MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hello,

I have an 4:3 CRT VGA Monitor and a CRT TV. I would like to connect the Monitor with a HDMI to VGA adapter to the DE10 and the CRT-TV to the analog output (Scart). They should always be connected at the same time. My plan is not to swap cables every time I change a core.

It is totally OK for me that 15KHz Cores only work on the TV and 31KHz Cores work only on the Monitor. E.g. no picture on the TV for AO486.

So far, no problem, especially not with the TV. But let's talk only about the AO486 core for the Monitor so far, I never get the resolution perfekt. I tried plenty of combinations, but there is always something wrong. Either the picture is not "Full Screen", it seems to me, that the MiSTer thinks I have a 16:9 Monitor connected to the HDMI port, or the letters (either in "Dos" or in some games) just don't look right. E.G. on an "H" one stroke is twice as thick as the other.

A logic setting for me would e.g. be 640x480, but I don't get it right.

Unfortunately I'm not a "picture-format" specialist, so is my plan possible at all? Can someone support me with settings I have adjust to have a "perfect" monitor picture over that HDMI to VGA adapter?

Thank you,

Frank

You can leave both hooked up at the same time, but you should turn off the display that is not being used since both outputs will be driven the same way and one or the other will be out of the supported sync range.

I don't have the analog IO board, so I use switchboxes for HDMI and also component switchboxes to go between my various sources and my various displays. I only feed one display at a time this way but don't have to unplug cables.

Regarding AO486, there is a thread about setting up individual scaler modes for all the various video modes. I haven't had time to try this yet, but I definitely plan to. My VGA monitor supports 1600x1200, so I just scale everything up to that and it always fills the screen no matter what I throw at it and I don't have to keep adjusting the monitor every time the video mode changes. It looks pretty much perfect when doing this.

Is it actually possible to have both I/O board and Direct Video outputting at the same time without 2 different configs? Or, perhaps one config but with all the 31Khz cores having their separate [core] sections?

Ao486's VGA output is a bit sketchy so you can't really get 1:1 image in DOS text mode, but it's perfect in most games. To have both DOS & games okay (and much more too) there's this new method being proposed, which will hopefully be included in the MiSTer main at some point.

As an aside, you actually can display ao486 on 15khz TV using custom modelines. It works so well (for games, not DOS text) that it's my preferred way of using this core now.

Depends on what content you use in Ao486 but most dos content is 400p/70hz. So feeding it 480p is going to leave large black bars on top/bottom. If you want DOS gaming I would recommend trying the below video_mode in your ini file (create an ao486 section to only affect that core). The HUD needs refresh rate set to variable (probably before you apply the modes) and use aspect ratio=full and HV- integer scale. Text mode will be a bit tall/narrow but it will be perfectly sharp. Games should fill the screen.
The end of the above linked thread is more than a mere "proposal", the last page has an advanced test core that lets you define video modes that match content resolution and it does the switching. So if you really want perfect resolution in every mode that sounds pretty good.

FoxbatStargazer wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 10:38 pm The end of the above linked thread is more than a mere "proposal"

Unfortunately, until it gets accepted into the main that's precisely what it is. Otherwise it will get outdated very soon, unless it's maintaned as a separate fork. I kept using the original one for many months for ao486, swapping Mister files/inis back and forth but it was a chore, plus the ao core itself eventually got updated too.

Semantics. You are both right.

True...no need to argue about it since we're all fans of this proposal method