1084s Monitor as a preview video monitor on PC. Possible?

[Zac67]

Ack. Y/C aka S-video aka Luma/Chroma is way better than CVBS aka composite (sharper image, crisper colors, no color bleeding/wavy edges).

[Zac67]

It is that simple. Gertsy was referring to a standard S-video cable with two mini-DIN plugs. You chop of one of them and replace it with two RCAs.

Usually, you can also use a cable like this for composite only, just unplug one of the RCAs (and possibly move the one plug left over) and reset the video mode. Composite may look better for gaming if you like that 'smudged' look.

[Zac67]

When you say composite, you mean the other end also should have two RCA (instead of S-Video), right?

No, the exact same cable. You plug one of the RCAs (which one depends on the hardware) into CVBS/composite and leave the other one dangling. Of course you can also use a straight RCA cable and the mini-DIN-to-RCA adapter that came with your graphics card.

[Zac67]

Success! Thanks to all, I managed to get a S-Video to single male RCA

*cough* that's hardly S-video *cough*

Seriously, if you're happy go with it.
For the record, you require *two* RCA connections (or any two signals on whatever connector for that matter) for S-video to work. Combining them into a single signal is composite (more or less). Due to frequency overlap a simple combining will usually degrade the resolution to below composite. The adapter you're using may have an integrated low-pass filter to solve this problem.

What I meant with the dangling RCA plug is that *many* (possibly most) mini-DIN outputs use just one of the signals if you're down to composite and don't use the other one - if configured to composite that is, this doesn't magically change because you pull a plug. This lets you use a single S-video connector cable for both S-video and composite (not simultaneously, of course) without requiring an additional adapter/cable. *Some* mini-DIN outputs with >4 contacts use a dedicated contact, so the dangling won't work - depending on the hardware in question. Anyway...

[Zac67]

Yes, going with a simple cable mini-DIN ("S-video") to dual RCA is the easiest, cheapest and probably best quality route. You only need to configure the S-video port to output a signal (if it doesn't all the time already).
If that isn't possible for whatever reason (driver or software problem) then you can also go the expensive route with an external VGA-to-video converter. But you'll also need to activate that VGA port of yours...

[Zac67]

The flicker you see is inherent to the standard: NTSC has only 480 lines delivered in two interlaced fields alternating with just 30 Hz - very visible for high contrast edges. While this is true for a high fidelity (=no processing) conversion, some converters apply filtering (possibly even adaptive) to the image and reduce the flicker substantially. (With adaptive filtering only blurring the image where it's necessary.)

The output of my first S-video capable graphics card (Kyro II aka PowerVR 3) was flickering very badly (comparable to Amiga video), but the output of its replacement (GF4 Ti4200) was much more tolerable yet a bit blurred due to non-adaptive filtering.

[Zac67]

MAME games are as limited in resolution as Amiga titles. The image quality doesn't actually change much when scaled up (to VGA/SVGA/XVGA/...), so when it's scaled back down (to NTSC) it's pretty much as before.