Retrotink2x (or 5x...I don't have a 5x) just HDMI out of the mister into the converter box and into the DVI port on the TV.

I did not try via the component inputs.

I used this video_mode in mister.ini:

video_mode=960,32,96,128,540,3,5,14,41000

which i calculated using cvt12 (on linux). this is as close to 33.75 kHz as I could get it.

./cvt12 960 540 60.1
# 960x540 @ 60.100 Hz (CVT) field rate 59.995 Hz; hsync: 33.717 kHz; pclk: 41.00 MHz
Modeline "960x540_60.10" 41.00 960 992 1088 1216 540 543 548 562 -hsync +vsync

and converted to mister format at the morf77 site.

with vsync_adjust=0 and vscale_mode=1.

I don't have a time sleuth though so I can't test the lag (and castlemania is sold out). NES and SNES look good from the 30 seconds of testing i did...but the Genesis is cropped a little on the sides. I'll have to play with it some more.

Until now I was just using video_mode=0 (720p) with the Sony...which works fine too. I normally use the mister with an iPad display but it's nice to have a 36 inch screen sometimes.

Besides the service menu setting to disable processing there's another setting I changed to get it to not automatically squeeze HD content (this is a 4:3 set and it would squeeze HD into a 16:9 box). This makes it work in full screen with 4:3 content.

[Deezdrama]

By "spending all that money" I meant Retrotink. This thing costs ~300USD, no? If you don't need the RT and have a friend & transport & space for a 32" behemoth, then sure, you can grab it and experiment away.

Personally, I don't care much for r/crtgaming fads, because I have yet to see anything there (including the above picture) that would be significantly better than one of my better consumer Trinitrons.

why would I need that when I got mister silly

[Deezdrama]

540p seems to work on my Sony 36XBR800 with the mister. It's a 4:3 HD set from 2002. To get it working over DVI I had to use a HDMI->DVI converter box though (product 431 at converters.tv). This TV is picky about what it accepts over DVI so the box does some magic to make the Sony happy. I originally bought the converter to fix an issue with the Retrotink2x where the picture was purple.

I'm not using the Retrotink2x (or 5x...I don't have a 5x) just HDMI out of the mister into the converter box and into the DVI port on the TV.

I did not try via the component inputs.

I used this video_mode in mister.ini:

video_mode=960,32,96,128,540,3,5,14,41000

which i calculated using cvt12 (on linux). this is as close to 33.75 kHz as I could get it.

./cvt12 960 540 60.1
# 960x540 @ 60.100 Hz (CVT) field rate 59.995 Hz; hsync: 33.717 kHz; pclk: 41.00 MHz
Modeline "960x540_60.10" 41.00 960 992 1088 1216 540 543 548 562 -hsync +vsync

and converted to mister format at the morf77 site.

with vsync_adjust=0 and vscale_mode=1.

I don't have a time sleuth though so I can't test the lag (and castlemania is sold out). NES and SNES look good from the 30 seconds of testing i did...but the Genesis is cropped a little on the sides. I'll have to play with it some more.

Until now I was just using video_mode=0 (720p) with the Sony...which works fine too. I normally use the mister with an iPad display but it's nice to have a 36 inch screen sometimes.

Besides the service menu setting to disable processing there's another setting I changed to get it to not automatically squeeze HD content (this is a 4:3 set and it would squeeze HD into a 16:9 box). This makes it work in full screen with 4:3 content.

Isnt the xbr deemed the best hd crt ever made? Is yours super fine pitch?
Cool to hear 540p output to it fine.
Im thinking set the resolution modeline, turn on HD Bypass , run scandoubler with 75% crt fx and then adjust the letterboxing with vert/hor size.
This would kind of screw up the sizing for 1080i content but probably would mostly play mister on it.

Did you try scandoubling and the crt fx scanlines? Im wondering if 75% scanlines makes the image dim or if the hd crt punches through it just fine.

[orange428]

Hi, the Sony I have is just a Hi-Scan model...it's not Super Fine Pitch. I don't really like scanlines so haven't tried those settings, not sure.

[orange428]

Several things have gone right and stars aligned so here's an update. I finally managed to get a Time Sleuth and chriz2600 added 540p support to it. On my 36XBR800 using DVI input I get 7ms of consistent lag. I can live with those numbers.

I've tested the NES, SNES, and Genesis cores and they look great. Nice 4:3 picture, fills up the entire screen and I was able to fix the cropping issue on the Genesis core (using OSD settings)...if I was from England I'd say I was chuffed. I'm very glad I held onto this TV for the last 20 years.

For anyone else interested here's my ini settings for 540p:

vscale_mode=1
video_mode=1920,88,44,148,540,2,5,15,74250
vsync_adjust=2
refresh_min=40
refresh_max=80

I don't know if refresh min/max are required...I just put the min/max values supported by those params since I don't really know what the TV's vertical refresh is.

[steamedge]

Hello! A bit of a bump here. So I have been starting to dabble a bit into this hobby and I apologize if I am totally off base but I have an opportunity to get a Sony HDCRT and while I know they are less than desirable, with the recent discovery of the near lagless 1080i/540p mode and reading through this thread among others, has anyone else used their MiSTer with the HD CRT? I know that the post above me has ( orange428 ) and would love to know if this is worth it or is it too much of a hassle to do so.

On that note, I am in the process of getting a retrotink so really, just playing on a modern tv/monitor is the easiest solution but a HDCRT/CRT just "hits different" so I want to explore that option.

Thank you!

[jsvw007]

540p seems to work on my Sony 36XBR800 with the mister. It's a 4:3 HD set from 2002. To get it working over DVI I had to use a HDMI->DVI converter box though (product 431 at converters.tv). This TV is picky about what it accepts over DVI so the box does some magic to make the Sony happy. I originally bought the converter to fix an issue with the Retrotink2x where the picture was purple.

I'm not using the Retrotink2x (or 5x...I don't have a 5x) just HDMI out of the mister into the converter box and into the DVI port on the TV.

I did not try via the component inputs.

I used this video_mode in mister.ini:

video_mode=960,32,96,128,540,3,5,14,41000

which i calculated using cvt12 (on linux). this is as close to 33.75 kHz as I could get it.

./cvt12 960 540 60.1
# 960x540 @ 60.100 Hz (CVT) field rate 59.995 Hz; hsync: 33.717 kHz; pclk: 41.00 MHz
Modeline "960x540_60.10" 41.00 960 992 1088 1216 540 543 548 562 -hsync +vsync

and converted to mister format at the morf77 site.

with vsync_adjust=0 and vscale_mode=1.

I don't have a time sleuth though so I can't test the lag (and castlemania is sold out). NES and SNES look good from the 30 seconds of testing i did...but the Genesis is cropped a little on the sides. I'll have to play with it some more.

Until now I was just using video_mode=0 (720p) with the Sony...which works fine too. I normally use the mister with an iPad display but it's nice to have a 36 inch screen sometimes.

Besides the service menu setting to disable processing there's another setting I changed to get it to not automatically squeeze HD content (this is a 4:3 set and it would squeeze HD into a 16:9 box). This makes it work in full screen with 4:3 content.

I have a Sony KV-36HS510 and have connected it directly from MiSTer de10 Hdmi output to the DVI input of my HD CRT with a basic HDMI to DVI cable. It works without the need of a DVI converter box. I tried using your settings, and it works but it displays in a letterboxed 16:9 format.

I do not quite understand all the parameters, but I copied your setting of "video_mode=960,32,96,128,540,3,5,14,41000".

960 x 540 is a 16 x 9 format, so this makes sense. My question is, could you use 720 x 540 since that would be a 4:3 ratio? You said you also have a 4:3 display and changed some setting to not automatically squeeze HD content. Was this a setting in the service menu as well? I have toggled HDPT in the service menu and confirmed it works, because duck hunt works with my lightgun now.

I guess I just don't understand why you are feeding the Mister a 16:9 custom video mode and how you somehow are getting a 4:3 result from that. I currently am double letterboxed when I play a game in any core.

[jrronimo]

Hello! A bit of a bump here. So I have been starting to dabble a bit into this hobby and I apologize if I am totally off base but I have an opportunity to get a Sony HDCRT and while I know they are less than desirable, with the recent discovery of the near lagless 1080i/540p mode and reading through this thread among others, has anyone else used their MiSTer with the HD CRT? I know that the post above me has ( orange428 ) and would love to know if this is worth it or is it too much of a hassle to do so.

On that note, I am in the process of getting a retrotink so really, just playing on a modern tv/monitor is the easiest solution but a HDCRT/CRT just "hits different" so I want to explore that option.

Thank you!

I have a Sony 34XBR960 with HDMI that I've plugged my MiSTer into once, but I haven't spent too much time trying it out. I'd be happy to plug it in if you have some specific settings you'd like me to try though.

[orange428]

hi, for 540p on my 36xbr800 (which is a 4:3 set) i switched to this setting:

video_mode=1920,88,44,148,540,2,5,15,74250

to disable the automatic 16:9 squeeze it's in the service menu yes...i think it's called 'JUMP'. toggle that off (or on...).

also you sometimes have to mess with the individual core settings inside MiSTer OSD to get it to display full screen. i don't have mine turned on at the moment so I can't remember exactly which setting it is. it's in the core's 'Video' section if i recall.

i have not tried 720x540 so not sure about that.

[jsvw007]

I have a Sony KV-36HS510 4:3 set. I also discovered the JUMP parameter (from reddit) which is in the 2170D-3 section of the service menu and it solved the pillarboxing issue I was having with the forced widescreen in 1080i.

For me, the 720x540 custom video mode works perfectly. I tried the 960x540 settings and with the JUMP parameter enabled it ended up pillarboxing on the left and right.. which is odd because I would have expected it to pillarbox on the top and bottom if anything. I did not try any other 540p settings besides the two mentioned.

For anyone who wants to try, this is the setting I use:

video_mode=720,24,72,96,540,3,4,15,30500