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Comment by ksaj | Hacker News Reader

It is strange that there are no pictures of this device. However, with the (brilliant) name, I can easily guess what it looks like.

There have always been adapters and multi-adapters because of hand-held video recorders, various entertainment units, and even overhead displays. Even HDMI comes in Standard, Dual, Mini, Micro and a specialized Automotive connectors.

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> It is strange that there are no pictures of this device.

You'd be petrified to see it.

Looks like there's some more info here: https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=135

There's a video, but it's half an hour of calibrating a pick and place machine.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/IAsJbZpvYHU

The price point is pretty step at $169.

I thought that at first. But if you need to translate between a lot of the devices this would work with, you might spend more than that on all the different adapters.

For someone with a lot of retro gear mixed in with new gear (like me), it's probably not such a bad price. Especially businesses that digitize home videos etc.

I wonder if there is surge control on the inputs. The number one reason I have to replace video adapters is the input buffer frying. Ironically that often results in a not-blue screen of death.

Welcome to small-production-run hobbyist electronics. The stuff you see at Walmart is cheap because they make 50,000 at a time.

Also, the cheap options are using off-the-shelf upscaler chips that will choke on anything other than NTSC or PAL video baseband - the kind of chips that go into TVs that have retro inputs. As far as I'm aware there is no chip on the market that you can buy that will handle arbitrary analog video modes to the fidelity that we want them, and pretty much everyone is using some amount of FPGAs to handle some part of the conversion[0]. That's like half the BOM cost on these things alone.

[0] Don't ask me how much. I imagine you probably couldn't directly sample analog video on an FPGA.

For home computers like c64 and amiga that'll be enough though. They were TV based. I didn't realise this was that expensive. Probably will go for a Chinese option then as they're only 20 bucks.

https://github.com/hoglet67/RGBtoHDMI/wiki $5-10 pi + $3 cpld + some comparators and a DAC for the analog addon https://github.com/hoglet67/RGBtoHDMI/wiki/Bill-of-Materials...

No it’s not. You are just accustomed to Chinese garbage electronics.

What would be the best price, and how would you get it there?

That's not unusually expensive for this type of hardware. My RetroTINK 2X was around 130

If there are no alternatives that exist, it seems very reasonable. You'll spend much more time/$ on hacking it together yourself with an FPGA.

The main thing is that I can't find the license. I have to assume it's a proprietary solution.

It seems like an attempt to snip the OSSC Pro, an open source hardware (OSHW) solution which is set to release soon.

Man, it doesn't even cover CGA displays (200x160,16 color)!

CGA 16 colour was only 160×100 (it was 80×100* text mode pretending to be graphics [1]). Much more commonly used was 320×200 4 colour.

* Font height changed to 2 pixels, so 100 lines of "text" instead of 25 (640×200 actual pixels).

[1] https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/c/Color_...

That was the first thing I looked for as well. I have a service monitor (combination tracking generator and spectrum analyzer) witch CGA output. There's a fair amount of old engineering equipment with CGA out. They typically have green CRT built in, but if you do hook up an external monitor you get a rather nice color display.

Not a total loss, CGA was also also popular in cabinet arcade games. You can get converter boards. All the ones I've seen had 5-pin headers and you have to build your own cable.

I came to here request a picture also

Yeah or a link to buy it.

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