Upscaling my SNES with an OSSC and a SCART cable
[no mic] Remember to watch at 1440p to see the most detail!
Sample footage playing Super Mario World at 4x scaling on my SNES.
(Settings are cycled through at the end of the video)
The console is hooked into an OSSC via a SCART cable obtained from HD Retrovision. My SNES is a 2 chip model which displays the trademark color smearing (most obvious on the waves on the overworld map at the end) of those models. The OSSC is able to counteract this phenomenon via a Reverse Low-Pass Filter (Reverse LPF), but it's not perfect. Aside from that particular visual artifact, the signal is remarkably clean, with no visible jitter / pixel wobbliness like I've seen from my other consoles. The SCART output is truly amazing for maximizing graphical fidelity.
Even with a clean signal, however, the SNES remains a particularly tricky console to get onto a modern screen due to the console's nonstandard refresh rate. Because the OSSC doesn't buffer the signal to produce it's output, it doesn't send a clean 60fps, so most monitors and TVs will reject the signal because it is out-of-spec. Using the SCART cable seems to make this problem more pronounced for some reason. When using the same S-Video cable that I use with my N64, I had greater success displaying the signal on my TV, but it remained flickery and inconsistent, dropping out at critical moments during gameplay. I've heard that installing a de-jitter mod can help immensely with this particular quirk of the SNES, but my console does not have such a mod installed, so until recently, I just accepted that I'd probably never be able to fully enjoy playing it.
As of today, however, I'm happy to say that I've found great success by reading through more forum posts and fiddling with a few settings that I'd never tried before. Most importantly, I noticed that setting the OSSC's TX Mode to DVI instead of HDMI somehow allows my monitor to understand the signal without dropping out at all. I got the idea to try that from this thread https://videogameperfection.com/forum... but I have no idea why it actually helps. I will note that this did not improve the situation with my primary capture card (Magewell Pro Capture HDMI PCIe), only my monitor. Because the signal remains unwatchable with this card, I had to reinstall my original capture card, an Elgato HD60 Pro, to capture this SNES footage. I am not sure why this card is more accepting of the signal than the other one, but I digress.
Between the info found in this other thread https://videogameperfection.com/forum... and the optimal OSSC timings provided by FirebrandX, I was able to tinker with the Advanced Timings (mostly sampling phase) using the 256x240 optim mode in order to achieve what you see in the video (I previously used the 4:3 generic mode in order to play stuff). The catch with this setup is that because I've set TX Mode to DVI, audio is not included with the signal despite the video still being sent along an HDMI cable. I therefore have to run a separate 3.5mm auxillary cable from the accompanying audio out port into my computer's Line In port if I want to hear anything.
HOWEVER, after many years of learning how to use my OSSC and a lot of trial and error, I can finally say that I'm getting the most out of my SNES! I'm very excited to both play and stream all the games I've been avoiding for the past few years.