Help to get the best picture / sound possible for composite cables?

[shawnji]

I have a Duo-R, but for the moment I'm stuck with a 3rd party set of composite AV cables.  I'm running my TV in game mode and that fixes any latentcy issues, but I have other issues, such as the picture dropping out if the AV cables are nudged even slightly, a painful sort of buzzing noise in places where the game is silent, and occasional sprite flickering that had monsters occasionally turning invisible for a few seconds when I'd enter certain areas in Ys I+II.  Is this primarily an issue with the AV cables, or is it just the nature of hooking up these older consoles to modern TVs?  Up until now, I had only ever hooked up older consoles to tube TVs.

Forgive me if I sound like an idiot here.  I'm just not terribly familiar with a lot of the technical details in how HDTVs interpret these things.  Eventually, it won't be a problem, because I intend to have my DUO modded for S-video.  However, I'm not in a place where I can afford that, so any tips to reduce the issues I'm experiencing right now would be highly appreciated.

[graffias79]

Before I had my console modded I had the same problem with the AV cable.  I found that it helped to pull the cable out of the DIN connector by about a millimeter.  This helped to stabilized it a bit.

As for flickering when entering certain areas, that's just how Ys behaves sometimes - regular old sprite flicker.  I notice it most in the mine on Ys II.

[SignOfZeta]

The noise might be normal since the PCE is noisy. It might also be the cable since a huge number of the 3rd party ones are shitty and don't fit properly.

A bad cable could also be the source of the image dropping out since HDTVs don't usually have the ability to show a bad image, they just drop it completely.

As for the sprites disappearing in Ys, that's almost certainly a basic HDTV problem. Anytime an object used a flicker based transparency trick the TV will usually display it as fully solid or completely invisible due to crappy line doubling hardware. Older HDTVs and some newer better ones have a lot of options for interlaced images. Most HDTVs are made to show Blurays though so they don't often have these features. If this a $200 40" Vizeo, I'd blame the TV. Aftermarket boxes exist to help with this but I'm no expert since, honestly, it's way cheaper and better to just keep old displays around. A $50 PVM beats a $500 XRBG in every way if you have the room.

[Keith Courage]

You said you have a DUO-R correct? Those systems are notorious for having cracked solder joints for the AV jack. Open up that system and reflow some solder on the AV jack pins.

Also, some of those generic cable do not have proper grounding. Meaning I've opened up a few to find that the only ground being used is by the Din casing itself instead of tapping the ground pin for the cable which is the correct way to do it.

[shawnji]

Thanks for all the good information, guys.  I think it is definitely a combination of the 3rd party cable and the Duo-R's AV jack.

I also have a 60" Vizio that I'm trying to run this on, sooo... yeah.  That being the case, I'm assuming the interlacing issues will still be there even after an S-video or Component mod then since it just depends on the TV having some specialized option to deal with it?