Dreamcast-Talk.com

Hi,

I've been doing some research about the best way to hook up the dreamcast to a HD TV.
I quickly found I'll be wanting something that converts VGA to HDMI, and that the Akura was the best choice for this without an upscaled.

is there anything comparable? the Akura is quite expensive and almost always out of stock.

Thanks!

To be honest, I just buy the generic VGA Dreamcast cables from Ebay for $10, and the VGA to HDMI adapter from Monoprice for $17 (product ID 4629). Picture looks beautiful and sharp for what it is (480p).

Note about those cables.

I’ve tried 4 different vga-hdmi solutions
A small PC/USB powered hdmi converter
A larger Chinese one with RCA inputs
A “powered vga-HDMI cable” which had a converter chip in the plug

And lastly my Atlona

The first 3 were like ~$30 each. They do the job in a pinch but some had visual noise in the image (like mild static in solid colors)

The atlona looked flawless. And had less input lag.


The first 3 converters just pass a PC 640x480 input via HDMI and my 3 Vizios detected it as such. At least in my case, when running a PC 640x480 signal to my tv, I lost some functionality. Colors were muted, I was unable to arbitrarily scale the image, and other worth while TV post effects were disabled. Effectively my TVs treat pc resolutions as a pass-through signal. I couldn’t even adjust sharpness.

The Atlona however can output a true 480P HDMI signal. And it let my tv process the image much better. Also let my TV use the “panaramic” scale mode which stretches the sides more then the center. Which looks great for some games like racers where your view of the road is often flat on the horizon anyway.