Micomsoft XCAPTURE-1 testing - Sega Genesis 240p RGB

Channel:

Sixfortyfive

Subscribers:

5,390

Published on September 22, 2013 10:59:56 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqunMRCaFS8

Game:

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)

Duration: 30:44

5,498 views

27

I recently acquired a new capture card: the USB3 XCAPTURE-1 by Micomsoft. It seems to be a considerable upgrade from my old ones for a few notable reasons, some of them being: It has VGA input, it can accept signals ranging from 240p to 1080p (up to 60fps for all resolutions, as well), it can accept 15kHz signals, it uses the entire RGB color space instead of being restricted to YCbCr, and it outputs a lossless/uncompressed video signal. I haven't had a capture card capable of picking up a video feed from retro consoles in a very long time, so I'm using the Sega Genesis for my first test run of the card and seeing what level of quality I can get out of it. A list of equipment used can be found below.

Sega Genesis console:
- North American model 1 ("High Definition Graphics", EXT port, TMSS variant)
- region switch installed (USA mode used for USA games and Trouble Shooter Vintage, JPN mode used for JPN games)

A/V capture equipment:
- Sega Genesis RGB video cable
- XSYNC-1 c-sync separator
- XCAPTURE-1 USB3 capture card (VGA input)
- stereo audio feed from Genesis headphone jack

A/V post-processing:
- The Genesis video feed picked up by the capture card is a 720x240 resolution signal. I doubled the horizontal res and quadrupled the vertical res to 1440x960 (nearest neighbor resize) for this video to more accurately reflect the intended aspect ratio and to see if 960p yielded better compression than 480p. (Note that this still results a 3:2 aspect ratio, not 4:3.) Youtube doesn't seem to display 960p though.
- The video was compressed using the Lagarith lossless video codec.
- The audio was uncompressed 48kHz PCM.
- The original frame rate for this video was 59.94 fps. I interpolated it to 27.97 fps, blending every two frames into a single frame, before uploading since Youtube coverts 60fps uploads to 30fps anyway, and their conversion method is very poor. The result of this change is that the footage looks blurrier in still shots, but it's smoother in motion and visual effects that alternate on every frame are preserved better.
- Therefore, almost all quality imperfections seen would be the result of Youtube re-encoding alone. (In particular, Youtube doesn't seem to handle instances where the screen is pitch black for an extended amount of time; it seems to load the next part of the video too early and freeze it there for some reason.) The RGB cable is susceptible to some noise and distortion dependent on its build quality, but close inspection of the original video file shows that this is extremely minor and only discernible at very close viewing distances.

Games demonstrated:
0:00 Sonic the Hedgehog (JPN)
4:39 Alisia Dragoon (USA)
10:13 Ranger-X (USA)
14:07 Trouble Shooter Vintage (MIJET translated version via repro cartridge)
20:27 Puyo Puyo 2 (JPN)
22:30 Ristar (USA)
24:39 Alien Soldier (JPN)

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