Please Help!

[martymcfly]

hi, sorry if i seem inexperianced, im a gp2x user for aprox 10 hours so far. I love the machine, its brilliant. Even on firmware 3.0, i find it easy to use and efficiant, and having done much reseach and preperation for it before buying, i have been able to easily have fun with minimal fuss!
However, there is one negative aspect that has really got me down abit.
I ordered the tv out cable at the same time i ordered the value pack. Obviously, being in the uk with a wharfdale television (flatscreen but not a flat television), i needed extra cables. Through email with gp2x.co.uk, i was led towards what i purchased this evening: a scart to audio, s video converter. However, when i plugged it in, picture was nearly drained of all its colour. So i tried it on the new HD tv in the living room. On that it was completely black and white. Furthermore, at first the connection was very lose. Now after careful nudging, its extremely, and i mean very very tight in the hole. Picture flickers, is greyscale, and when the wire moves, (ie when i decided to see if there was perhaps a break in the wire) the image can either disapear altogether, or flicker even worse. I have emailed gp2x to ask how i go about with a replacement. (i know its their cable, because i have tried all the televisions in the house, and went back the shop to swap for an even more expensive gold plated version of the cables: same issue)
My question now is, after careful though: how many of you believe the TV out is a neccessaity? I mean i cud probablly do without it, but i did think it would be neat. Anybody else had similar problems? Is Tv out generally successful? Or only if it is plugged directly into the holes it was designed for? I tried pal and ntsc, and all the different scart ports as well. Do you all think i should just give up on it, or what? This is one of those situations where i would just like a general concensus of peoples thoughts and any advice perhaps.

PS: i shone a light into the EXT port on the gp2x on the offchance their might be a damaged pin, but it all looks huncky dorey to me.

 

[MrHillBilly]

I think all that your problem is, that you need to change the TV Out in the settings in the GP2X to PAL. I have a NTSC TV and if I have it in PAL I get the video you discribed.

Hope that gets you up and running

 

[nubie]

Hi, this I have to answer every two weeks. First, Are your TV's really S-Video over SCART compatible? S-Video is not a standard of SCART. Secondly, is your S-Video adaptor equipped for TV's that aren't S-Video capable?

Next, I found that if you place a bit of cardstock in the connector it will fix the looseness. Since you get a B&W picture I wouldn't do that, I would investigate the S-Video situation.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video :

S-Video and audio (mono) can be transferred through SCART connections as well. However, it was not part of the original SCART standard, and not every SCART-compatible device supports it for this reason. Also, S-Video and RGB are mutually exclusive through SCART, due to the S-Video implementation using the pins allocated for RGB. Most SCART-equipped televisions or VCRs (and almost all of the older ones) do not actually support S-Video, resulting in a black-and-white picture if such a connection is attempted, as only the luminance signal portion is usable. Generally, a black-and-white picture in itself can also be a sign of incompatible colour encoding--for example NTSC material viewed through a PAL-only device.

If you need to get the connection going, use this simple picture tutorial. Don't file, just put the bit of card in, see if that fixes it.

http://www.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,23,1255

 

[martymcfly]

Nah it isnt ntsc or pal issue, iv tried both.
uthermore it isn't always black and white, sometimes very very faded colours with flickering.
Woulnd't any sivdeo to scart cable be equipped for a tv with scart...because if there was already s-video, you would just use that instead
And an S-Video adaptor equipped for TV's that aren't S-Video capable should surely follow the same route.

"Most SCART-equipped televisions or VCRs (and almost all of the older ones) do not actually support S-Video, resulting in a black-and-white picture if such a connection is attempted, as only the luminance signal portion is usable. Generally, a black-and-white picture in itself can also be a sign of incompatible colour encoding--for example NTSC material viewed through a PAL-only device."

The televisions themselves are multi NtSC and PAL. I know i'm not an expert on these things, but surely if any tv is compatible with this cable, it would be a brand spanking new flatscreen HD television?!

Anyway i am still abit confused.

ANother question would be: does the fact i am gettin picture at all, but it is black and white and faded, make you guys think its a problem on my behalf, or a dodgy cable. Can a working cable flicker and lose image completely when moved, if it is correct, but used incorrectly?(as may be the case from your post)

 

[PokeParadox]

Unfortnately although many(most) PAL TVs also support NTSC mode, many of them also do not support Svideo correctly.
You said you tried setting the GP2X to both, NTSC and PAL and still had black and white... but did you try cycling through all your TV's AV channels?
Some TVs have the same AV channel twice. Once for composite through an Svid cable and another for true Svid.

 

[martymcfly]

some crazy sh*t, i ended up trying both scart sockets, and randomly pressing the av channel. And i eventually got the picture! Proper colours! Only works in the top scart though strangly, on a wierd channel, but oh well!
Thanks alot for all your help
The cable is still very loose, but gp2x acknowledged that and are sending one that they know isn't. So i'm made up! Only neagtive now is that the free games that came with it seem to have parts cut off when i play them on the tv. (is there a way to make it fit the screen properly?!)

Edit: it seems that its not just the games.Carefully looking reveals that the top bottom, and both sides all have a slice of image missing. Is this normal? The screen is filled, but just cuts off all 4 edges by an inch perhaps?

 

[woogal]

It's called overscan and it's perfectly normal (it happens with everything you watch on tv too). The GP2X is scaling the image up to 720x576, and most (all?) tvs other than lcd won't display all that image. The chip supports a 320x240 mode with overscan correction, but for some reason setting that mode with the driver doesn't work.

 

[martymcfly]

So it will always cut off loads of the image?