finally got some video hardware we ordered a while ago and now we can finally play SNES games on original hardware in high definition*!

*high definition here means with no chroma bleed like you get with composite video--it's still 240p, obviously

specifically, we got an SNES SCART cable wired up for a north american SNES's RGB output (you can only get these aftermarket for obvious reasons--nothing in north america uses SCART) along with an RGB->YPbPr transcoder

this is needed because the SNES natively supports only composite video, S-video, and RGB, and composite video has chroma bleed, our tv doesn't support S-video (and it also has smaller amounts of artifacting), and our TV doesn't support RGB (nor do most TVs)

YPbPr is a good standard but it's a bit annoying to work with

at a hardware level stuff always tends to work in RGB. YPbPr is just a rotation of RGB, which means it's able to represent exactly the same amount of detail

the advantage of YPbPr is the same as that of composite video: if you have a black and white TV, you can still get a black and white image by just plugging in the Y (luminance) cable and ignoring the chrominance altogether.

In composite video, the chrominance is superimposed on top of the luminance, modulated at a high frequency, but in S-video, the chrominance is separated out into its own signal, and in component, it's separated into two signals for the blue and red components--the green, of course, can be determined from knowing those and the total luminance.

Since S-video has to cram two chroma components into the same bandwidth as YPbPr's single chroma component per cable, it has a slightly worse video. But both are better than composite, which crams both chroma components into a very tiny bandwidth, since you always want as much bandwidth as you can spare going to your luminance.

Component gets around the whole thing by giving the full bandwidth to all three and using three communication channels, which is the ideal situation and allows for your chrominance to be equal in resolution to luminance.