Multi-Amiga Flicker Fixer

[danbeaver]

For that price I prefer to buy a new Indivision.

My thoughts exactly!

[djos]

I've got the 8220 model and it works pretty well imo - I mounted mine on a piece of perspex with thin rubber feet and installed a power switch so I dont need to keep un/plugging in the damn thing each time.

[Ral-Clan]

I've just recently found out about these and am getting quite excited!

$32 with free shipping for a flicker fixer?  Sounds too good to be true (even if I have to make my own cable).

Can't be that easy?  Can it?

There are a ton of threads about using this converter - but no one seems to be stating the obvious - what is the video quality like?  Same as RGB quality on a 1084?  Poor as composite?  More like S-Video quality?

Can someone please describe the video quality?  If it's as good as native RGB on a 1084 then I'm buying one of these immediately for my A500!

Thanks.

[broken]

Can someone please describe the video quality?  If it's as good as native RGB on a 1084 then I'm buying one of these immediately for my A500!

lol

not even close.

I had one before and thought the video quality was garbage to be honest. I tested it with both a LCD and CRT monitor. Keep in mind everything inputted into it is automatically upscaled to 60Hz NTSC. If you play a PAL game or Demo (virtually all of them), then you will have jerky scrolling that isn't smooth at all. Plus there are graphical glitches that pop up all the time. And I saw issues with workbench cursor having glitches around it.


All in all, I think it's a lousy solution. It might be ok if you are inputting nothing but NTSC stuff like a SNES or Genesis to scale up to a VGA monitor. But as soon as you input something can run at multiple resolutions and different refresh rates, this thing falls down. Hard.

I personally think a good Svideo adapter like the one Nathan (amigamaniac) use to build give you far better quality (while maintaining proper 50/60Hz screen refresh) than this POS.


IMHO

[Ral-Clan]

lol

not even close.
IMHO

That's wierd.  I've seen other posts where people are saying it's quite good.  I wish I could see a high quality screen grab so I can judge better.

[AmmoJammo]

The output is OK....

if your only choice is the GBS, or composite, then the GBS is fantastic....

It'll never be as good as RBG/scart, it does weird things to the video.

I'll try to take some good pics later, comparing scart to the GBS, on the same monitor!

[AmmoJammo]

GBS set to 1024 x 786, which is this LCDs native resolution...

It will often create weird banding in solid colours, or patterns, whereas the scart displays it as a proper, solid colour...

Keep in mind this monitor is rubbish, and doesn't display any image properly centred :whack:

GBS


SCART


The GBS also creates these weird patterns around the mouse pointer... I didn't even bother photographing them.

There's also often a weird ghosting around text, as mentioned before, this screen isn't great, so the scart image looks a bit odd too :whack: you can also see in the following pic, that along the row of "D" in HD0, HD1, HD2, etc, its blurry.... the GBS doesn't do a very good job of upscaling... grey also seems to be displayed slightly blue, although you can probably adjust this

GBS


SCART


SO! if you're needing a way to connect your Amiga to an LCD TV for playing games, then I'm sure you'll be more than happy with the GBS.

[Lurch]

I found anything moving looks weird. The mouse pointer is a good example, a couple of games I tried through it didn't display right either.

To be honest look around for an s-video/scart solution or by a flickerfixer/scandoubler.

[djos]

Kipper2k has a new S-Video/Composite adapter for $35cad.

http://kipper2k.com/amigaforsale/

[broken]

I would take a solid svideo connection over this POS anyday.

The jerky scrolling for PAL games and demos completely makes this device un-recommendable in my opinion.

[Ral-Clan]

AmmoJammo,

Thanks a lot for those pictures. They were EXTREMELY informative.  I agree that if you have nothing, or mostly do gaming, having one of these Chinese boards may be better than nothing.  But the banding on the solid colours is just unuseable for my purposes (DPaint painting - where solid colours would come up a lot).

I'm assuming the second photo in each pair is SCART?

You guys are lucky to have SCART in Europe.  We didn't get anything decent like that until S-Video came around.

As for the S-Video adapter, thanks Djos.  I actually have a few Amiga CRT monitors handy at the moment, but was just considering the Chinese flicker fixer because it would give me some backup and an option to move onto commonly available LCDs when these CRTs died.  Hopefully when they do there will be a better solution.  I can't really use one of Jens' Indvisions right now, because I've got a few other things inside my A500 that would make if very difficult to fit another internal device.

So the Commodore CRTs will have to do for now.

Thanks very much.

[AmmoJammo]

Yes, each second photo is scart.

I sent the workbench backdrop to a very fine checker board pattern... I think? :p

This is the GBS attempt...


VS the SCART.

[ChaosLord]

Thanks a lot for those pictures. They were EXTREMELY informative.  I agree that if you have nothing, or mostly do gaming, having one of these Chinese boards may be better than nothing.  But the banding on the solid colours is just unuseable for my purposes (DPaint painting - where solid colours would come up a lot).

If anyone wants a good flickerfixer they can always buy a used DCE Scan Magic from someone.  I have one since forever and it is awesome.  It displays all 16.7 million Amiga 1200 colors and it does NOT promote PAL into 60 hz so all PAL games look great!  I mostly only play PAL games.

DCE ScanMagic works in 1280x512 mode, you can bet the GBS does not.

Or you can wait until the new superduper ScanJuggler XAGA comes out.

No external flickerfixer can ever be as good as an internal one.  It simply is not possible.  Once the signal has left the Amiga it is no longer digital.  It is analog at that point.  It must then be realtime digitized back into digital, fiddled with, then reoutput as analog again.  Ugh.  Its hopeless.

[magnetic]

If anyone wants a good flickerfixer they can always buy a used DCE Scan Magic from someone.  I have one since forever and it is awesome.  It displays all 16.7 million Amiga 1200 colors and it does NOT promote PAL into 60 hz so all PAL games look great!  I mostly only play PAL games.

DCE ScanMagic works in 1280x512 mode, you can bet the GBS does not.

I had a DCE scan magic external and I couldnt get PAL modes to work on my dell monitor.. ntsc looked great though. Perfect picture. I have an mk2 now operating in all modes on my vizio hdmi tv but the scaling and positioning are all off. I wonder if we will ever see the new core and tool  I have a dual monitor setup with the mk2 on the 22" HDMI vizio tv and a sony 20" RGB pro studio monitor off rgb output. Ill tell you this for any gaming or demo watching 100% better on the RGB monitor. But for productivity mk2 in highgfx is sweet.

[PanterHZ]

Must say that I was quite surprised too see the output quality of the GBS, I really thought that it would be better than scart. I was considering to buy a GBS just for checking it out, but now I think I will just save my money.

Thanks for the pictures AmmoJammo.

[djos]

you can improve the quality of the GBS by adding these simple mods from Ian Stedman:



here's what mine looks like:







It's not perfect as the GBS still has trouble dealing with very fine patterns but this does remove the worst of the banding.