psx lcd screen free sample
I bought the screen from Total Console for my husband. He has a few old PlayStation games he likes, and wants to be able to play now and again, so I figured this would be the best way allow him to do that and not have to have it hooked to the TV all the time. I had some difficulty, but it was not the fault of Total Console. Rather, there were some things I had to learn along the way that I will pass along that may help someone else.
1. The screen is touchy. It may not work with the standard PSOne adapter (model SCPH-113). You may need the adapter that was specially made for this screen (it has a little more juice), which is model SCPH-121. I found one on eBay. When using the 113 adapter, I would get sound, and shadows, but the screen was really dark and you could not make anything out.
2. The screen is fussy. Even after obtaining the correct adapter, I was getting the shadows. Total Console was extremely helpful, and I was setting up a return when, on a whim, I plugged it into the wall (I had prior used an extension cord and a power bar - the outlets in my house are oddly placed). It lit right up. I was amazed. As long as it"s plugged into a wall, it works great. (Our screen doesn"t work correctly with the 113 adapter, even plugged into the wall - a google search showed that this is sometimes an issue, other times not).
Yes, we got my son one for Xmas. We were thinking about getting him a GBA, but with the price of it, and the price of games, we went for a PSOne (£50, well actually we bought a package with 10 games for £99) and LCD screen (£99).
Yes, it`s more expensive to start off with, but he`s able to play all the Playstation games we already have, and Playstation games aren`t badly priced now either. Plus it`s backlit so no light to shine over the screen needed like the GBA.
It`s the best thing we ever got, it`s never been off since Xmas, and the 5.6" TFT screen is really crisp. It still amazes me how clear it is, even when sat quite far back watching him play. The screen is a much better size that a GBA screen.
I looked at all the different models of screen. The Sony one doesn`t have too many extra functions, and the Logic 3 version says it has a video port. I thought it might let you connect a camcorder etc and use the screen as a monitor, so contacted Logic 3 to ask. But they said it`s only video out pass-through, to allow you to connect to a TV without disconnecting the screen.
So the one we went for was the Wild Things Voyager in the Index catalogue. It had video inputs too, so you can connect a camcorder etc to use as a monitor, it also has the video out pass-through. It also comes with the car cigar adaptor socket (the Sony has it as an optional extra), and has an earphone socket. All these screens were advertised as 5", but when we actually got this one, it had a sticker one the box, they`d been upgraded to 5.6" screen instead....even better.
We also got him the PSone carry backpack, and it just fits in snugly with the screen attached. I even saw a portable battery pack on the Comet website for it, to make it totally wire free, but havn`t got round to getting one of those yet.
A couple of years ago I picked up a cheap PSone and the official Sony LCD screen then this year I decided to install a cheap modchip. Unfortunately at the same time, I also bought a new HDTV and it really makes some PS games not that good to look at while playing so I decide to resort to the LCD screen. Unfortunately the screen is PAL and trying to get any NTSC games running on it results in the scrolling effect. Even booting the PSone WITHOUT a disc still causes the scrolling effect. Without forking out more money for a US LCD screen (and yes, I do know PSP can play PSX ISOs and there are PS emulators out there), is it possible to get NTSC games working on a PAL LCD screen?
These were followed by the SCPH-700x and SCPH-750x series, released in April 1998. They are externally identical to the SCPH-500x machines, but have internal changes made to reduce manufacturing costs (for example, the system RAM went from 4 chips to 1, and the CD controller went from 3 chips to 1). In addition, a slight change of the start-up screen was made; the diamond remains unchanged but the font used for Sony Computer and Entertainment is now consistent, making the words appear smaller than the diamond overall, and the trademark symbol (™) is now placed after "Computer Entertainment" instead of after the diamond, as it was on the earlier models. New to the SCPH-700x series was the introduction of the "Sound Scope" – light show music visualizations. These were accessible by pressing the Select button while playing any normal audio CD in the system"s CD player. While watching these visualizations, players could also add various effects like color cycling or motion blur and can save/load their memory card. These were seen on the SCPH-700x, 750x, 900x, and PS one models.
The reason for the two different case colors was a hardware change that Sony had made fairly early in the PlayStation production cycle - the original machines were built using Rev. A (early Japan market units) or Rev. B (later Japan units, US and Europe) hardware, both using the same GPU with VRAM to store the video data. Later models used Rev. C silicon and SGRAM - although the two chipsets had very similar performance, and Rev. C was explicitly designed with compatibility in mind, they were not identical - the Rev. C version was significantly faster at doing alpha blending, and hence the PS "semitransparent" writing mode - it was also rather slow at certain screen memory block moves (basically, ones involving narrow vertical strips of the display) on top of this there were some minor hardware bugs in the older silicon that had been addressed by including workarounds for them in the libraries - the later library versions checked the GPU type at startup time and disabled the patches if they were not needed. Because this made the two machine types quite significantly different from each other, the developer had to test the title on both machines before submitting. The blue debugs (DTL-H100x, DTL-H110x) had the old silicon and the green ones (DTL-H120x) had the new silicon.
Sony also released a version with a 5-inch LCD screen and an adaptor (though it did not have a battery: it is powered by plugging the adaptor in a main socket, or in a car). It was called the Combo pack. However, it includes a headphone jack (for headphones or other audio connection) and an AV mini jack for connecting camcorders or other devices.
The PlayStation 2 games can support HDTVs and EDTVs as well as the 16:9 widescreen mode. Generally, progressive scan mode is activated by holding the Template:PlayStation key press and Template:PlayStation key press, buttons down after the PlayStation 2 logo appears. When this is done, the game will typically load a screen with instructions on how to enable progressive scan. Many games only offer progressive scan through this method, offering no related options in the game"s options menu. Both methods work on a backward compatible PlayStation 3 as well.
At the PS2 internal System Configuration menu, the Screen Size option allows for a 4:3 or 16:9 (widescreen) display, however, most games do not poll this option for enabling widescreen, relying on internal options instead. As with progressive mode, widescreen mode can also be forced. Using the products of the PlayStation 2 emulation and homebrew scene, many games that don"t directly offer a widescreen mode can be patched to use a true 16:9 aspect ratio. This is achieved by one of two methods: using cheat codes with a cheat engine like the commercial software Code Breaker or the free Homebrew software PS2rd; or by modifying the game executable permanently with a hex editor.
When you change the aspect ratio of the game to widescreen, your TV does not automatically adjust. You"ve have to manually switch the TV to 16:9 (aka Full Screen). Don"t forget to change back when you play a game in 4:3 mode.
Some games, like Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando, have a widescreen mode takes the easy way out and just chops off a lot of the top and bottom of the video to make it fit the 16:9 aspect ratio. Be sure to check any game you suspect this of. I preferred how the game looked in 4:3 mode. I still set the TV to Full Screen. There"s some distortion, but not enough to bother me.
The main drawbacks to improved video quality via better cables and HDTV are jagged edges and graphical artifacts becoming much more apparent. PS2 games were designed for the brighter, more saturated look of cathode ray tube televisions, not the clearer, sharper but less rich LCD screens. Some tweaking of the TVs settings can help here. First, most if not all HDTVs store separate video settings for each input. So changing the brightness on the component input won"t ruin the cable TV settings.
The Hisense U8H matches the excellent brightness and color performance of much pricier LCD TVs, and its Google TV smart platform is a welcome addition. But it’s available in only three screen sizes.
The Hisense U8H is the best LCD/LED TV for most people because it delivers the performance of a much pricier TV yet starts at under $1,000, for the smallest (55-inch) screen size. This TV utilizes quantum dots, a full-array backlight with mini-LEDs, and a 120 Hz refresh rate to deliver a great-looking 4K HDR image. It’s compatible with every major HDR format. And it’s equipped with two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 inputs to support 4K 120 Hz gaming from the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Add in the intuitive, fully featured Google TV smart-TV platform, and the U8H’s price-to-performance ratio is of inarguable value.
That’s not to say the U8H has pixel-precise light control—it’s not an OLED TV, after all—but it does a terrific job most of the time. In fact, in our tests, the U8H bested last year’s upgrade pick, the Samsung QN90A, in certain scenarios: The intro to Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix features the filmmaker against a pitch-black backdrop. Though last year’s QN90A failed to maintain perfect control over dimming elements during this scene (the black backdrop brightened distractingly once a sufficient amount of brighter content appeared on screen), the U8H did not. (For the record, the newer QN90B also passed this test.) The U8H’s mini-LEDs also help the screen look uniformly bright: Although the U8H is still not as good as an OLED TV in this respect, it shows very little indication of being a backlight-driven display, even during tricky scenes with large swaths of dim lighting.
The onboard Google TV smart platform is another feather in this TV’s cap. As usual, however, it will be much more satisfying to use if you have a Google account and already take advantage of Google’s connected services, like Photos. The experience of navigating the TV’s smart features—scanning QR codes to sign into apps, using the onscreen keyboard, and browsing your Google Photos to set a photo as a screensaver—was very satisfying in terms of responsiveness and speed. Powering on the TV and booting into an app took just seconds. The included Bluetooth remote is also equipped with a handy “Hey Google” button, allowing you to pull up Google’s assistant and use voice commands to search for content or set a reminder. If you have multiple users with their own Google accounts, you can designate separate profiles (attached to a Gmail account) so that each user can customize the experience to their liking, as well as access their own Google Drive or Photos. While some reviewers have reported instances of momentary freezing while using the U8H’s platform, I didn’t personally experience any instances of slowdown that were egregiously worse than with any other smart-TV platform.
The Hisense U8H has some difficulties with banding, or areas of uneven gradation, where transitions that should appear smooth instead look like “bands” of color (sometimes also called posterization). Like many current 4K HDR TVs, the U8H uses an 8-bit panel rather than a 10-bit panel, which affects the color decoding and color presentation process. This is usually relevant only with HDR video and games. When playing games on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, I saw a few instances where the content wasn’t rendered correctly and displayed ugly splotches of color on the screen. However, this almost always occurred during static screens (such as a pause menu or loading screen); I rarely spotted it during actual gameplay. Hisense has stated that it would address the problem in a future firmware update, but at the time of writing it was still present. This is a flaw that may give dedicated gamers pause, but we don’t consider it to be a dealbreaker for most people.
Finally, like most TVs that use vertical alignment (VA) LCD panels, the U8H has a limited horizontal viewing angle, which may be a bit annoying if you’re hoping to entertain a large crowd. Our upgrade pick uses a special wide-angle technology to address this.
It’s a separate app, not a separate paid app. They didn’t do this for money or any conspirical reason. They most likely did this to streamline the second screen feature into its own thing instead of having to open the “3 in 1” app. I, for one, would rather have this separate so I don’t have to wait for the main app to load. This goes for the Messages app as well: I hated having to wait to navigate the menu just to get to messages, messages should be its own thing. The bottom line is that this does what the main app used to, but without the menu navigation. If you don’t like it don’t download it, it’s not a big enough feature to care about this much.
The Nintendo GameCube was a weird little console, one that had all kinds of wacky add-ons and peripherals released for it over the years, from LAN adapters to Game Boy Links to bongo drums. One thing I never knew about until today, however, were the company’s plans for an official LCD screen.
ViaGo Nintendo, Adam Doree has uploaded an uncut video of a presentation Nintendo made at E3 2002, featuring Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata and Bill Trinen. In this video, after the crew had spent ages talking about Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, Iwata reveals that they have one last surprise to discuss: a first-party LCD screen, designed to attach to the top of the console and make it even more portable than it already was (the GameCube, famously, included a carrying handle on the back). I’ve set the video to autoplay at the beginning of the discussion about the screen:
I never knew this! Sure other companies have stepped into this vacuum over the years, releasing various screens of varying quality, but it would have been very cool to get an official Nintendo monitor.
Iwata even reveals that he had met with Sega’s Yuji Naka — in happier times — about Phantasy Star Online, and the pair discussed whether they could take that title and “make it a portable game” to make the most of this screen. None of which ever came to pass, of course, but it’s still neat imagining a GameCube era where you could have grabbed your console by its handle, taken it to a friends house and played Mario Kart Double Dash on your own little official Nintendo screen.
Just because I’m only learning about this today doesn’t mean there isn’t other stuff out there about the screen; here’s a 2002 write-up on IGN about how nice it looked, for example, whileits listing on Console Variations speculates that the high cost of LCD screens at the time made it too expensive to release. The video below, meanwhile, has a good linger on footage of the screen alongside some speakers, part of the most 2002 gaming setup imaginable.
Nintendo got its next portable, the DS, to the market in November 2004. The PSP debuted in Japan in December of 2004; distribution to North America began a few months later. The Nintendo DS embodied several innovations, the most notable of which was a second LCD screen (this one a touch screen) that worked in tandem with the first. But where the DS was basically just a good handheld game system, the PSP was a new hybrid: a combination game system and media player.
And it was a beast. Designed by a team led by Shinichi Ogasawara at Sony, the PSP debuted as the most powerful handheld on the market, with remarkable graphics capabilities. It was based on a pair of MIPS R4000 microprocessors from MIPS Technologies, which ran at a then-impressive 333 megahertz. One functioned as the central processing unit and the other as a media processor. There was also a dedicated graphics processor, which Sony called the Graphics Core, that ran at 166 MHz. It could handle 24-bit color graphics, about eight bits better than most comparable units at the time. It also had one of the largest screens in the handheld-gaming world, a 480- by 272-pixel thin-film-transistor LCD that measured 4.3 inches on the diagonal. The original version had 32 megabytes of onboard memory, considered inadequate by some, so Sony doubled it in subsequent models. It had a slot for a Memory Stick Duo, a Sony proprietary flash-memory format, for additional storage (the Memory Stick Duo was soon renamed Memory Stick Pro Duo). It had stereo speakers built in, a headphone jack, and an embedded microphone.
Shopping for a new TV is like wading through a never-ending pool of tech jargon, display terminology, and head-spinning acronyms. It was one thing when 4K resolution landed in the homes of consumers, with TV brands touting the new UHD viewing spec as a major marketing grab. But over the last several years, the plot has only continued to thicken when it comes to three- and four-letter acronyms with the introduction of state-of-the-art lighting and screen technology. But between OLEDs, QLEDs, mini-LEDs, and now QD-OLEDs, there’s one battle of words that rests at the core of TV vocabulary: LED versus LCD.
Despite having a different acronym, LED TV is just a specific type of LCD TV, which uses a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel to control where light is displayed on your screen. These panels are typically composed of two sheets of polarizing material with a liquid crystal solution between them. When an electric current passes through the liquid, it causes the crystals to align, so that light can (or can’t) pass through. Think of it as a shutter, either allowing light to pass through or blocking it out.
Since both LED and LCD TVs are based around LCD technology, the question remains: what is the difference? Actually, it’s about what the difference was. Older LCD TVs used cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) to provide lighting, whereas LED LCD TVs used an array of smaller, more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the screen.
Since the technology is better, all LCD TVs now use LED lights and are colloquially considered LED TVs. For those interested, we’ll go deeper into backlighting below, or you can move onto the Local Dimming section.
Three basic illumination forms have been used in LCD TVs: CCFL backlighting, full-array LED backlighting, and LED edge lighting. Each of these illumination technologies is different from one another in important ways. Let’s dig into each.
CCFL backlighting is an older, now-abandoned form of display technology in which a series of cold cathode lamps sit across the inside of the TV behind the LCD. The lights illuminate the crystals fairly evenly, which means all regions of the picture will have similar brightness levels. This affects some aspects of picture quality, which we discuss in more detail below. Since CCFLs are larger than LED arrays, CCFL-based LCD TVs are thicker than LED-backlit LCD TVs.
Full-array backlighting swaps the outdated CCFLs for an array of LEDs spanning the back of the screen, comprising zones of LEDs that can be lit or dimmed in a process called local dimming. TVs using full-array LED backlighting to make up a healthy chunk of the high-end LED TV market, and with good reason — with more precise and even illumination, they can create better picture quality than CCFL LCD TVs were ever able to achieve, with better energy efficiency to boot.
Another form of LCD screen illumination is LED edge lighting. As the name implies, edge-lit TVs have LEDs along the edges of a screen. There are a few different configurations, including LEDs along just the bottom, LEDs on the top and bottom, LEDs left and right, and LEDs along all four edges. These different configurations result in picture quality differences, but the overall brightness capabilities still exceed what CCFL LCD TVs could achieve. While there are some drawbacks to edge lighting compared to full-array or direct backlight displays, the upshot is edge lighting that allows manufacturers to make thinner TVs that cost less to manufacture.
Local dimming is a feature of LED LCD TVs wherein the LED light source behind the LCD is dimmed and illuminated to match what the picture demands. LCDs can’t completely prevent light from passing through, even during dark scenes, so dimming the light source itself aids in creating deeper blacks and more impressive contrast in the picture. This is accomplished by selectively dimming the LEDs when that particular part of the picture — or region — is intended to be dark.
Local dimming helps LED/LCD TVs more closely match the quality of modern OLED displays, which feature better contrast levels by their nature — something CCFL LCD TVs couldn’t do. The quality of local dimming varies depending on which type of backlighting your LCD uses, how many individual zones of backlighting are employed, and the quality of the processing. Here’s an overview of how effective local dimming is on each type of LCD TV.
TVs with full-array backlighting have the most accurate local dimming and therefore tend to offer the best contrast. Since an array of LEDs spans the entire back of the LCD screen, regions can generally be dimmed with more finesse than on edge-lit TVs, and brightness tends to be uniform across the entire screen. Hisense’s impressive U7G TVs are great examples of relatively affordable models that use multiple-zone, full-array backlighting with local dimming.
Because edge lighting employs LEDs positioned on the edge or edges of the screen to project light across the back of the LCD screen, as opposed to coming from directly behind it, it can result in very subtle blocks or bands of lighter pixels within or around areas that should be dark. The local dimming of edge-lit TVs can sometimes result in some murkiness in dark areas compared with full-array LED TVs. It should also be noted that not all LED edge-lit TVs offer local dimming, which is why it is not uncommon to see glowing strips of light at the edges of a TV and less brightness toward the center of the screen.
Since CCFL backlit TVs do not use LEDs, models with this lighting style do not have dimming abilities. Instead, the LCD panel of CCFL LCDs is constantly and evenly illuminated, making a noticeable difference in picture quality compared to LED LCDs. This is especially noticeable in scenes with high contrast, as the dark portions of the picture may appear too bright or washed out. When watching in a well-lit room, it’s easier to ignore or miss the difference, but in a dark room, it will be, well, glaring.
Because they don’t require a separate light source, OLED displays are also amazingly thin — often just a few millimeters. OLED panels are often found on high-end TVs in place of LED/LCD technology, but that doesn’t mean that LED/LCDs aren’t without their own premium technology.
QLED is a premium tier of LED/LCD TVs from Samsung. Unlike OLED displays, QLED is not a so-called emissive display technology (lights still illuminate QLED pixels from behind). However, QLED TVs feature an updated illumination technology over regular LED LCDs in the form of Quantum Dot material (hence the “Q” in QLED), which raises overall efficiency and brightness. This translates to better, brighter grayscale and color and enhances HDR (High Dynamic Range) abilities.