Saturn connections with progressive scan ???

[Lagi]

Hi everybody,

It made years that I travel around the forums (assembler, and so on...) and I'm just sick not to find any answers.

I have got a Saturn Pal which is compatible 50 Hz and 60 Hz and Ntsc and Pal thanks to switches on the side. I have got an RGB cord which was of course automatically supplied because I come from France.

What I look for is to have the best quality picture for my saturn. The VDP 2 of the Saturn can display pictures with a Vga signal, ie with a frequency of 31 KHz and not only 15 KHz like on Standard definition on the televisions.

When I talked to a guy on a forum whose nickname is Nick Rivers, he told me that it was possible to get a VGA display from the Saturn as soon as you have the development system (sophia, dev cart A and B, and Psy-Q) of the saturn with the VGA cord which is normally supplied with. Go on ebay and tell me if you see in the description of such Saturn developments (they are already rare to find) if you see a VGA cord to hook up from the Saturn A/V connection to the VGA monitor (the rarest thing that I never found on the internet, except a photo given by Nick Rivers).

After that, I was completely mad because we didn't know if all the games were compatible VGA. Virtua Fighter 2 is one of the rare games to use the high resolution of the Saturn, does it mean it could be the only game to work on a progressive scan frequency ? But wait, there is worse. Actually, contrary to the Dreamcast, there is no native signal, so if this display is possible on Sega Saturn, an external software is needed to unlock the progressive signal. And here is the part of the system discs for the system which were given by Sega for the developers. Recently, there was one at 80 $ on ebay, which is very expensive... Anyway, I didn't bid on it unfortunately with my horrendous regrets...

Anyway, is it possible to make a vga cable for sega saturn ? Would it work on the standard sega saturn or should it be required only for the Saturn development systems ? If it's not possible to make one cord, is it possible to get a progressive scan display from the RGB Scart cord that I have actually in my possession. Do I need for instance the XRGB 2+ or the X-Select D4 which I can find on liksang and which are upscan converters (15 Khz to 31 Khz display) ?

If you know the answer, please let me know because I'm really desperate... It's my favourite console, I've got all the official best cords for each of my systems, included the official D-terminal for PS2 and Cube and YUV for Xbox... If such a VGA cord exists for Saturn, I must find it by all the possible ways. Thank you.

 

[NFG]

If it was possible, it's probably going to be a dev-only feature that cannot be used for games.  VGA is 2-4x more resolution than normal, and that's a huge amount of extra VRAM required.  The only way to increase the resolution is to decrease the colours, so a 16-colour dev-only VGA display is very possibly the best you can get.  

I'm guessing, but the theory is sound.

And of course, if you DID enable the output, you'd have to hack the hardware as I'm reasonably sure the Saturn's chroma encoder doesn't handle 31kHz.

[blackevilweredragon]

If it was possible, it's probably going to be a dev-only feature that cannot be used for games.  VGA is 2-4x more resolution than normal, and that's a huge amount of extra VRAM required.  The only way to increase the resolution is to decrease the colours, so a 16-colour dev-only VGA display is very possibly the best you can get.  

I'm guessing, but the theory is sound.

And of course, if you DID enable the output, you'd have to hack the hardware as I'm reasonably sure the Saturn's chroma encoder doesn't handle 31kHz.

well, it would need to be RGB anyway, so the chroma encoder isn't needed then..

[blackevilweredragon]

actually, I just had a thought..  isn't it possible that this is refering to VGA "double"?  it's a 640x480 image at 31KHz, but the pixels are doubled, so the real resolution is 320x240..

just a guess..   (this is how PCs do 320x240 at 60Hz)