so i bought a vga box

[daniel116]

Where the hell am I going to get a cable that has a headphones plug on one side and the red and white plugs on the other?

[Gary_b]

just about any retailer would carry these. walmart, best buy and radio shack would be a good place to look. if you wanna save money you can order of off the internet. here is a cheap one on ebay http://cgi.ebay.com/New-3-5mm-Headphone ... 2c5cafb43b

these cables are very common, think MP3 players.

[pcwzrd13]

Where the hell am I going to get a cable that has a headphones plug on one side and the red and white plugs on the other?

Haha, forgot about the audio. Sorry. You'll need the cable Gary_b mentioned above.

Oh, and you'll also need some fairy dust, a couple dragon scales, and a partridge in a pair tree.

[oopsmyseamandied]

There can be a little messin' around getting this kind of setup. It's well worth it though. 480i or better is the only way to really enjoy this era of consoles on modern TV's. Composite and S-video look horrid on flatscreen high-def.

The good thing is, you don't really need to go higher than 480p. You could, but it is kind of pointless given the software limits. So, you can keep your hdmi options comletely open and just relegate PS2, Xbox, and GCN to a component switchbox, and run the DC on that tasty VGA socket.

[daniel116]

man am I disappointed with the vga box...
I got it working and everything but now everything looks too clear, it's like someone turned the anti-aliasing off.
So far I've played shenmue and crazy taxi, which looked really bad, and grandia 2 which looked awesome.
This thing is just unstable...

[Gary_b]

all of those games look way better on my display using VGA than when using composite or S-video. maybe your tv is to large? my HDtv is 34inches. everything looks even better on my old 20 inch CRT pc monitor, as a matter of fact i think the 20 inch is perfect. i no longer have room to keep the 20 inch set up as a dedicated Dreamcast monitor though, so the tv is going to have to work for now

[Neohound]

Whilst I mainly prefer games through a vga box, there are problems with it. Like Gary_b says, you will notice more imperfections the larger the screen is. Details you wouldn't notice on a 20inch screen become glaringly obvious when on a 40inch screen. Things like popup on crazy taxi and 18 Wheeler and obvious pixelation on other games. In some ways, old crtv's gave a smoother, more flattering picture without the hard edged clarity you get with modern tv's/vga box.

[daniel116]

Yeah I got a pretty big TV, I guess that's why the VGA looks so bad.
This just proves that you should be happy with what you have, I always loved dreamcast-graphics, even today I much prefer dreamcast graphics over ps3, but I just had to be greedy and try to make things look even better and now with the vga things look too clear and without it things look old.
I'm gonna take a 2 weeks break from dreamcasting and then go back to normal cables.

[mazonemayu]

have you tried playing with your tv's display settings yet?

[daniel116]

Yeah I tried everything, it just doesn't work well with big screen TV's