> In plain English: I think it's absolutely *possible* to decode NTSC better than many > of the original players and monitors did. I said nothing about if it's desirable to > do so in MAME. (I imagine we'd default to looking exactly as shitty as hardware, > while Daphne will likely use the best possible decoder all the time).
Perhaps, perhaps
All this talk about capturing the raw voltage signal has got me thinking about my last (failed) attempt.
I bought a 12-bit 15 MHz analog->digital IC made by TI to get my feet wet, and tried to write this to an SD card using an FPGA. Making the FPGA talk to the SD card was quite a chore in and of itself although I was eventually successful. I even had it writing 512-byte blocks to the SD card. The blocking issue was that the SD card's sustained write speed was far too slow to handle the bandwidth I needed (in fairness, they are getting faster constantly).
Were I to attempt this again (and I intend to), I plan on using a 30 MHz ADC instead of a 15 MHz (since I think 15 is too slow to get the full resolution), still probably 12-bit samples, and still using an FPGA, but this time I want to output the data over ethernet to a desktop PC so that I don't have to worry about write bandwidth. (UPDATE: this would require 45 megabytes/s through-put)
I found a site that shows how to use an FPGA to transmit UDP packets which (in theory) would work. I know that UDP packets can be dropped but I am hoping (perhaps ignorantly) that I can contrive a situation where they never _would_ be dropped.
Thoughts on viability of this approach, or suggestions on a more reliable approach?