It’s not pretty and it could be better, but I’m able to stream from my unmodified Nintendo 64 at an acceptable resolution using about $50 of hardware.
Curling around the picture is an S-Video cable. My N64 came originally with composite cables; S-Video provides a slightly better signal. With so much signal processing happening, it’s important to start off with the best signal we can get. There is an N64 mod that breaks out the RGB signal before it is processed, but I don’t have that.
That feeds into the bigger box, the Video Converter that takes the S-Video as input and gives HDMI as output. If you’re just looking to play on a modern monitor, that’s all you need to do. I had to fiddle with my monitor to get it to display acceptably, but the aspect ratio and colors were still way off. Amazon has this box for under $32 right now. I’m not going to share links, but it’s easy enough to find — TENSUN HDMI Video Converter.
The dongle with the USB connector on it is an HDMI to USB 3.0 video capture device. The HDMI from the video converter goes in the left end, and a USB 3.0 female to male cable gets attached to the other — in my case, at least, since my streaming computer is pretty far from the N64. It could be plugged in directly to a USB 3.0 port on my computer if it were closer. And… hey, actually, it IS close enough. Didn’t even need that USB cable I bought. Wild.
The video capture card cost about $15.
It took a little fiddling for OBS to capture both video and sound from the device, and for it to send the audio to an external speaker so that I could hear it while playing the game, but there’s plenty of clues online on how to set this up and it just works.
If you’ve been wanting to play your vintage game systems on modern hardware and also stream but you thought it would take hundreds of dollars — no, it doesn’t have to.
In yesterday’s post, everwake told me about a device called the RetroTINK-5X Pro. This would replace the TENSUN Video Converter. It uses an FPGA to do a better job with the signal conversion, and can provide an output resolution higher than the input resolution, and of higher quality as well. It can also take advantage of the N64 RGB output mod that would allow N64 games to be played on the original (but modded) hardware with an image as perfect as possible.
Downside is, this costs $300, and each is made by hand, to order, by the inventor.
Not gonna lie, I kinda want one. But, it’s a little out of my price range. I’d do it if I planned to mostly play retro games on their original hardware from now on, but that’s unlikely. Now that the N64 is up, I’ll play a few games that I’ve been missing, and then I’ll dig out the Saturn from its box and do some of those, so… well, maybe it would be worth it. My birthday’s coming up.
I’m kind of confused as to what the goal is once you start to mix original hardware with modern monitors in the first place. I’d have thought for the authentic experience you’d just want to use an era-appropriate cathode ray display, aka an old TV. Those must still be cheap and easy to find.
Once you start enhancing the original experience with better graphics by way of modern technology, does it matter where the input is coming from? It’s not going to replicate the original experience anyway. Or is it that using the original hardware is the only way to play these games at all so authenticity isn’t a factor?
Never having owned a console later than the Atari 2600 it’s all a bit out there for me!
It would be cool to buy an old CRT 馃檪 Dunno where I’d put it — right now, the monitor I use is wired through a switch that allows it to take input from five sources.
The goal here is to help me blog about the games I play, and for that I need a better solution for getting screen shots and video than recording with my phone. Emulated games could do that (and better), but there’s something about using the original games I bought back in the day, and the hardware, that just appeals to the thrifty person inside me. Plus, a lot of the ROM sites on the web are just so scammy.
In the end, maybe it’s all for nothing, but it was fun seeing the old N64 come back to life for the first time in a quarter century, ready to play the games I played with my kids when they were little.
I am pretty careful to buy HDTVs that still have component inputs on the back, though the three consoles I have hooked up right now all have HDMI outputs. The component input is currently only being used for a VCR. I have a switchbox that at one time had four old consoles hooked up, but we recently moved and I haven’t felt the need to unbox all that again.
I would absolutely love to buy an old CRT TV while you can still get them cheap. Old consoles look so much better on them. But I’m in the same boat, I don’t know where I would put it.
I am in the market for a new monitor. The gaming monitor I now use would be my new work monitor, and the new gaming monitor would be better and bigger. I’ll have to see if I can get one with some sort of direct connection.
My current setup supports streaming from my Analogue NT+ and my Switch, too, so I’m actually pretty happy with how it’s going.