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[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC Engine AV mod]

As for the Pc-Engine scene in the UK in the 80ies,yea it did have a good one. But I got a question,since everyone was using their Pc-Engine in RGB,does that mean everyone was doing RGB mods?

Yeah, a lot of importers were RGB modding the machines they sold. This was born out of necessity as much as anything else - at the time most UK TVs would not display a NTSC 3.58 signal via RF/Composite, you would either get a rolling picture or a stable but black and white one. If you bought an import Megadrive, Super Famicom, NeoGeo etc you would normally get a SCART cable with it too.

The most common mod was a hole drilled at the side of the PCE casing and running a hardwired SCART cable out of it.

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I do remember seeing some where a computer ribbon cable with a scart plug on the end was fed through the gap at the rear of the machine above the interface connector (this was before the CD-ROM was released obviously).

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC Engine AV mod]

I don't think I ever saw a single RGB display from a computer or console in the 80s or early 90s in anyones house. It was pretty rare in reality, at least in the UK.

WTF! Massive amounts of Commodore and Philips RGB screens were sold with Amigas and STs. Pretty certain some console shops even sold them (Shekhana on Tottenham Court Road??).

As for TVs, by the time I had a Super Famicom me and my brother had two cheap 14" TVs for games (one Toshiba, one Sharp) both had RGB SCART (and the Sharp is still alive and kicking to this day).

And like I said, when the PC-Engine was released RGB screens were common enough that some retailers sold the consoles RGB SCART hardwired.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC Engine AV mod]

RGB era to me (i.e. in the UK) = the time when the best possible picture for the available systems was RGB. Which is everything up to PS2 (excluding the handful of progressive PS2 titles).

Yeah you had to mod the PCE, but this was common place right from the early days of UK PCE imports. Quite a few places sold them with hardwired Scart cables.

[Console Repair/Mod Center / Re: PC Engine AV mod]

Composite/rf is, in my opinion, better for composite.rf-era machines, and that means pre-Playstation. When I play Megadrive games near perfectly emulated on Xbox, the one thing I don't like is the blockiness. I can see the individual pixels, and I always hated that.

It's the same with music. Records made before the 1980s are best heard on vinyl, not CD.

Composite era?

PC Engine, Megadrive, Super Famicom up to PlayStation2 is the RGB era. Everything after that is component/VGA/HDMI.
RGB SCART is 1970s technology.

When the PC-Engine and soon after the MegaDrive found their way to UK importers a pretty large % of kids I knew were using RGB monitors or RGB SCART TVs. They were readily available at the time (infact a good quality, proper low-res RGB screen is MUCH harder to find now than it was then).

Everytime I see screenshots of US gamers using composite on old 2D console games I thank the lord I had access to decent screens back then.

Do people really think the developers were designing and testing these games using a consumer TV with an RF or composite connection?