Yesterday evening I spent a night trying out my HDMI-to-VGA-with-audio-out adapter. I connected the The C64 Maxi to my Benq BL702a monitor. It worked and while the picture looked good, the dimensions were wrong. Afterwards I read somewhere that while you can’t get the menu to display right, you can make the games look right if you select the “full height” option. Maybe even by renaming the games with “_FH” at the end. That’s for another time.

Next console I tried was the SNES mini. This also worked, but the aspect ratio was also wrong.

Connecting the The C64 Maxi to my monitors is more likely than the SNES mini however, because I like to play C64 games with a joystick from my desk. I can do so of course with my real C64, but sometimes I want to use the The C64 Maxi. None of my setups for gaming purposes has a monitor with an HDMI input. Only VGA and DVI. And all have a 5:4 aspect ratio that you can’t change to 16:9 in the settings. If I want to play C64 games on the big screen through HDMI, I can just as well use the MiSTer.

The last thing I tried was the Evercade. But that didn’t work. No picture.

When I had the Evercade in my hands, I couldn’t resist connecting it to the one monitor with HDMI to play some Alwa’s Awakening. And before I knew it, it was two hours later. I made some good progress and enjoyed it very much. I haven’t played many platformers in the last couple of years, and I’m not much into Metroidvania style games, because I keep forgetting where everything is. But with this game, I have the feeling that remembering where everything is, isn’t very important. You kind of get where you need to be very naturally. I don’t know if that will be the case up until the end, but we’ll see.

While playing on the big screen, I didn’t have any issues with dropped connections, as I had on earlier occasions. Sitting close to the big screen, I changed the setting to pixel perfect and heavy scanlines. On the small screen I use original ratio and subtle scanlines because the screen is so small. After last night, I’m tempted to get me a VS. But, I’m also tempted to get a The500 Mini, a Switch, or a PS5… I’m not tempted to get an Evercade EXP, because it doesn’t have a bigger screen… yet 🙂