The Dreamcast is one of my all-time favorite video game systems. But lately playing it on modern TVs doesn't really work out that well because the old way of connecting those consoles to TVs just seems a little bit muddied and washed out. But now a company called Retro-Bit is producing brand-new VGA boxes that honestly make the image sharper than it's ever been. Let's take a look at this.
The Dreamcast never really caught on when it was originally released but some of the best games ever created on any Sega platform reside on that system. And some of those games were never released on any other platform ever and the best way to play them nowadays is still on a Dreamcast. Unfortunately because of the way that the Dreamcast outputs images it only does it from the basic connector of an RCA. Now that kind of sucks because RCA outputs aren't very high quality and while I'm not a big fan of them, mostly because the image is going through one little yellow cable that never really performs as good as something like HDMI, back in the day they didn't have HDMI but what they did have was S-video. Now this box here not only does RCA but it also has an S-video input that actually looks a lot better than just your basic yellow input from an RCA cable. Now I compared both images side by side and the S-video always looked better time and time again. But if you really want to get the best possible image out of your Dreamcast using this box you've got to use the VGA out.
The VGA output is simply the best, sharpest image you're ever going to get out of a Dreamcast. Coming in at 640 by 480 this image is not only really sharp but the colors are also a lot better as well. The VGA input is supported by a lot of monitors and TVs out on the market but just check behind your TV for a little blue thing and you might actually see that you have one. And if you do and you have a Dreamcast you're probably going to want to pick one of these up because believe me it's going to make your Dreamcast games look a lot better than they've ever looked before. The one issue you're going to have with using the VGA on this box is that it does export the image but it doesn't export the audio so really the only way to capture the audio is through a 3.5 inch audio jack just beside the VGA out. If your TV doesn’t support 3.5 inch audio input then you’ll have to get your hands on a 3.5 inch audio to RCA audio cable. So just make sure that you have the right cables and you'll be able to listen to the audio and honestly it sounds just as good as the RCA output on a classic Dreamcast.
We wanted to run a comparison between all forms of output that this box could provide so we tried out RCA, S-video and VGA with a number of games. The first game we tried out was Power Stone 2. Now as you can see in this intro sequence the VGA output simply looks a lot better than the other two. Although S-video is really good you can tell that the RCA output is just muddied compared to the other two output methods.
We also took a look at one of my favorite games ever, Shenmue. Now Shenmue is one of the best looking games on the Dreamcast and the VGA pushes it way out in front of the RCA original output. This right here is the best way to play Shenmue in my opinion. So if you're going to play Shenmue at any point you have to play it with this VGA cable because honestly it makes a big difference. In the original RCA output this character’s hair kind of blends together. With a VGA output you can see every individual strand. That's awesome because I personally never saw that much detail when I originally played this on my TV back when this game came out.
Overall the Retro-Bit VGA box is a recommended buy from me simply because if you're a fan of Dreamcast and you have VGA as an option on one of your televisions or monitors then you simply have to get this thing. It just looks amazing and it makes those old Dreamcast games look modern like they just came out yesterday. Now buyer beware though not every Dreamcast game on the market actually supports VGA output so just do your research online before you pick this up so you can play some your favorite games and I promise you you're going to love it.
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