Here's my review of the device:
It's small. It uses a small, 5V power adapter. It supports RGB and Component (the sync on green type, I think) video. I cracked it open to check out the chip, but it was hidden behind a glued-on heat sink that I didn't feel like prying off, so that will have to remain a mystery for now. It uses a 16MB SDRAM chip (W9816G6CH-7) for buffering. I was not able to locate useful info regarding another chip: MST9883C-LF
I hooked it up to an A500 and an SGI GDM20E21 monitor, which it synced up to right away. I had to switch the input from Component to RGB since everything looked purple.
After stretching and centering the image, I noticed that the picture seemed rather dull, not as bright as it was on my 1084. This could be because I stretched out an image that was scanning in a smaller area, and the beam had auto-adjusted for intensity based on the screen mode, but not when I tried to spread the same number of electrons over a larger area. I might have to try out one of my LCDs on it later, where electron guns are not an issue. I used SotB as my test game figuring that its touted 50 fps frame rate should give this thing a run for its money. For a few seconds, I sat there and just punched the air to see if there were any signs of screen lag, but detected none. Static objects surrounded by black borders on vertical lines exhibit a slight "shimmering" effect, but things in motion seem fairly smooth. In workbench I detected a slight ghost trail behind the pointer, likely the result of lossy compression. Interlaced WB 1.2 displayed, but it was horrible to look at, like someone had cut the WB into shreds and then overlapped them. Slight color separation is noticeable in hard edges, but I had a combined video cable of about 13 feet, so I'm going to get a VGA gender changer to hook directly to my RGB to VGA adapter from amigakit to see if that improves the picture any. Color separation is not noticeable on complex images, leading me to believe that this device is best designed for JPEG-like images (i.e. photos) as opposed to GIF-like images (i.e. WB screens). At 60Hz, I looked at the screen out of the corner of my eye, where persistence of vision is much less and detected no flicker. This is possibly a function of the monitor itself, but I don't have any response time info for this monitor. I can detect flicker from the corner of my eye in the default screen mode on a 1084.
In summary:
The Good: Fast frame rate, no color loss on OCS games, reasonably sharp picture in complex images
The Bad: No interlace mode support, lossy compression noticeable on WB screens, slight shimmer in VGA mode at black to color boundaries(Although this largely went away in the WXGA mode. I got no sync at all on the SVGA mode.), JPEG-y ghost trail follows moving objects on monochrome backgrounds,color separation on text and similar objects, scrolling text (during the between level segues in SotB) was not as smooth as it could've been, due to separation, ghosting and shimmer.
The Ugly: OK, it actually looks kind of good since it's small and unobtrusive.
Overall, I'm happy with my purchase since it will work just fine for using a 20-inch monitor on my A500 that I plan on turning into an arcade machine for my rec room. I won't be doing any WB stuff with this machine, where most of the problems I encountered turned up.
