I'm still working on a setup for both video capture, display and streaming for my Amiga (and eventually for the BBC Micro). For display I'm using the OSSC which is a lag-free RGB->HDMI converter that also does line doubling. Most Amiga games are either 288p or 240p (362x284 or 362x241) depending on how aggressively the game overscans. Obviously whatever I go with I'd also like to be compliant with SDA rules so I can submit runs.
This leaves me with two options for capture:
1) Go pure-analogue and capture off the composite video output. This is currently proving more challenging than expected as my capture device is a laptop and finding a USB composite capture that doesn't force 480i/576i and generally look like garbage is proving surprisingly difficult. In some ways I'd actually prefer this as the resulting image looks more authentic when streaming
2) Use a HDMI capture device with a passthrough option. The video output from the OSSC is fantastic, but to get it to play nice with my monitor I'm having to use Line4x mode, which upscales to 960p/1152p and then pads to 1200p
Option 2 would need some processing to drop it back down to 240p/288p, ideally done at the recording stage. Not a huge problem for me and wouldn't lose any information. End result should have a better picture than composite, then crop during post-processing, but is that too much editing to still be a valid submission?
One final issue specific to Amiga games, is a lot of PAL games used effective NTSC resolution with a massive black bar at the bottom, presumably to give the devs the option of an NTSC port, it'd make sense to crop these, but would that be ok? The end result would end up looking like a widescreen video while the equivalent NTSC game (if it existed) would be 4:3. This is how they looked back in the day in PAL regions
This leaves me with two options for capture:
1) Go pure-analogue and capture off the composite video output. This is currently proving more challenging than expected as my capture device is a laptop and finding a USB composite capture that doesn't force 480i/576i and generally look like garbage is proving surprisingly difficult. In some ways I'd actually prefer this as the resulting image looks more authentic when streaming
2) Use a HDMI capture device with a passthrough option. The video output from the OSSC is fantastic, but to get it to play nice with my monitor I'm having to use Line4x mode, which upscales to 960p/1152p and then pads to 1200p
Option 2 would need some processing to drop it back down to 240p/288p, ideally done at the recording stage. Not a huge problem for me and wouldn't lose any information. End result should have a better picture than composite, then crop during post-processing, but is that too much editing to still be a valid submission?
One final issue specific to Amiga games, is a lot of PAL games used effective NTSC resolution with a massive black bar at the bottom, presumably to give the devs the option of an NTSC port, it'd make sense to crop these, but would that be ok? The end result would end up looking like a widescreen video while the equivalent NTSC game (if it existed) would be 4:3. This is how they looked back in the day in PAL regions
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