Retro Tech
RGB and Retro Consoles: Which Ones Need a Mod and Which Just Need a Cable
Part 5 of the thread The emulation bench
- RGB keeps red, green and blue on separate wires. No color bleed, no dot crawl, and text you can finally read.
- Genesis, Saturn and PlayStation already output it. Most SNES models do too. You just need the right cable.
- The NES and N64 need a real mod to get RGB. That's soldering, not a cable.
- Cheap cables cause most of the problems people blame on the console. Buy good cables once.
Most of us grew up playing these consoles through composite videoThe single yellow RCA plug. Old-school standard-definition video on one wire, which is exactly what a tube TV wants., the yellow plug, or worse, through the RF switch on channel 3. That signal smears color into one wire and lets the TV sort it back out, and the TV never quite manages. Colors bleed, edges crawl, and small text turns to mush.
A lot of those same consoles could produce a much cleaner picture the whole time. They made RGB internally and, especially in North America, just didn't give you a way to get at it. This is my reference for which consoles are which.
What RGB actually is
RGB sends red, green and blue on their own separate wires, plus a sync signal. Nothing gets mixed together, so nothing has to be separated again at the other end.
What that gets you:
- Clean color with no bleeding between neighboring areas.
- No dot crawl or rainbow shimmer on fine patterns.
- Detail you missed. Sprite shading and small text that were a blur over composite.
- Closer to what the artists saw. Many developers worked on RGB monitors.
The steps up the ladder go RF, then composite, then S-Video (which splits brightness from color), then RGB or component. Each one is a visible improvement.
Console by console
| Console | RGB out of the box? | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Sega Genesis / Mega Drive | Yes, every model | An RGB cable. The Model 1 has the best audio; the Model 3's picture is noticeably worse. |
| Sega Saturn | Yes | An RGB cable. |
| Sony PlayStation | Yes, every model | An RGB cable. The earliest models are generally considered the best; later cost-reduced ones are a touch softer. |
| Super Nintendo (original) | Yes | A SNES RGB cable. The 1CHIP boards have a particularly sharp picture. |
| SNES Model 2 (the small 1997 one) | No | A mod to restore it. |
| NES | No | A mod board. NESRGB by Tim Worthington is the classic, and the Hi-Def NES goes straight to HDMI. |
| Nintendo 64 | Mostly no | Some early NTSC boards can be modded fairly easily. Later ones need an RGB board, and digital HDMI mods exist too. The hardest of the bunch. |
Heads up
The NES and N64 mods mean opening the console and soldering. If you haven't done fine soldering before, practice on something you don't care about first, or pay someone who does this all the time. A lifted pad on a 35-year-old board is a bad afternoon.
If you're buying a console to use with RGB, this table is also a shopping list. A Genesis Model 1 or an original SNES is a much easier start than an NES.
What you plug it into
| Display | Good | Not so good |
|---|---|---|
| Sony PVM / BVM monitors | Incredibly sharp, great geometry, professional inputs | Expensive, getting rare, mostly small screens (14 to 20 inches) |
| European SCART TVs | Bigger screens, cheaper than a PVM | Hard to find in North America |
| A modern TV through a scaler | Works with the TV you have. OSSC, RetroTINK and Framemeister are the names to know, and the good ones add little to no lag | An extra box to buy, and purists find it too clean |
In Europe, RGB came through SCART on ordinary TVs, which is why so much of the cable world uses SCART connectors even in America. To feed a PVM, you'll want a SCART-to-BNC adapter.
Cables are half the battle
This is the part I'd stress most. A bad RGB cable causes most of the problems people blame on the console: sync trouble, checkerboard interference, wrong colors. Good cables are properly shielded and have the right resistor values for that console. Cheap ones often don't.
Places with a good reputation:
- RetroGamingCables.co.uk
- Retro Access
- HD Retrovision, whose cables are component rather than RGB SCART, which suits American TVs and scalers
Along with the cable, you might need an RGB switch for several consoles, a distribution amplifier, or a sync stripper (more on that next).
When the picture won't lock
- Sync problems. Some displays and scalers don't like composite sync. A sync cleaner or stripper fixes a lot of it, and some setups need sync on luma instead. Check what your display expects.
- Interference. Diagonal lines or a checkerboard shimmer are usually shielding. Better cable first, and keep power bricks and video cables apart.
- Compatibility. Not every display takes every RGB format. Look up your exact console and display pairing before you buy anything expensive.
Tip
Buy the cable first and see the difference before you spend on a scaler or a monitor. For a Genesis or a SNES, a good RGB cable into a SCART-capable TV or a basic scaler is already a huge jump.
For more, RetroRGB.com is the best reference I know, the My Life in Gaming videos are excellent, and r/crtgaming and the Shmups forum are full of people who've solved your exact sync problem already.
If the real hardware isn't an option, CRT shaders on the Steam Deck get you a surprising amount of the look. Picking which console to mod in the first place is easier with the SNES model comparison and the Genesis model comparison side by side, since both come down partly to picture quality.