31 kHz support on Wii?

RetroArch Nintendo consoles
#1

This one’s a looong shot but I thought I’d ask. I bought a cable that converts the Wii’s component video signal to VGA so I could play smash in 480p on an old computer monitor. It looks great, so naturally I fired up RA to see how it looks (I’ve had great success with this monitor and a Windows PC, but I don’t have that computer with me). However, since the monitor can’t go below 31 kHz, I have to play everything linedoubled (240p60 is out of range).

The Wii can’t output at 120 Hz, and the Wii port of RA doesn’t support shaders. I took a look at the old CPU-based filters, since they still have a menu entry, but it looks like they don’t compile for anything besides Win/Unix/OSX.

I’d be shocked if there was a way to do this, but…shock me.

#2

You just want 100% black lines for simulated 240p? If so, there are some scanline overlays that should do the trick.

#3

I’m impressed.

There’s a little glitch, though: I get crazy horizontal moire at 1.0x scale. It’s best at 1.07x exactly, but the top and bottom are still dimmed a little, and the scanlines I’m trying to mask become visible near the top and bottom. It also causes a softer, blurred look. Are the overlays scaled with respect to something other than the configured output resolution? I’m using an integer scale and 1.0 opacity.

Also, the overlay gets shifted by ~25% of a scanline if I have “hide in menu” on, so everything looks really blurry, even at proper scale. Took me a while to figure out…is that by design?

#4

so the wii 100% definitely can’t output at 120Hz? Are there any hardware accessories that can convert a 240p60 signal into a 240p120 signal?

#5

Not that I know of, no. I haven’t heard of anything that can increase the refresh rate, either.

How were you planning to display the Wii on your CRT, anyway? Component-to-VGA transcoder?

If you were going to have to spend some money, anyway, I think you’d be better served with an RPi3 with either a cheap HDMI-to-VGA adapter (which is what I use; it adds like a frame of latency but it’s not much) or Gert’s VGA adapter.

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#6

There are cheap (~$20) Wii VGA cables available. The main use case is playing Wii/GC games in 480p on a CRT monitor, since most CRT televisions can’t display 480p (and the few that can have laggy post-processing), even if they accept YPbPr. Using RA on it was just an afterthought, really, but it would have been nice to not need to switch the cable from my Wii to my PC all the time. Then again, not all systems run at fullspeed on the Wii anyway so…whatever.

By the way, any idea yet why the overlay is scaled slightly? It’s not like this on other platforms, right?