ModRetro’s M64 Can Finally Talk to a CRT, for Another Ninety Dollars

Alongside the M64 going on sale, ModRetro has put the M64 AV Adapter up for pre-order at $89.99. One correction to the headlines going around: it is not available now. It is a pre-order, and ModRetro says it ships by Christmas.

The spec is the part worth reading carefully, because it is more thorough than these things usually are. Composite, S-video, component and RGBs, switched on the fly with a knob on the front. A second knob handles NTSC, PAL and custom cartridge modes. NTSC runs 480p, 480i and 240p; PAL runs 576p, 576i and 288p. There are forced 240p and 288p modes specifically to get scanlines showing properly, and stereo analog audio out the back. ModRetro claims well under one frame of lag through the conversion, which is their figure, not a measured one.

RGBs plus a forced 240p mode is a genuine answer to what CRT people actually ask for, and most modern retro hardware cannot give it to you at any price. Credit where it is due.

But look at the shape of it. The M64 is an HDMI machine, up to 4K, and this adapter works by taking that HDMI signal and converting it back to analog. The analog path is an accessory, sold separately, arriving five months after the console. A Nintendo 64 in 1996 did analog out of the box, with the cable in the box, because analog was the only thing there was. Thirty years on, the digital signal is the native one and the CRT connection is the thing you buy an extra box to convert back into. That is not a criticism of ModRetro so much as a description of where the ground has moved. It is still a strange thing to type.

It also matters technically, and it is the thing I want to test rather than argue about. Converting HDMI back to analog is not the same as an FPGA driving an analog signal directly, whatever the lag figure says. Whether that difference is visible on a CRT, or whether it is the sort of thing only a capture card and a spreadsheet can find, is an empirical question.

The arithmetic is straightforward. The M64 was $199 early bird, $229 at standard retail, and the adapter is another $89.99, so call it $319 to play cartridges you already own on a television you already own. Against that, an original N64 with an RGB mod is a different equation with different tradeoffs, and anyone weighing the two should run both numbers rather than take my word for it.

We have an M64 on order. When it lands it goes on the bench for The Lab, and the AV adapter question is now near the top of the list: what the conversion actually costs in latency, whether the forced 240p mode produces a clean signal a CRT is happy with, and how RGBs off this thing compares to analog off real hardware.