Yeah I see what you mean the set up I cureantly have s-video saturn and vga Dreamcast and 2d fighters looks hands down better on the older s-video Saturn, when is comes to detail compared to the newer higher rez Vga Dreamcast, the only issue is color. The colors are not great with S-video
Board is all laid out. I’m going to make a little ‘shield’ type board that’s optional to go on top so I can test out different potentiometers to see how well they work. Once I got that laid out I’ll order a test run and see how it fares.
sounds great I would love to test one out
this is gangster. im looking into this
The thing about your Resident evil post is that your testing the wrong type of game.Old school 2D games get the most benefit from a scanline generator not a 3d polygon game like resident evil
woah that was quick.
It’s a REALLY simple design 
Most of the time was spent putting in the potential for tweaks for color and scanline intensity adjustment via a snap on daughterboard that fits on top.
Actually I did test Street Fighter 3, MvC, Bangai-O and a couple of PS1 side scrollers. I just wish I had Comix Zone and Garfield to test out the deep dithering effect which makes shadows appear vs the striped lines that are supposed to make them.
Nice, I would like to know what kind of price is planned for your board. Depending on that, I’ll wait for the buy or build one with scavenged parts. Also, I don’t mind having a ready-to-solder kit to save a few bucks.
Heh, no matter what, Im sure the postage would once again overshadow the cost of the parts to you.
Total guess at this point, but its looking in the $12-$14 range for unassembled kits; The nice VGA D-subs are SPENDY so if you want to rig up your own without using the on board D-subs, say so and it’ll help the price for sure. The shield thingy for on top is still way too much unknown before I could even guess. I have to play with it, test out potentimeters or other means of adjusting the colors/scanline intensity.
Minor tidbit: The base board by itself, no color adjusting shield, goes both way. With the shield, then which one is IN and which one is OUT matters. Board dimensions: 2.02" x 2.50". Four mounting holes for #4 bolts/screws, one in each corner, 0.200" from the sides.
I knew the D-subs would be the most expensive part but it makes everything so much cleaner 
I don’t mind soldering but I remember building a VGA port in the back of My DC and it sucks soldering wires to every little pin on the cheap d-sub
so where on the graph paper diagram from the op’d link would a dummy like me work in those pots exactly, or even some kind of resistors cannibalized from old electronics?
For adjusting the scanline intensity, one end of the pot to the ‘IN’ color, wiper to the ‘OUT’ color, and the last end pot to the output of the gate.
UK’s Faginrs500 Youtube video explaining scanline generator
I’m extremely excited to check out what Toodles comes up with on this. With a price point this low, this could be a real game changer. Count me in for beta testing/purchasing.
You have the on/off settings for even and odd lines independently don’t you? Just want to make sure because when it comes to drop shadows, you’re likely to get errors if you switch on the wrong line.
I’m not sure I understand. The way I have it now does have the ‘off’ setting on the same switch as the EVEN/ODD selection; when set to ‘off’, the tri-state buffers are set to always be High impenence; the affect on the colors should be identical to if the scanner wasn’t present at all (at least without the shield. With the shield, it would be the same as a resistor in serial, which shouldn’t affect the voltage on the line.)
Could you tell me more of these drop shadows and what causes them?
Ok have you ever played a fighting game made by SNK? Many times they create shadows by drawing a black sprite on the ground that flickers once every other frame at 30-60fps. This is what creates that drop shadow effect. You’ll get this in many 2D sprite based games including vertical shooters which show this on the ground below enemy sprites.
If you run a transcoder that isn’t in sync or on par in performance, what happens is every native line will display fine, but the extra drawn will get some weird effect that causes it to jutter improperly thus destroying the effect.
Please keep in mind, I’m pretty retarded about video, so I could easily be talking out of my ass and would have no problem being enlightened or proven wrong, but I dont think that’ll be a problem. Here’s why I think that:
-The order of which lines are blacked out doesn’t alternate. It’s always going to be the even or odd lines, every frame, unless you move the switch. Many of the ‘translucent’ effects put in, like the ‘steam’ of the hot springs stage on SS5SP, is done with a checkerboard pattern of pixels, either alternating every frame or just not being displayed at all for some frames. If the scanlines alternated between odd and even, then instead of appearing transluscent, it would appear line just vertical lines.
- From what I’m picturing as possible problems with it not flickering properly, it would have to have scanlines the same size as the game’s pixels; that wouldn’t be the case with this scanline generator. The scanlines would be based on the display data. So playing Garou on the Dreamcast, the display would be 640x480p (240 scanlines), even though the game runs at like 224 lines. The same thing would happen if using a line doubler, upscaler, XRGB, etc, from any source; they output an image with say 480p lines, and the scanner changes every other one to black.
-The data (I’m pretty sure) has to be progressive, not interlaced. I could definitely see how interlaced would be problematic with this method.
So, I guess, Im not sure, but I dont think so. If you know of a decent way to test, preferably using a Dreamcast game with VGA output, I’d be happy to test it out though. I can’t think of any easier ways to test, since I dont have an upscaler or line doubler.