From Analogue to Digital

A breakdown of my video game collection and setup

Wednesday, 22 October 2025 • 4,051 words

#gaming

I like to play video games; it's a pleasant thing on an afternoon after work to be able to grab a controller from the drawer, turn on a console, and indulge in play. The majority of my collection spans from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, and as such features a number of consoles that output video signals and use connectors that modern televisions and displays have long since abandoned. Some people will be horrified that this era is now considered "retro" and to a large extent I am one of them!

This is a particularly broad topic and there are several camps of opinion that so-called "retro-gamers" have entrenched themselves into; I have my opinions and have curated my setup to fit my needs, but yours will be different and so I advise taking the time to research different solutions. There's some further reading at the bottom of this post which should serve as jumping off points. Remember - there is no one "perfect setup", only the setup that is perfect for you.

What are the options?

You could, if you so desired, turn to things like emulation - be that software based (PCSX2, Dolphin, Project64, and others) or hardware based (MiSTer, Analogue FPGA systems) - but for many reasons I dislike emulation:

You're not getting the full experience. You often don't get to use (due to needing various adapters) the original controllers.
Not all features of the hardware are supported - not all emulators support all games, some don't link to other instances for multiplayer, etc.
The console menus/boot screens are often not present - a key part of the nostalgia for those who owned them back in the day. The Xbox flubber, the GameCube blocks, etc. This is a particular pet peeve of mine.^[1]
You don't use original discs: flipping through your digital list of games isn't the same as getting up and looking at the shelf, pulling out a game and reading the cover and manual^[2]. Remember thick game manuals?
I harbour a little bit of a grudge against emulation as I grew up in an era where most emulators for the more modern consoles (6th gen!) were ropey at best and incapable of loading games at worst. They've since come a long way, but I can't shake those initial impressions. You are more than likely to have a Good Enough experience in 2025 with software emulation.

So my choice for retro gaming is to use original hardware, with modification where that improves the quality of life of the system. I currently have 8 consoles plugged into my TV setup; the complete collection of both 6th generation (Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube), 7th generation (Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3) and a Switch. I would like to have a Nintendo 64 in this mix too, but I am running out of space as it is, and as a 'toploader' it can't be stacked. Save for the three consoles that can output HDMI directly (X360, PS3, Switch), the remaining five do not have outputs that my 4K TV supports; it's HDMI only, and please - standard resolutions or it'll complain. In the search for the ultimate setup, I wanted to be able to have every console plugged in and able to be switched on and played without fumbling with cables and cheapo adapters. Everything should output its highest quality video signal, with minimal input latency, and have modern improvements where they make sense.

Input, Output

With so many systems, my first goal was to harmonise on one standard of video cable for everything that isn't outputting HDMI. Why not HDMI mods? Simply - the cost of doing that for 5 consoles is more than using a dedicated scaler^[3]. Thankfully, cable choice was essentially made for me; the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and the Wii have readily available Component video (YPbPr) cables, with which they output good clean video signals. Most people (in PAL regions) will remember using SCART or Composite video (a yellow RCA cable). Lots of these cables just shoved Composite video and stereo audio into a little rectangle and a minimal version of SCART came out the other end. However, higher quality video cables were available (we were still a few years away from going fully digital). If you have exclusively PAL consoles, especially 5th generation and older, you may find RGB output/mods are your preference, if not required; adding an N64 to my setup would involve Tim Worthington's RGB mod, for instance.

The odd one out here is the GameCube. Early models (DOL-001) had two video outputs: Analog AV Out, and Digital AV Out. The digital port will output YCbCr^[4] that, with the OEM Nintendo component cable, gets converted to analogue YPbPr through a proprietary ASIC. If you have this cable (now worth a considerable amount of money), you also need to use the Analog AV cable for stereo audio; Nintendo didn't include a DAC for audio in the Component cable. The alternative option is to use a GCVideo solution. I'm using the Insurrection Industries Carby and pairing it with an HDMI to YPbPr Component converter. This is so that I can upscale and process the output in the same way for all of my analogue consoles. (Carby Component Cable please come back!)

The Dreamcast has the ability to output VGA, which bypasses the switch box and goes straight to the upscaler; it's native VGA and doesn't need any conversion or special cables, so the cheap Dreamcast VGA cables on eBay work perfectly here.

The video pipeline is as follows:

The first stage: analogue output. Component video comes out of the Xbox, GameCube, Wii, and PlayStation 2 - where it goes into a switch box. I have a Monoprice 103027 unit I found used on eBay, but anything that is either fully mechanical switching or uses high quality matrix switching ICs would be ideal.
Analogue to digital conversion stage: one component cable comes out of the switch box and goes into my Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC), which I upgraded to 1.xx+ firmware. The Dreamcast VGA comes into the OSSC on AV3. The OSSC is an upscaler, meaning it can convert and upscale the analogue video signals into digital signals that modern displays can accept and process. It'll do anything from line doubling (480p to 960p) to line sextupling (240p to 1440p!) dependent on the source. Here I also apply scanlines through the OSSC to help get the feel of the original CRT experience back.
Digital switching: HDMI comes out of the OSSC and goes into an Extron SW4 HDMI switch box. HDMI from the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Switch come into the other three inputs. The Extron has automatic source switching enabled through jumping a pair of pins on the back of the unit.
The final stage: one HDMI cable comes out of the Extron and goes into my Philips 4K TV. Audio comes out of the TV through HDMI ARC and goes into an S.M.S.L AO300 amplifier, then into Monitor Audio Monitor 100 speakers. Nice speakers are of course optional!

This might seem like a complex process, and it is - but it's worth it to see just how good you can make this analogue content look. The Xbox has some games that even output 720p or 1080i video, which is worth the price of admission alone; 1080i from the Xbox! The console from 2001!

The Fleet

It's not just about plugging everything in, of course. Much effort has gone into choosing the parts of the system, researching the options, and lots of the consoles in my collection have gone under the knife many times to have upgrades and repairs. Let's walk through the proverbial hangar together:

Xbox

The first home console I owned, the Xbox is perhaps my favourite. Halo and Halo 2 were pivotal to my ongoing love for Sci-Fi, leading me to all sorts of media including Bungie's big inspirations, Alien and Aliens. I'll never forget the jaw-dropping wonder I had when stepping out of the crashed lifeboat for the first time and looking up at the ringworld in Halo. Other games I still play from back in the day include Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, undoubtedly fuelling my love for the Max Power scene and underground automotive culture in an era of Fast and Furious, and the Burnout series; Burnout: Revenge will always make my top 10 games list.

Sadly this Xbox isn't the same unit I owned as a child, but it's become a staple of play with only a few mods - an OpenXenium chip and a 1TB SATA HDD. The PC-like architecture is a huge boon to the system with hardmodded Xboxes (Xboxen?) still reigning supreme as some of the best emulation machines out there. In the future I'd like to transplant the guts of this console into either a Crystal Xbox shell or one of the seemingly vaporware Retro Game Restore shells. There's also the option of dyeing the crystal shell a different colour...

OpenXenium modchip, with EvoX M8+ Titan patched BIOS
1TB SATA HDD (StarTech adapter with 80-wire IDE cable)

PlayStation 2

I never owned any of Sony's consoles as a child, and my foray into PlayStation only started a few years ago when I purchased this special edition Aqua Blue PlayStation 2. I'm continually amazed by its massive library of games that include some very interesting exclusives - The Getaway is a personal favourite and a complete time capsule of the turn of the millennium in London. The popularity of the PS2 means that you can to this day find great deals on games in even high street secondhand shops. The backwards-compatibility with the PlayStation is a huge bonus and gives me an additional console's worth of games to play, including heavy hitters like Metal Gear Solid.

Softmodding is very straightforward here, you can grab a memory card preloaded with FreeMCBoot on eBay for very little money, but I'd recommend going down the HDD adapter + SATA board route as you can put FreeHDBoot on the hard drive and gain back a memory card slot. This way you can also install something called HDDOSD which lets you browse the drive in the main menu.

FreeHDBoot
PS2 Network adapter with SATA conversion board + 1TB HDD

GameCube

What hasn't been written about the GameCube? Perhaps the underdog of the 6th Generation, the GameCube maintains a cult following (much like the Dreamcast) not just for its stellar library of games, but also a very comfortable controller with twin-stage 'ana-digi' triggers: most of the way in they're analog, with a digital button right at the end of their travel. Having the A button be physically larger also helps with comfort and lets you roll your thumb to reach the other face buttons quite satisfyingly. The first time I saw a GameCube, I played Star Fox Assault with a friend; the multiplayer mode is really quite fun and a good arena shooter! Recently I ripped all my games using CleanRip and started playing through the Resident Evil remake.

Originally released in 'Indigo' purple (the first GameCube I owned was this colour), 'Platinum' silver and 'Jet Black', I picked up a 'Spice' orange to complement my collection of limited-edition or non-standard coloured consoles. The GameCube is the most kitted-out console in the collection, with some rarities like the broadband adapter (DOL-015) that I purchased from CeX (of all places!) and a matching 'Spice' orange Game Boy Player; Game Boy games on the big screen look absolutely fantastic through the OSSC's upscaler. The original miniDVD drive is gone, with a GC Loader sporting a suitably large SD card in its place, running SwissGC as a homebrew solution. Save files are dealt with by a MemCard PRO GC. In serial port 2 sits an SD2SP2 for configuration backup.

Game Boy Player
Broadband Adapter
GC Loader ODE
SD2SP2
MemCard PRO GC
CR2032 holder for replaceable clock batteries

Dreamcast

I hadn't considered a Dreamcast as a contender for my collection until I realised it was the only console missing to complete my 6th generation set. After all, much of the system exclusives made their way to other platforms in the form of ports or remakes. Jet Set Radio, Shenmue, and Soul Caliber are standouts here in that many consider the Dreamcast the best or only way to play. I'd like to get a GDEMU for my system, if only to make the system a lot quieter! It's particularly cool that the Dreamcast supports outputting VGA, but unfortunately it's not supported by all games on the system.

Wii

The hacking scene around the Wii is quite interesting, and these days softmodding is the way to go; the SD card slot makes it so easy. You may have even heard of the "Letterbomb" hack, as it's fairly ubiquitous. The Homebrew Channel and its theme are fantastic and blend into the console well, which is perfect for someone like me who appreciates the "OEM plus" aesthetic.

There are some interesting games made for the Wii (it would be remiss of me not to mention Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which I spent a lot of time playing with school friends), but I am quite fond of a few lesser-known titles. Pokémon Battle Revolution, the sort-of-but-not-quite spiritual successor to Pokémon Stadium, comes to mind as a game that showed a lot of potential but ultimately was too reliant on the player also having a Nintendo DS and Pokémon Diamond/Pearl. I'm also obliged to mention No More Heroes as a title that deserves your attention.

Xbox 360

The almighty Xbox's younger brother, the 360 doesn't have me turning 360 degrees and walking away as I spent a significant amount of time lusting after this console when I was in secondary school. I was eventually able to convince my parents to buy me one, and it was a black Xbox 360 Elite - marketed by its codename Jasper. Very cool at the time, but in recent years I've become more fond of the original white colour of the system. Without a doubt the most important games of this era for me were Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Reach (come on, did you really think anything different? I was there for the Beta!), Forza Motorsport 4, and Forza Horizon. I actually pre-ordered the limited editions of both Forza titles! Fans of this series didn't know how good we had it with Motorsport 4.

This particular 360 in my collection is a kitbashed console, made using my original Jasper console's internals and a dead Halo 3 limited edition console's shell I bought on eBay. This era of gaming is, at the time of writing, incredibly inexpensive to get into - so if you've been holding out, consider this a sign. Future plans for this console include RGH 1.2 with a 'CoolRunner' chip, a Sonus 360 to add some Halo SFX like the Halo: Reach Xbox 360 S, an SSD to replace the aging HDD, and to bring back the blades dashboard that so intrigued me back in the day. I'd like to pick up the HD-DVD accessory as it's an interesting novelty!

PlayStation 3

Let's be honest, the main reason anyone bought a PS3 was because it had a Blu-ray player integrated into the console, and that's what mine adds to my setup; a dedicated 1080p Blu-ray machine, with the added bonus of being a games console. The launch price of the system was fairly steep and has gone down in history as a meme (599 USD), but again this was primarily due to the additional cost of that Blu-ray drive (and the licencing). If you take into consideration that Blu-ray players were even more expensive and didn't have the rest of a PS3 attached to them, it was a fairly good deal! In terms of exclusives, the big names here that I'm seeking out are Demon's Souls, the Gran Turismo series, Metal Gear Solid 4, the Motorstorm series, and the Ratchet & Clank series.

In terms of modding, I think I'll end up looking at some form of custom firmware as then I can have a region-free Blu-ray player.

Switch

I haven't very much to say about the Nintendo Switch that I haven't talked about already - my custom translucent JoyCons with multicoloured face buttons, hall effect thumbsticks, and white indicator LEDs being the only modifications. I'm quite impressed with the Switch as a portable console - seeing Burnout Paradise Remastered run flawlessly in handheld mode when I'd previously played it on my Xbox 360 was a fun reminder of how far Moore's Law has held up!

There are some modchips for the Switch like the picofly, which looks like the defacto option for homebrew and backups, but the scene is still evolving.

Future Plans, and the Bad Bits

As much as I like the current setup, there are some downsides. Primarily, the component switch box I have requires a remote (or getting up and pressing a button, shock horror) to switch inputs. I intend to get an automatic switcher; either a gcompsw or, if I can find one, an Extron Crosspoint component matrix switch. The more automated I can get the switching of the video inputs in the setup to be, the more friction-free playing games will be - meaning I play them more.

The OSSC does not have a Composite video input, meaning any new console that I add to the collection will need to output RGB via SCART or YPbPr through Component; this means hardware modification for essentially all remaining consoles I see myself owning. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it would be good to have a Composite input to this setup, not just for games but also for other video sources such as my VHS player or a future LaserDisc player (yes, I do own some!). There's the possibility of adding a transcoder here like the Koryuu, or even upgrading my upscaler.

There's one more thing that frustrates me about the OSSC: it suffers from what I call "single board computer syndrome" in that its array of input ports are scattered on all different sides of the unit: this makes it a bit of a cable mess if you don't use right angle adapters to send all the cables behind it. The OSSC Pro doesn't fix this problem either, with the SCART and expansion ports on the sides of the unit! The RetroTINK 4K does the same thing, there's just no escaping it.

My Extron SW4 HDMI is also fully utilised, and doesn't support video sources beyond 1080p. This is not necessarily an issue right now, but the most modern upscalers (Retrotink 4K, PixelFX Morph et al.) can upscale 1080p HDMI content up to 4K, and they would do a better job at it than any internal scaler in a typical television set, alongside the ability to do additional video processing on these sources. This would be an attractive proposition for 7th generation consoles, and even PCs! I could run all my HDMI sources through an HDMI 4K switcher and then a single cable into the TV would simplify the digital side of my setup.

The Philips 4K TV is fussy about video inputs and will display "Video content not supported" on the screen constantly on some combinations of upscaled video. Thankfully the OSSC can pass through unscaled video in these instances but I would much prefer that the TV didn't do the scaling here. It seems to just be an issue with this particular model, so it may be solved with a firmware update (can you believe this is where we are at as a society?).

Cable management of all of this gear is also a massive frustration; every console has its own power supply and video cable, each of my switching boxes has its own power supply, the amplifier has its own power supply, and the amount of cabling around the switching units can become quite a rat's nest. This is especially frustrating as the setup is currently the only way I can test video output from any of the 6th generation consoles; so if I am working on a repair or mod and have the console in pieces I have to pull cables out and it just becomes even more of a mess. I would like a dedicated test monitor with Composite/Component/SCART/HDMI inputs so that I can test everything on the workbench; there are a plenty of smaller TVs from the early "HDTV" era that could do this but I'd like something with a display of around 9". I dream of having a Sony PVM-9044QM professional broadcast CRT...

Many of the consoles I own also do not have their own integrated power supply, so there are quite a lot of power bricks behind the setup. Thankfully in 2025 we have access to USB Power Delivery standards that can provide up to 240 W of power, meaning there are already many drop-in power boards that make these consoles powered by a USB-C cable! This does a lot to reduce the bulk of the power bricks and reduces the dependence of the consoles on 20+ year old power supplies. The GameCube, Wii, and Xbox definitely have these available.