RetroTINK About It

I talked previously about my Matrox Marvel G400-TV.

Twenty-five years ago, I was obsessed with getting media onto my computer. I wanted to save every TV show in the highest possible quality on my computer. I wanted to convert my Transformers VHS tapes into high quality RealMedia files. This is a period of time that could easily be forgotten or dismissed, but I was a pioneer.

Another period of time that could be forgotten is the Sega CD era.

These were my obsessions when I was 10 and when I was 18. Now, at 43, I fear I am combining them.

Recording Gameplay

Thanks in large part to Twitch, the last fifteen years have seen an explosion in the consumption of video game gameplay as entertainment. I still remember watching a young co-worker watching Twitch for the first time, thinking, “You just watch someone else play a game?” I have grown since then and now frequently watch others play games I haven’t played, as well as learn strategies for Magic: The Gathering, thanks to content creators.

If you want to be a content creator, you need a way to stream and/or record the content you are sharing. If you are playing a PC game, this is relatively straightforward. There are numerous free software options that will record your screen as you play.

But, if you want to record a game on physical hardware separate from your computer, you have some work in front of you. You need a capture card.

Capturing Old Media

My Matrox Marvel G400-TV was a capture card designed for recording TV or VHS input via component or S-Video. Current capture cards only accept HDMI input. Since HDMI has been the universal media format for years, this is acceptable, unless, of course, you are trying to capture gameplay from a device made over thirty years ago.

You can buy an adapter to convert component to HDMI for under $20, but if you are trying to maintain your aspect ratio and not introduce lag, it is not going to be that cheap.

If you’ve ever hooked up an old console, you may be familiar with the yellow, white, and red cables. Or maybe even an RF converter. The Genesis actually had an S-Video output, which was an improved version of component video output. But there is a best-in-class option that most do not know about: RGB SCART.

As a hoarder of cables, I thought I had seen them all, but this is a beast unlike any other.

Of course, I didn’t know about these cables, because televisions do not accept RGB SCART. And that’s where RetroTINK comes in.

RetroTINK

To recap, my goal is to record gameplay from an old gaming system, like the Sega CD. I want the original aspect ratio with the highest quality signal. I want to use an RGB SCART cable, but computer capture cards require HDMI.

Tools like RetroTINK or OSSC allow you to convert RGB SCART to HDMI. They both allow for a pass-through mode that preserves the original quality I desire, but they do so much more. A single blog post can’t really describe everything a tool like the RetroTINK 4K can do.

But, the short of it is that it makes playing games on modern hardware look amazing.

Retro games were designed to be run on CRT TVs. The pixel placement they used relied on how the images would be reproduced on old hardware, not modern flat-panel screens.