Attached screenshots generated with the HDMI prototype on a plasma screen.

Games with a black playfield looks great but games with a colored background provides scaling artefacts and the colors are a little bit to bright.

This is the project started by friends based on my AV Plus mod. As the AV mod delivers superior video quality in comparison to other it is the perfect base as input signal to a digital video processor which finally supports direct HDMI output. The processor itself is highly programmable. This is required as the default scaling multiplier provide not a real good screen output.

So next items on the to do list is to optimize the colors and re-programm the scaling unit to use the right values with bigger bars on the left and right to ensure the small resolution from console is optimal scaled in fixed rates (which is currently not the case so you may notice scaling artefacts).

The video processor is registered so no additional license costs required. I'm only the sponsor of this project and final product is exclusively offered. Current PCB size is 15cm x 7cm in dual layer with some SMD components.

The technical aspects: it is currently not possible to get a better picture out of the videoprocessor than you deliver to the processor itself. There are some nice "beautifying" feature built into it but result is not identical. The AV Plus output looks currently nicer. But the output itself is sharp and the color highly saturated. both sound good first hand but doesn't deliver an harmonic output so needs to be tweaked by fine tuning the input and operational parameters of the chip.

Disadvantage of the sharpness is that the difference between dark and light colors are too dramatically. So scaler finally adds some jitter and borders. Large light fields having some kind of structure/pattern looking similar to the original worse Intellivision mod circulating on several websites.

To get the best picture out of the console the better concept is to move the A/D part closer to the TIA side. If the signal is directly translated into digital output it would be a better approach but requires deeper knowledge of TIA and of course other technology to fullfill the job of translation in time. This was my original plan until my friends demonstrated this solution to me.

Another quick solution is to use the upcoming RGB mod as the used processor also outputs signals which can be directly feed into the HDMI video processor which may provide an even better output quality with current concept.

I'm looking forward to the next project milestones....