Amiga RGBtoHDMI (with a Pi) Updates

hi it's jan beta and i thought i'd do a little  update video about the rgb to hdmi adapter for   the amiga there are a lot of questions in the  comments below the last video that i did on this   and i'm going to try to address some of those  and answer them ideally at least the ones i have   answers to feel free to post more comments if you  have any more questions if you haven't watched the   previous video i recommend doing so i show the  adapter and how to put it into your amiga and   things like that and how to install the software  in more detail there this is just a bit of an faq   video or update as i said the software has been  updated since my last video i had some issues   with capturing the video from this little device  and that has been resolved in the meantime i   did a whole twitch stream a couple of hours of  random amiga games and trying things out with   this device and it works flawlessly almost now  you can check that out in the video description   i put a link there to my twitch channel as well  as to the youtube channel that i use to archive my   twitch streams so if you are interested in just  seeing this thing in action you can watch the   footage there which is pretty much an unchanged  capture and a little bit of chatting and checking   out several games and some software so if you  watched the last video you probably know that this   is a little adapter board that sits in the denise  graphics chip socket on the amiga and the denise   sits on another socket on the same adapter board  and then you plug in raspberry pi zero on the side   and the digital signals coming from the denise  or coming to the denise are used to create a   full hd upscaled hdmi output picture and the  picture is outputted through the little mini hdmi   socket on the raspberry pi and you can display it  on a modern screen as i'm doing here so this is   a digital picture pixel perfect rendition of the  amiga output so actually one of the questions was   how much lag does this have and i can tell you  this it has so little lag that i wasn't able to   show any lag using my crt in comparison with  the upscaled picture it's not really an upscaled   picture it's just a generated picture that comes  directly from the digital signals that are usually   used to generate the analog rgb picture and yeah  you don't notice any lag while using this on a   reasonably fast monitor and i wasn't able to show  it with like using slow motion video and things   like that i don't have the technical ability to  really show the lag i'm sorry so if anyone has   something or a high-speed camera or something and  you are able to notice and show the lag actually   feel free to post links to anything in the  comments but i wasn't i don't have the technical   ability to do this um yeah the lag is very  very low i played some games with this   that i know inside out and i don't notice any  difference against playing it on an actual   crt monitor so it is a couple of milliseconds at  the very most as c0pperdragon states on his github   page so after the last video a lot of people  asked where to buy the little adapter boards and   uh yeah most of the people who asked were  expecting that you can just go to some kind of   shop and just order a pre-assembled board that's  not really the case it's a really it's a hobbyist   open source open hardware project and c0pperdragon  generously offers on his github page to   solder these boards and send them to people for a  small amount of money or relatively small amount   of money the problem is that he's not a full-time  pcb soldering person he designed the circuit   and probably assumed most people would just diy  these so they would make their own circuit boards   and source the components which isn't really  hard because it's standard components and   solder their own boards and then put them in  their amigas many people who watch the video   obviously don't want to do that and ordered the  boards from c0pperdragon and the list is very   long he said he can fulfill all uh orders so  to say it's not even really orders you ask him   politely if he's ready to build a board for you  and he got a lot of requests so please be patient   and don't put any pressure on him he's not like  it's not like you place an order on amazon or   anything he's just making them as you order them  it's just a one person endeavor that he's doing   so please be patient and be kind oh one question  people had was whether the original rgb out which   is the 23-pin socket there would still work while  you have this installed and yes it does you can   have this hooked up to the monitor here this is  the rgb out the original output that still looks   exactly the same as before it is  stretched though because it doesn't have   the aspect ratio correction that the other one  had so this is the 50 hertz hdmi signal which   looks a lot crisper obviously so i don't know  how well this translates through the camera   this is the hdmi output through the rgb to hdmi  and i'm now going to switch it to the original   output and you can probably see how washed out it  is in comparison because this is the analog signal   that is still produced that was the question  and the digital signal that is now also produced   is a lot crisper obviously because it's a pixel  perfect digital image yeah so there we go that   still works and also the composite out which is  a monochrome composite out that still works too   so i am now on c0pperdragon's amiga digital  video github page and as you can see there's   some issues listed here and one  of the issues is the issue i had   with this which is my hdmi capture card which  for the record is an elgato game capture hd60s   and that didn't play well with the  output from the raspberry pi and ian   who is the editor or one of the editors of  the software suggested that the solution is   that the software defaults to an output that  is compatible with dvi monitors actually   to be able to display the output on a 4:3 aspect  ratio dvi monitor and usually that also works   on hdmi monitors for some reason my capture  card didn't interpret that signal correctly   so there is a workaround for that initially ian  suggested to just change a line in the config.txt   file hdmi_drive 1 to hdmi_drive 2 so it would  output a native hdmi signal and i did that   and i answered here in the issues thread that  that fixed my issue immediately and ian went on   to implement a setting for that in the on-screen  menu for the software so there is a an hdmi mode   setting now that he implemented there's also a new  version that is able to swap the aspect ratio from   ntsc to pal aspect ratio so you can play games  that were made for the ntsc aspect ratio usually   the aspect ratio for ntsc games was a bit limited  on parallel amigas because the screen would just   be shrinked and there would be a black bar on  the bottom as you can see in these pictures here   and yeah that's can stretch the picture out  pixel perfect of course to the full ntsc   uh size and i am going to test that okay  putting this into the sd card slot here now let's see if this still works at all okay we get the output from the pi we get the startup it takes a bit longer  starting up the first time because it's it writes   the default values i think so there we go  that's our software running let's enter the menu   and now we should have an option  for hdmi mode and there it is yeah   so the hdmi mode defaults to dvi compatible  as you can see and i can set this to hdmi auto   rgb full quest reboot on exit menu so it's  rebooting and we can always hold down the button   during reset to set it to a picture mode that  to the default picture mode basically this is   yeah this is now the mode that should work  with my capture card let's actually check   the capture and i can show you some actual  captured footage maybe with the right colors   yeah here we go it's just capturing the video  as it's supposed to we can use some scan lines   it's only rudimentary implementation as of now  for the amiga usually this only works on the cpld this should give me some scan lines now yeah there we go we have a scanline emulation  and yeah as i said this is just very basic   implementation of the scan lines so it's just  a black lines every other line i think still   if you're into scan line emulation which i am  not you can use that stuff i'm just going to   turn scan lines off that works i think this even  fixed the timing issue that i had um ian said   that there were some timing issues with this i  think this might just have fixed that there's   no flickering at all anymore and we had some from  time to time we had a flickery line here and there   i think that completely stopped so that's great  so the new software seems to work flawlessly now   another question that was asked frequently was  whether this would work with the aga amigas so   the ones with the advanced graphics chipset  and unfortunately not because the bit depth   of the output is too high the only modes that work  reliably are the ocs original chipset modes that's   why i used my amiga 500 that has an original  chipset denise in there the aga chipsets the   timings are too complicated for this device to  work there is however an external standalone   version of the rgb to hdmi hardware which also  uses the raspberry pi to upscale the picture   but that's more of an upscaler for the analog  signals in that case then that works supposedly   i haven't tried it of course i will eventually  try more uh incarnations of this project because i   think it's very very useful for a lot of use cases  and a lot of old systems work with that another   question was though if the commodore 128 80 column  mode would work and that does work with the cga   variants of the adapter uh also as an external uh  solution i think so it's not the digital signals   that should work i haven't tried that i want to  try that eventually okay so everything seems to   work rather well let's try the feature that  corrects the aspect ratio for ntsc and power   so let's correct the aspect ratio should be in the preferences swap aspect  okay on and it's stretching the picture   yeah this is actually a pretty neat way   of getting the aspect ratio right for games  that were intended to be played on ntsc amigas that's pretty cool okay this is not stretched  now because we reset okay let's see if we can   stretch this yes we can it just switches back automatically  which makes sense because most of the games i'm   going to play on this system are going to be pal  games although some of them are made for ntsc and   pal but yeah i'm used to seeing it in the wrong  aspect ratio so that's going to be fine i guess   and now it should it probably switches back  when it changes the resolution to low res again   no it didn't switch back okay that's interesting yeah nice yeah i think that's it for this  video sorry if this was a bit of a smaller   one but we are in lockdown again and schools  are closed and i have to care for my kid   while making videos which is kind of impossible  to do at times so um i hope you understand that   this is not a full-fledged restoration or  repair video of any kind i thought that this   would make sense after all the questions  i got and i hope you enjoyed this thanks   everybody for supporting me and thanks for  watching i'm jan beta see you next time bye

Channel: Jan Beta

Views: 17,449

Rating: 4.961565 out of 5

Keywords: Jan Beta

Id: 9baCd5O2nG4

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021