I have a shitty 14" (I think) tv in my room and it’s not quite great for Wii gaming, does anybody know of any reliable method to connect the Wii to a VGA/DIV monitor since mine is a nice LG 20" one which should be much better than that tv? Something that will work with most of the games, including WiiWare and Virtual Console and not cost too much or offer noticably degraded image quality?
I did a few google searches but there are so mixed reviews about various products I have no idea what to believe.
I never expected it to be so hard to connect a console to a PC monitor, I was silly enough to believe a simple cable would suffice and provide as good quality as on a HDTV but there are all sorts of adaptors and stuff with different functions, different drawbacks, different performance which can affect gaming…
Edit: Oh, I should mention my PC’s GPU has no TV-in slot (though I imagine my next system will have that via an ATI AIW GPU, but that’s in the distant future) which sounds like it makes it easier to connect a console to it, so I need something that connects directly to the monitor, unless there’s other ways via other sorts of slots…
nfggames.com/neography/pivot/ent … games#body
That is the best one, if you do not get this one, you are just not right. =P
Never use a GPU to connect a console to, the quality on them is never that good unless you buy a really expensive one with RGB and component inputs, and even at that the majority of them suffer from lag.
Not a very in depth review. Isn’t that the cable which doesn’t work with many of the virtual console games? Or is that something which can’t be bypassed?
Some screenshots would have been nice though the ones found on the vdigi website are pretty convincing (and I still need to get some of those games, heh)…
[quote=“Al3xand3r”]Not a very in depth review. Isn’t that the cable which doesn’t work with many of the virtual console games? Or is that something which can’t be bypassed?
[/quote]
how much of an in-depth review do you want?
It’s a cable…
Perhaps you should ask around on the NFG forum if the cable supports the VC, I’d ask for you but I can’t be arsed.
This is something I have look at time and time again for various consoles, and the advice I’ll give to you is to save up for a new TV. Some companies do LCD monitor/TV things that are basically a monitor with a TV tuner. My girlfriend’s Samsung has component in.
Obviously if that isn’t an option I think you’re just going to have to make a risk purchase. Anything you buy for this job will not be 100% guaranteed to work (before you buy try and get the shop to agree to give you a full refund if it doesn’t work).
Well, I’m not rich or anything, I’m saving up for new PC parts, not a tv, and it will be a long time before I get a new system set up and can start raising money for other things, like a new cell phone first ,etc…
I recommend Dell’s monitors:
Examples
The one I have is similar to the second one along, but it’s an older model so it doesn’t support HDMI. I supports five different inputs, so I have a PC (through DVI), Saturn, Wii, and 360 all hooked up at the same time and select between them with a simple button press.
Of course if you already own a monitor, an adapter may be a better choice, but you could perhaps look at selling your existing monitor and putting the money towards a monitor with more inputs.
Very nice and convenient, I wish I could get one too but I can’t quite do that because I got this monitor when the last one died… It wouldn’t catch any good money nowadays anyway… I just noticed that kind of monitor is too expensive too, my current one cost less than a third of the second one’s price when I purchased it months ago :S
By adapters do you mean something like what Chizzles suggested or something further specialised which would connect either to the DVI or the VGA slot of my monitor and convert it to a TV tuner or something along those lines?
I said I’m looking for PC parts in the last post but I wouldn’t purchase another monitor, I’ll keep quite a few parts of my current PC like the hard drives, monitor, surround sound system, sound card, and the like which don’t need replacing yet… Maybe 20" sounds small but it’s perfect size for my desk, and it’s a good 1680x1050 LG monitor…
Yeah, if you can find a DVI to A/V adapter that would be ideal. Maybe something like this? I haven’t used one personally though, this is just what came up when I did a quick Google search.
One issue I did have with playing the Wii on my Dell was that the picture was stretched to fit a 16:10 display, but the Wii only outputs in 16:9, making the image look slightly too tall. For some reason you can adjust this when plugging the 360 into the monitor, but not the Wii.
Can’t you manually adjust the size properties of the image from the monitor’s control panel? It would be approximate but you can probably get it right manually… My monitor is 16:9 though so I should be okay regardless of the method I use, as long as upscaling is done decently, right?
There’s no option to manually resize the image. You get three options, 1:1, Fill, and Aspect. 1.1 will show the image in the actually size that it is (for example, a DVD movie would show in a small box in the middle of the screen as that would be it’s actual size in relation to the monitor’s native resolution), Fill fills up the whole screen, and Aspect tries to make the image fit the aspect ratio, while still taking up as much of the screen as it can, but it doesn’t understand consoles like the Wii and Saturn that use the standard yellow A/V cable.
If your monitor is 16:9, I’d imagine you’ll have no troubles of that kind though.
As long as it has component inputs, anything that is not component or RGB looks horrible on a PC monitor.
The cable I posted uses a direct YUV - RGB colour space conversion as far as I’m aware which is very much the same process that happens to component once it enters your TV’s video processor.