Amiga to VGA | GBS-8220 Review (CGA/EGA/YUV to VGA)

Thank you for watching I hope this helps you with your purchasing decisions! Please see further links in the description of others findings and modifications, and I'll be sharing a mod episode very soon. Overall I'm impressed for the price, and we don't want to spend too much time or money on modding it as every £ closes the gap to the more expensive legitimate solutions out there. If you have an alternative method I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Neil - RMC

Awesome video! Glad to see the A500 getting the love it deserves and being kept running with up to date parts and peripherals. Please keep making these vids.

The picture here is so good. I love how the background is really colorful, but the center has a more mellow, low-CRI light that gives the items a warm, retro look.

Awesome overview! I have the very same model and been thinking to try this with my Amiga and Atari. But never really got around. Now, you've done what I thought of and I see a very promising result and solutions to the artifacts too. Thank you very much :)

Great video. I bought one and couldn't figure out the pin-outs until I saw this video so thanks.

Very informative, entertaining and technical video... as always! Thumbs up 👍!!!

My dad was cleaning up in my parents storage unit and found a bunch of old computers. He turned into a kid and wanted me to check if it is possible to run these old systems. Thanks for the video! <3

Back in the old days, we used to use scan rate doubler circuits to bring the hsync up to 31khz. Worked a treat with CRT's & only took a few minutes to make.

Excellent video, had one of these in the cupboard for years. Looking forward to the follow up video!

Your videos are always of the highest quality and engrossing. Cheers from Iceland!

I have one of these boards in an arcade machine that had the CRT replaced with an LCD monitor, the interference problem is terrible, especially on saturated colours. Much tweaking and settings experimentation didn't help much. Unfortunately higher quality scan converters are expensive! I was thinking of getting the Open Source Scan Converter. I didn't know about mods for the GBS board, I will look into that. Excellent video!

I love you Neil, in a purely platonic, awkwardly uncomfortable, man hug sort of way :-) Very much looking forward to part 2!

There are a few known issues with the GBS board, as you've seen on Ian's blog. The PCB layout is less than ideal, and that causes sparkly dots on some boards, especially with a 50 Hz video input. My first board was quite bad, so I did the mod where you cut the trace for the SDRAM clock, the solder on a resistor and cap (RC filter), which fixed the dots problem completely. I think it might also work to reduce the SDRAM speed slightly as well (as you mentioned), but that involves modifying some register valus via I2C, so you have to have something like an Arduino permanently hooked up. There is another project on the shmups forum for connecting a Rasp Pi to do a similar thing, but also to enable a true 240p / 288p mode, as the GBS tends to try to deinterlace an already-progressive input signal, which can cause really bad artifacting with some systems. Using a Rasp Pi for configuring a few GBS registers is huge overkill tbh. An Arduino or ESP8266 would do the job fine. The GBS boards also have issues with sync, and requires an external LM1881 sync separator for some consoles. Also, the "arcade" style connector is likely adding to the noise, as there is only one ground path, and the RGB wires are obviously unshielded. So yeah, they can be quite good scaler boards for the money, but can take a lot of tweaking to get right. lol There is a version with HDMI output btw, but I haven't tested one, and imagine it might have similar issues on the input side unless they have tweaked the design already.

I have the exact same Phillips crt that I use with my 600, sadly I two encountered the dying space invader sound only a few weekd ago! I look forward to your investigations into a fix. Love the channel as well.

Very informative as always, thanks!

I'm having a problem that I can't keep it to lock in the vertical sync. It keeps scrolling. Other than that the picture is clean

Looking forward to seeing how well you manage to get this working! I've been using a cheapy RGB scart cable to a TV with my amigas. Works, but not ideal. Cheers

Had one (monitor) just like it for my A500... Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

This is something I’d never have the need to use but I enjoyed watching all the same 👍🏼

Great video as always. I have the same Phillips CM8833-II with exactly the same problem as you demonstrated, so looking forward to see if you post a video on that repair. In the meantime have bought a GBS-8220 to hook up to an old 17" IIYAMA CRT monitor. CRT's are always better, even though I have an NEC MultiSync LCD1970NXp which will sync down to 15.6 KHz, but looks too dull. On Amiga 1200 by the way, currently using SCART on old 14" TV's. Keep up the great work. :)