I bought a RetroTINK HD15 Dongle mainly for a boring, sensible reason: to get clean RGB video out of my SNES and into my Datapath VisionAV-HD capture cards, whose DVI-I inputs happily accept VGA-format analog RGB with a simple adapter. The dongle plugs into the SNES’s multi-out AV connector and breaks the video out to a standard HD15/VGA connector — it’s not an upscaler, just an active signal conditioner, built to feed something like a RetroTINK-4K.
But I had a second, much less sensible hope: that it might work plugged directly into a VGA monitor, no scaler in between at all.
Why that shouldn’t work
The SNES outputs a 15kHz video signal. Almost every VGA monitor made in the last twenty-five years wants 31kHz or higher and will simply refuse the signal — out-of-range error, blank screen, nothing. That’s the entire reason scalers and upscalers exist in this hobby.
So before buying anything, I went looking for whether my specific monitor — a BenQ RL2455HM — was one of the rare exceptions. It turns out it is: the 15khz.miraheze.org community database — a crowdsourced list of exactly which modern-ish monitors will actually sync to 15kHz — lists the RL2455HM as fully 15kHz-capable on its VGA input, previously tested there with a Sega Mega Drive.
Even with that box checked, there was a second problem. The RetroTINK dongle outputs composite sync on pin 13 only — pin 14, where a monitor expecting proper RGBHV would look for a separate vertical sync signal, isn’t driven at all. The documented setup for the RL2455HM on that same wiki page used a SyncStrike adapter (a sync separator) to bridge that gap, along with manually switching the monitor’s input colour mode from YUV to RGB and forcing 4:3 in its on-screen menu.
Reading all that, my honest expectation was: plausible with the right chain, not plausible with just the dongle and a bare cable.
It just worked
I tried it anyway.
Star Fox booted straight up — title screen, then gameplay, no drama, no out-of-range error, no missing sync.
I also tried a Japanese Super Mario World cartridge — this particular SNES has a region-free mod (a whole separate story: I Just Wanted to Power My PAL SNES in America…), so it happily ran straight through to a Japanese level-name screen too.
No sync separator, no scaler
To be clear about exactly what’s in the chain, because it’s the whole surprise: SNES → RetroTINK dongle → monitor, direct. No SyncStrike, no sync separator, no scaler anywhere in between. The RL2455HM is just more forgiving about composite sync on its VGA input than the documented setup assumes — it doesn’t need pin 14 driven at all.
A $20-ish dongle, a monitor most people wouldn’t think twice about, and a “we’ll see” that actually paid off.
Related on this site
- Super Nintendo (SNES) — hardware reference page
- I Just Wanted to Power My PAL SNES in America… — the same console’s other story
- Datapath VisionAV-HD
