Possible to make a scaler from capture card (Elgato)?

[MegaMace]

So I have this old Elgato Game Capture and I don't really use it much (not very pleasant to play older consoles while using, and not high enough video quality for newer stuff). It occurred to me that it has some of the makings of a scaler, in that it can accept a composite input, and it outputs video via both HDMI and USB (HDMI is for playing, USB is for the capturing PC). What goes on in between, I don't know. It doesn't produce a nice video, but I wonder with some hacking if it could? So my question basically boils down to if anyone knows about these cards or if you recognize any components as possibly useful. A bit of a shot in the dark, but I know there are some smart folks here

Here's a few pics of the internals of this thing:

The "top" of the whole board:

Elgato4.jpg

The bottom of the board:

Elgato5.jpg

Some of the larger ICs up close - gonna duplicate the labeling in case the pics are ever lost. I tried to find info online what these do but not much luck.

10Bit MST3367CMK-LF-170 A5ML031B 1506B

Elgato6.jpg

Fujitsu M886M03A 1515 207 E1 ARM

Elgato7.jpg

Cat CAT6612CQ GB01448

Elgato8.jpg

Lastly, there are some open pins on the board but these don't seem like they'd be of much help for this based on their labeling - +P5V, DAT, CLK, RST, GND (I do know what these all stand for )

Elgato9.jpg

[lidnariq]

Lastly, there are some open pins on the board but these don't seem like they'd be of much help for this based on their labeling - +P5V, DAT, CLK, RST, GND

Cirrus Logic CS53L21 is an I²S audio ADC (4-96kHz, 24bit encoding, 98dB dynamic range). But that's not the raw I²S stream - that's a place to eavesdrop / inject your own control signals to it.

MST3367 by Mstar is an HDMI receiver.
CAT6612 is an HDMI transmitter.

It's those small chips on the bottom that you actually care about here.

It's probably technically doable, but these things aren't easy to repurpose.

[Ben Boldt]

I use one of these SCART boxes:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mLSBQF3

The box can convert composite, S-video, and RGB from various consoles. SCART was popular in Europe and Japan but we never had it in USA. But because of its popularity elsewhere, you can easily find SCART cables and adapters online.

Europe and Japan had different pinouts of the SCART connector. I have found that this box uses a European pinout, however most RGB console cables (SNES/N64, PlayStation, Megadrive/Genesis) use Japanese pinout. It is usually very easy to open the SCART connector and resolder the connections to the European pinout.

[segaloco]

Is that USB some sort of data connection or just power? I'd be curious if there's any sort of JTAG or other interface to get at whatever compute is going on down in there. If it is user-configurable, it's probably some sort of ROM. What's tricky is it could be mask ROM, could even be mask ROM *inside* ala microcontrollers. Your first step would be determining if there is any stored program computational element. If not, then you'd at most be able to break and rewire pins to influence whatever the ICs do happen to expose. If they don't expose any configuration via the pins, and there's not an accessible, swappable ROM somewhere, then not doable.

[MegaMace]

I use one of these SCART boxes:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mLSBQF3

I've always wondered about the quality of Amazon/AliExpress stuff, with this being a quarter of the price of the cheapest RetroTink scaler. Of course I don't know much about RetroTink either other than I've seen their name come up a lot in discussions around scaling.

Truthfully I'm not really looking for one now for as long as I can tolerate still owning a CRT. There will probably be an inevitable time I need one, but I was more interested in the naive dream of upcycling/repurposing for its own sake

Is that USB some sort of data connection or just power?

It carries data. The HDMI out is a passthrough for the TV you actually want to play on, USB is the video/audio feed for the computer to record. One thing I find interesting is that through USB it's the correct(ish) aspect ratio, but my HDMI out is stretched 16:9. That could just be a TV thing I can't figure out though (seems like newer flat panels generally got rid of the "wide" remote button to put analog back in 4:3).

As for the rest of what you said, I'm not really sure what all that means or how to identify any of it but lemme know if you want me to look for something in particular. Was sort of hoping there was a chance someone else owns one of these and it might spark them to take a look themselves (though I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea).

[segaloco]

Basically there is some data stream going into the HDMI transcoder, it may be one that expects a fixed resolution, it may be one with pins/registers to affect this. I haven't looked up the datasheet. Ultimately that will be the final arbiter of what you can do, because whatever signal processing you do then has to go into the transcoder which may or may not be cheap garbage and only expect a single input type. Idk, it is all highly dependent on the component. If you can find datasheets, they should give the pinout and interface characteristics, which will tell you if the HDMI encoder could even be made to handle the variety involved in different scaling ops.

Needless to say there is very unlikely to be a way to do this without soldering something, unless again the USB port exposes some sort of debug/maintenance interface.

[Pokun]

SCART was popular in Europe and Japan but we never had it in USA. But because of its popularity elsewhere, you can easily find SCART cables and adapters online.

Europe and Japan had different pinouts of the SCART connector. I have found that this box uses a European pinout, however most RGB console cables (SNES/N64, PlayStation, Megadrive/Genesis) use Japanese pinout. It is usually very easy to open the SCART connector and resolder the connections to the European pinout.

The Japanese variant isn't really called SCART, it's EIAJ TTC-003 and is usually called JP21, RGB21 (since it was used in some other Asian countries as well), RGB-multi or something similar.

Also SCART cables are far more common than RGB21 cables in my experience, although both are produced and there are adapters.