Help with correcting VGA to component picture on a Toshiba HD CRT

That doesn't sound very solvable either through your TV or transcoder box. Monoprice doesn't always sell high quality stuff. I would send it back to them.

What I use is the Audio Authority 9a60: http://www.audioauthority.com/product_details/9A60

It gives stellar picture from my dreamcast, though it is shifted slightly left and down I think. Many games let you correct that though, and it's not that bad to begin with.

You can find it for about 20 bucks on ebay, so I would just return the monoprice thing.

I hope you recorded the original RCUT value because everything else not going through that monoprice adapter will look really off.

The audio authority transcoder doesn't stretch the image at all.

As far as the price goes, you just have to keep checking back. If you look at completed listings, you'll see that many have gone for under $20, one even went for $12.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sop=15&_sacat=0&_from=R46&_nkw=audio%20authority%20vga%20component&rt=nc&_pppn=r1&LH_Complete=1

Now is the time to pick these dudes up, though. TV manufacturers have started to nix their VGA connections, so anyone wanting to connect their Dreamcasts will have to convert to component or HDMI.

I'm thinking you will never find a catch-all, one-stop solution to this problem. Here's why.

Every console since the dawn of time has worked with overscan, for various reasons. Dreamcast included. Ultimately though, overscan will be used more with older hardware to provide a full screen area, because the framebuffer of many games tends to be on the small side. TV to TV, overscan can vary, but you will find that if you can get the H+V alignment where you want it to get the most coverage with one broadcast on the same TV, every other broadcast tends to keep within that range.

The VGA Box is the wild card. It provides a high quality, non-interlaced (i.e. progressive) image. However, VGA is not a broadcast standard in the way that NTSC, PAL etc. are. It has no means to deal with overscan. So the only option is to turn it off. When using the VGA Box with your Dreamcast, the image that is given has no overscan at all, and it is frequently not providing the exact ratio that was originally intended--that only worked when stretching happened to account for overscan. This was not a problem in 1998 when the Dreamcast was designed. It was only ever presumed that you would have good access to the kind of H+V adjustments on your VGA monitor to correct the aspect and center as required. With your VGA Box now eliminating overscan, your transcoder altering the signal type for your HDTV, and your HDTV coming back to it looking for overscan, things have all manner of propensity to be wacked. At any rate, bad geometry is just bad geometry, you can be sure your box is not generating it. I'd expect geometry from other sources to be bad at 1080i if your Dreamcast through the VGA Box and transcoder box are showing bad geometry. Work with some test patterns, or other sources+modes with/without the transcoder box to confirm this, and go from there.

Yeah, what liquid snake said. I forgot that the image is shifted on my computer monitor too. So that's not an issue with transcoders, just the dreamcast and/or vga box.

The geometry itself isn't that bad though, the image is still mostly 4:3 as far as I can remember, maybe stretched vertically slightly. But the colors and sharpness are still great, so I still really like the outcome.

Yeah, that's the same one I have. Just compare a 480p image coming from your computer to video from your dreamcast.

The problem with adjusting your TV for 480p from dreamcast is that 480p from other sources (Wii, PS2) will be thrown off. So I decided to just accept the slightly off-center dreamcast image, and just adjust it in-game where possible.

I can save you some time by advising you not to try using different VGA boxes. The "VGA Box" is really only a VGA Box in order to provide convenient access to all outputs the Dreamcast is capable of. The VGA box does nothing to create a VGA signal, it is merely a switch that activates the signal type you want. You can get the same VGA signal from the Dreamcast just by connecting the right wires. Any VGA connection you make is functionally identical to any other here.

So any difference that you are trying to effect here will have to come from either your display or in your case, your transcoder.

So, it's as I said. It is either happening at the display, or with the display + your transcoder. Since it is impossible for you to remove the transcoder, these two possibilities are not functionally distinct, and the only way you can isolate it as the cause (or not) is to try another transcoder, which can be a good way to go broke. Trying another Dreamcast VGA Box will be of no use here. If colour is correct enough, I would leave it alone and just use the display's controls to center and H+V when using the Dreamcast. But since colour is one of your big problems, well... another transcoder box may be your only resort.

Yeah, the offset is something the dreamcast itself does, as liquid snake said a few posts back. I forgot that the VGA Box doesn't really do anything, it just breaks out all the connections of Dreamcast AV port into standard connections. Some people solder a VGA connection directly from the board because they don't want to buy a VGA box.

So I bet if you send your dreamcast to your PC monitor, you will see the offset too, compared to a PC 480p signal (unless your monitor is an LCD, which may do some autocorrecting, I still use CRT's there too).

So yeah, I really think that your color issue will be solved by the Audio Authority converter. I certainly had no color issues with it on my Sony Hi-Scan TV.