Hey y’all, it’s Try from My Life in Gaming. While zaxour’s TurboNanza isn’t a brand-new mod, I only became aware of it earlier this year thanks to this very website. Bob brought up various PC Engine/TurboGrafx/SuperGrafx video output options during the weekly roundup, and mentioned offhand that the TurboNanza generates S-video internally in such a way that it matches the composite video palette. So I went down this rabbit hole and finally made a video about it!
As you may know, PC Engine colors are radically different between composite and RGB, with the composite palette looking much more natural. While these colors have been reverse-engineered for RGB implementation in emulators such as MiSTer and Analogue Duo, I found the idea of achieving these colors with an internal mod and playing on original hardware to be extremely appealing, even if S-Video may not be as clean as RGB. That’s because I know that S-Video will still look amazing on a CRT, plus I was really curious to see how well I could tune the RetroTINK 4K Pro’s Enhanced S-Video to suit this mod.
Enhanced S-Video works by running the luma (Y) into the same analog to digital processor as RGB and component video, which means that it can be processed at the same precision as component video luma! The chroma is not as high-precision, but there are tools in the SDP Decoder menu that help minimize the impact of chroma bleed.
I think the results are extremely impressive! When not pixel-peeping, the flaws caused by attempting optimized sampling on S-Video are not very noticeable, whereas the benefits of playing with more accurate colors are massive. If you have a TurboNanza and would like to try it out for yourself, download the profile I created here! Just don’t forget to set Decimation Phase and Sub-Phase for both low-res and high-res games, as it will likely not match up between my setup and your setup. In my opinion, this may be the most compelling use case for Enhanced S-Video.
Also keep in mind that you must be able to connect S-Video into the rear VGA/HD-15 input port of the RetroTINK 4K Pro. This can be achieved with products like the S-Video to HD-15 adapter from Laser Bear or the Scalable Video Switch. Also remember that this is one of the features that is not possible with the RetroTINK 4K CE, but you can still do standard S-Video processing on the CE, which will look just as good as it does on the Pro (and looks awesome when paired with CRT effects).
By the way, the TurboNanza is wired up to the Sega Saturn pinout. Coury and I have been using the Insurrection Industries Saturn S-Video cable with our TurboNanza systems. Oh, and if you have a Duo system, you might also be interested in zaxour’s Duo Disguiser mod, which allows you to boot CD games from the Turbo EverDrive Pro!
Anyway, if all this sounds interesting, check out the video for many many more comparisons and details!