Get the Picture?

No, but I'm working on that. I'm trying to find ways to get a crisp picture out of my Sega Genesis, which at the moment is stuck using composite cables. Composite may have been acceptable back in the bygone days of the early 1990s, but on today's high-definition television sets, it leaves something to be desired. Hell, all that blur and color bleed is like looking at Medusa before she's put on her morning make-up.

I've been trying to find a solution, but so far nothing's been satisfactory. I bought an SCART cable and an HDMI converter some months ago, thinking that it would solve the problem, but the picture still has big issues... characters in the foreground are soft around the edges, and scrolling results in a "swimmy" distortion that turns every scuffle in Streets of Rage 2 into the fist fight from Top Secret.

Then there's VGA. It's possible to connect the Genesis to a computer monitor (as demonstrated in this video by Thomas3120) but it comes with a laundry list of caveats. First, you have to build the wire yourself. Second, most VGA monitors won't work with the Genesis because it's so old. They run at a 31 kilohertz frequency, but the Genesis can only output to 15 kilohertz, and the whole thing hertz my head because I have no idea what the hell any of it means. You can use a "scan doubler" to connect a Genesis to the VGA port of a modern display, but that requires a separate power supply, and my power strip is already at low vacancy.

I could even connect the Genesis straight to HDMI using cables from Pound Technology. Those are the guys who released a high-def cable for the original Xbox last year, and they're planning to offer similar products for both the Genesis and the Super NES in the future. Problem is, there's no specific release date for these products... and when they are released, they'll display games in a 16:9 aspect ratio rather than the 4:3 aspect ratio the Genesis normally uses, resulting in a stretched display. Annoyingly, these cables will also require a separate power supply, and as stated earlier there's not much room at the inn for extras.

At least I've got options. None of them are perfect and some of them are aggravatingly complicated, but I have options.