Revisiting the “Cansole”, because my TV doesn't have the right connectors

While a cheap composite to HDMI adapter _can_ work, it likely adds several frames of latency which may or may not affect gameplay. This isn’t because of the composite to HDMI conversion, but because cheap boxes like this scale the PAL signal from 576i to 720p or 1080p. It may not matter for pong, but this can be up to several hundred milliseconds compared to original discrete pong which would have had around 17ms latency from controller to display. It’s also possible that the arduino is outputting a 288p signal, like a lot of game consoles used to use, which the converter probably misinterprets as 576i which can lead to interlacing artifacts that most CRTs, for example, wouldn’t have.

There are several high end converters/scalers (Framemeister, RetroTink-5X, Koryuu Transcoder to OSSC) that introduce very little latency, but obviously cost significantly more.

For anyone interested in the messiness of PAL & NTSC signals and conversion to modern or even old displays, RetroRGB[0] is an amazing resource. It’s amazing to see how good old consoles can look, not only on current displays, but on CRTs with S-video or component inputs.

0 - https://www.retrorgb.com/

If anyone is interested in how a tiny game can be developed on a really small shitty, cheap and low-performance) chip, here's a nice video from Bean Heck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZsWqOuJFKI (part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq30EdgSpOY (part 2, result at ~1:18:00)

This is a fun project.

It reminds me of a little console of sorts my brother and I had when I was around the age of 4. I remember it only as "TV Games" and I'm pretty sure it only had pong on it.

It's funny to think about how much computer power went into producing the "Cansole" versus "TV Games". I'm sure it probably didn't even have a CPU, it was probably just all done in hardware.