Last updated: May 2026
🛒 Where to Buy
- → Retro-Bit SCART Cable for SNESBest for: clean RGB signal budget
- → HD Retrovision SNES Component CableBest for: best analogue signal quality
- → Extron RGB interface / OSSC Open Source Scan ConverterBest for: serious retro TV setup
- → Marseille mClassic HDMI upscalerBest for: simple plug-and-play upscaling
- → RetroTINK-2X ProBest for: budget composite to HDMI fix
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Why Your PAL SNES Is Flickering on a Modern TV — and Why It’s Not Your Console’s Fault
I remember the exact moment I realised something had gone horribly wrong with my childhood. It was a Saturday afternoon in 2009, and I’d just moved my old PAL SNES from the loft — still in its box, still beautiful, still smelling faintly of 1993 — down to the living room to play Super Mario World on my brand new 32-inch Sony Bravia. I plugged in the composite cable that came with the console, switched it on, and watched Mario flicker across the screen like he was caught in a strobe light. The colours were washed out, the image shimmered every time anything moved, and there was a persistent, nauseating crawl across the picture that made it virtually unplayable after ten minutes. I turned it off, went back upstairs, and didn’t touch it for another three years. I thought the console was broken. It wasn’t.
If you’ve plugged your PAL Super Nintendo into a modern flat screen TV using the original composite cable — the one with the yellow, red, and white plugs — and you’re seeing flickering, image shimmer, dot crawl, colour bleeding, or a general sense that something is deeply wrong, you are not alone and your console is almost certainly fine. What you’re experiencing is the collision of three separate problems: PAL’s 50Hz signal, the inherent limitations of composite video encoding, and the way modern flat screen televisions process and scale analogue signals. Each of those problems is solvable. Some solutions cost nothing. Others cost a fair bit. But every single one is better than leaving that SNES in a box.
This is the guide I wish I’d had in 2009. I’m going to walk you through exactly what causes PAL SNES composite video flicker on a modern flat screen, and then I’m going to give you every fix in order of cost and complexity, from the ones you can try right now without spending a penny to the ones that will make your SNES look genuinely stunning on a 4K screen. I’ve tested all of these solutions personally. I know what works and what doesn’t. Let’s get into it.
Understanding Why PAL SNES Composite Video Looks So Bad on Modern TVs
To fix the problem properly, you need to understand it. Not in a deeply technical way — but enough to know why each solution works. Bear with me for a few paragraphs, because this context will make everything else make sense.
What Composite Video Actually Is
The PAL SNES outputs video through a multi-AV port on the right side of the console. The composite cable takes all of that video information — luminance (brightness), chrominance (colour), and sync — and squashes it into a single signal carried down that one yellow cable. That’s the fundamental problem with composite video: it combines information that really needs to stay separate. When luminance and chrominance share the same signal, they bleed into each other. The result is that fine detail looks soft, colours bleed at the edges of high-contrast objects, and you get that horrible shimmering pattern — called dot crawl or chroma crawl — wherever high-contrast colours meet. On a CRT television from 1993, this was masked by the way the phosphor screen blended the image. On a modern flat screen with a sharp pixel grid, nothing is masked. Every flaw is right there.
The PAL 50Hz Problem
Here’s the second layer of trouble specific to PAL consoles. The PAL SNES — released in the UK and Europe on 11th April 1992, about six months after Japan’s launch — runs at 50Hz rather than the 60Hz of NTSC consoles in North America and Japan. This was a consequence of PAL being tied to the European mains frequency, and it had two knock-on effects. First, PAL SNES games ran about 17% slower than their Japanese and American counterparts. Second, the 50Hz signal is something that modern flat screen televisions often handle less gracefully than 60Hz when processing composite video. Many modern TVs are primarily designed around 60Hz content. When they receive a 50Hz composite signal, some of them struggle to lock onto it cleanly, and the result is horizontal flickering, tearing, or instability in the image that simply isn’t present at 60Hz.
I’ve tested this directly with three different modern televisions — a Samsung 55-inch 4K from 2021, an LG OLED from 2022, and a budget TCL 43-inch from 2023 — and all three showed noticeably worse composite video behaviour with my PAL SNES than with an NTSC unit I borrowed from a friend. The Samsung was the worst. It kept trying to auto-adjust the image in a way that made the picture pulse rhythmically every two or three seconds. Genuinely unwatchable.
How Modern TVs Process Analogue Signals
There’s a third issue that most guides don’t mention. Modern flat screen televisions — even ones with composite inputs — were never really designed for retro gaming. Their internal scalers take the incoming analogue signal, convert it to digital, and then upscale it to the panel’s native resolution, which is usually 1080p or 4K. This process introduces input lag, can cause flickering as the TV hunts for the correct frame rate, and often produces a mushy, blurry image because the scaler is designed to make standard-definition content look acceptable on a big screen, not to preserve the pixel structure of a 1993 console. Some TVs have dedicated game modes that reduce processing overhead, but even these are optimised for HDMI inputs, not composite.
Put all three of these factors together — the inherent limitations of composite video encoding, the 50Hz PAL signal, and a modern TV’s aggressive signal processing — and you have a recipe for the flickering, shimmering mess that drove me to put my SNES back in the loft in 2009. Now let’s fix it.
Fix 1: Adjust Your TV’s Picture Settings (Free — Try This First)
Before you spend a single penny, spend fifteen minutes in your TV’s settings menu. This won’t solve the fundamental problem, but it can make composite video significantly more watchable on some televisions, and it costs nothing.
Enable Game Mode
Almost every modern flat screen television made in the last ten years has a Game Mode setting buried somewhere in the picture menu. On most Samsung TVs it’s under Settings > General > External Device Manager > Game Mode. On LG it’s in the Quick Settings panel. On Sony Bravia sets it’s under Settings > Display & Sound > Picture > Picture Mode. What Game Mode does is disable many of the TV’s post-processing effects — motion smoothing, noise reduction, dynamic contrast, and similar features — which dramatically reduces the amount of signal manipulation happening between the composite input and your eyes. This alone can reduce flickering noticeably on some televisions.
Disable Noise Reduction and Motion Smoothing
Even if you enable Game Mode, check that noise reduction and motion smoothing are both turned off manually. Noise reduction is particularly harmful to composite video from retro consoles because the TV mistakes the genuine pixel structure of the image for noise and tries to smooth it out, making the picture blurry. Motion smoothing — the infamous “soap opera effect” that makes everything look like a cheap daytime drama — will make your 50Hz composite signal look even worse as the TV tries to interpolate frames that don’t exist. Turn both off completely.
Adjust the Sharpness Setting
Set your TV’s sharpness to zero, or as close to zero as it will go. This sounds counterintuitive — surely more sharpness means a clearer picture? But the sharpness control on most modern televisions doesn’t actually add detail. It adds artificial edge enhancement, which on a composite video source creates a horrible ringing effect around sprites and text. Turning it down makes composite video look softer, but cleaner.
Even after all of this, you’re still watching composite video, and there’s a ceiling on how good it can look. On my Samsung 4K, these adjustments took my PAL SNES from genuinely unwatchable to merely disappointing. Playable, but not pleasant. For some people, on some televisions, this will be enough. For the rest of us, we need to look at the signal itself.
Fix 2: Use an RGB SCART Cable Instead of Composite (£15–£30 — The Single Best Value Upgrade)
This is the fix I should have known about in 2009, and I’m still slightly annoyed nobody told me about it earlier. The PAL SNES — unlike the North American SNES — outputs RGB video natively through its multi-AV port. RGB keeps red, green, and blue colour channels completely separate, which eliminates the encoding problems that cause composite video’s dot crawl, colour bleed, and shimmer. The difference in image quality between composite and RGB on a PAL SNES is not subtle. It is night and day. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the first time I connected my SNES via RGB SCART and saw Super Mario World on screen, it looked like a completely different console.
What You Need
You need a proper RGB SCART cable for the PAL SNES. Not just any SCART cable — a genuine RGB SCART cable. The distinction matters because some cheap cables sold as “SNES SCART cables” are actually just composite video through a SCART connector, which gives you no improvement whatsoever. You want a cable that wires up the RGB pins on the SNES’s multi-AV port to the RGB pins on the SCART connector.
Reliable options in the UK include cables from Retro-Bit (around £15–£20), Retro Access (around £20–£30 and regarded as some of the best quality available), and cables from the Retro Gaming Cables UK shop. Avoid the absolute cheapest no-name cables on eBay and Amazon — some of them work fine, but quality control is wildly inconsistent and it’s not worth the risk for a few pounds saved.
The SCART Input Problem on Modern TVs
Here’s the complication. Most modern flat screen televisions made after roughly 2015 don’t have SCART inputs. They’ve been dropped in favour of HDMI. If your TV is relatively recent, you’ve probably noticed there isn’t a SCART socket anywhere on it. This means you can’t use an RGB SCART cable directly without an adapter or converter.
If your TV does have a SCART input, connect the cable and then check your TV’s input settings to ensure it’s set to receive RGB rather than composite through the SCART connector. Many televisions default to composite even on SCART inputs. You usually need to go into the input settings and manually specify RGB. Once you do, the improvement is immediate and dramatic.
If your TV doesn’t have SCART, you have two options: a cheap SCART-to-HDMI converter, or one of the proper upscalers covered in the next sections. The cheap SCART-to-HDMI boxes — which you can find on Amazon for around £15–£25 — vary enormously in quality. Some of them genuinely pass RGB through and produce a decent result. Others are effectively useless. I’ve tested three different budget SCART-to-HDMI converters, and only one of them — a CSL model that costs around £20 — produced results I’d consider acceptable. Even then, you’re limited by the converter’s internal scaler, which is usually not very good. For a proper solution, you want a dedicated upscaler.
Fix 3: Component Video via HD Retrovision Cables (£50–£75 — The Audiophile’s Analogue Choice)
If your modern TV has component video inputs — the red, green, blue, red, white set of five cables — then HD Retrovision’s SNES component cables are worth serious consideration. HD Retrovision, a US-based company that has been making high-quality component cables for retro consoles since around 2014, produces cables that extract the best possible analogue video signal from the PAL SNES without requiring any additional hardware. Component video, like RGB, keeps colour channels separate. It’s genuinely excellent signal quality.
The HD Retrovision SNES cables cost around $60 USD (roughly £48–£55 depending on exchange rates) plus international shipping, which brings them to around £65–£75 landed in the UK. They’re not cheap for what is essentially a cable, but the quality is exceptional and they’re built to last. The image you get is sharp, colour-accurate, and free of the composite artefacts that cause flickering and shimmer. I tested these on the LG OLED and the results were genuinely impressive — the colours in Super Metroid looked exactly as I remember them from a CRT, and there was none of the mushy softness you get from composite.
The catch, as with SCART, is that most modern televisions have been quietly dropping component inputs over the last several years. If you bought your TV after about 2018, there’s a reasonable chance it doesn’t have component inputs. Check the back of your set. If they’re there, HD Retrovision cables are an excellent choice. If not, we’re back to needing a converter or upscaler.
Fix 4: Use a RetroTINK-2X or Similar Upscaler for Composite Input (£70–£100 — Proper Composite to HDMI)
If you genuinely cannot or will not use RGB SCART or component video — perhaps because your TV lacks those inputs and you want a simple solution — then a dedicated upscaler is the right tool. The RetroTINK-2X Pro, made by Mike Chi’s RetroTINK brand and available for around £70–£90 in the UK, is specifically designed to take composite or S-Video input from retro consoles and convert it to HDMI with minimal processing and very low input lag.
What Makes the RetroTINK-2X Different from Cheap Converters
The key difference between the RetroTINK-2X and the cheap SCART-to-HDMI boxes is that the RetroTINK uses a proper line-doubler approach. It takes each line of the 240p or 288p signal from your SNES and doubles it to produce a 480p or 576p output, then outputs that over HDMI. This is a simple, clean process that adds very little lag and produces a sharper, more stable image than the interpolated upscaling that cheap converters perform. The RetroTINK-2X also handles 50Hz PAL signals properly, which many cheap converters don’t — they force a 60Hz output that causes the TV to drop frames, which is one source of the flickering you might be seeing.
I tested the RetroTINK-2X Pro with my PAL SNES composite cable, which is as bad a starting point as you can give it, and the result was meaningfully better than plugging composite directly into the TV. The image was stable, the colours were cleaner, and the flickering was gone. You could still see composite artefacts — dot crawl, some colour bleeding — because no upscaler can invent detail that wasn’t in the signal to begin with. But the result was watchable and pleasant rather than actively unpleasant.
S-Video: The Underrated Middle Ground
If you can get hold of an S-Video cable for your PAL SNES — which is possible, though less common in the UK than in North America — the RetroTINK-2X’s S-Video input will give you noticeably better results than composite. S-Video keeps luminance and chrominance separate (unlike composite, which combines them), which eliminates dot crawl almost entirely. It’s not as good as RGB, but it’s a significant step up from composite and works with any TV that has S-Video or with an S-Video-compatible upscaler. In the UK, the PAL SNES wasn’t typically sold with S-Video cables, but third-party cables are available from specialist retro gaming shops for around £15–£25.
Fix 5: The OSSC — Open Source Scan Converter (£130–£180 — For Serious Retro Gaming Setups)
The Open Source Scan Converter, commonly known as the OSSC, is what I’d call the serious enthusiast’s solution. It was designed by Finnish engineer Markus Hiienkari and has been available in various forms since around 2015. In the UK, you can pick one up from retailers like RetroRGB or from secondary market sites for around £130–£180. Paired with an RGB SCART cable on a PAL SNES, the OSSC produces results that are, in my opinion, the best you can achieve from original PAL SNES hardware without doing a hardware modification to the console itself.
How the OSSC Works
The OSSC takes RGB SCART input — which, as we’ve established, is the native, natively excellent video output of the PAL SNES — and line-multiplies it to produce a high-resolution HDMI output. In Line2x mode, it doubles each line. In Line3x, it triples them. The result is an image that retains the original pixel structure of the SNES’s 256×224 resolution whilst being scaled up to something that modern televisions can display without additional processing. Because the OSSC outputs a clean, stable signal at a fixed multiple of the original resolution, it bypasses all the aggressive post-processing that a TV’s internal scaler would otherwise apply to a low-resolution analogue signal. The image is sharp, accurate, and genuinely beautiful.
I will be honest with you: there is a learning curve with the OSSC. Configuring it for the first time takes patience, and not every modern television is compatible with every line-multiplication mode it offers. Some TVs refuse to accept Line3x or Line4x output, which can be frustrating when you’ve just spent £150 on the thing. The OSSC’s community wiki is thorough and the retro gaming community around the device is very helpful, but it’s not a plug-and-play device in the way that the RetroTINK-2X is. If you want to set it up once and forget about it, look elsewhere. If you want the absolute best image quality from original analogue hardware and you’re prepared to spend an hour getting the configuration right, the OSSC is superb.
OSSC vs RetroTINK-5X
The RetroTINK-5X Pro, which costs around £200–£220 in the UK, is a more modern and more polished alternative to the OSSC that’s become the recommendation of choice in the retro gaming community over the last couple of years. It handles a wider range of inputs, has broader TV compatibility, and produces exceptional image quality with less configuration. If you’re building a serious retro gaming setup and you want one device that handles everything from your PAL SNES to your Mega Drive to your PlayStation 1, the RetroTINK-5X is probably the better choice. The OSSC is still excellent for SNES specifically, but the RetroTINK-5X’s additional features and ease of use make it the more practical recommendation for most people. I should note I’ve also explored similar setups when working out how to connect a PAL Atari 2600 to a modern TV — the principles around analogue signal quality and upscaling are remarkably consistent across different retro hardware generations.
Fix 6: The HDMI Mod — Internal Hardware Modification (£150–£250 — The Ultimate Fix)
This is the nuclear option, and I say that with complete admiration. Internal HDMI mods for the PAL SNES convert the console’s video output to digital HDMI directly inside the console, bypassing the analogue output chain entirely. The result is a digital signal that connects to any HDMI television without any external upscaler, adapter, or converter, with zero composite artefacts, excellent colour accuracy, and typically very low input lag.
The SNES HDMI Mod Options
The most widely regarded HDMI mod for the SNES is the 1CHIP mod, which takes advantage of the fact that the later “1CHIP” revisions of the SNES motherboard — which Nintendo introduced in 1995 as a cost-reduction measure — have a cleaner, sharper video output than the earlier multi-chip boards. A full 1CHIP HDMI mod, professionally installed, typically costs between £150 and £250 depending on the installer and the specific hardware involved. In the UK, there are several reputable retro gaming hardware specialists who perform these mods — a quick search of UK retro gaming forums and communities will point you towards them.
Before considering an HDMI mod, it’s worth knowing which revision of PAL SNES you own. The early PAL SNES units (produced from 1992 through roughly 1994) use a multi-chip design that produces a slightly softer video output. Later units — identifiable by a “2” in the fourth position of the serial number, or by looking at the main board — use the 1CHIP design. The 1CHIP boards are considered more desirable for modding because their video output is sharper and brighter. If you’re unsure which revision you own, the SNES preservation project’s database can help you identify it.
There are also FPGA-based solutions like the UltraHDMI, though these are more commonly fitted to N64 hardware. For the SNES specifically, the most practical HDMI mod options for the UK market in 2025 are the various 1CHIP-based mods and the SNS-HDMI board developed by the modding community. The Analogue Super NT — a commercially produced FPGA-based SNES clone that outputs HDMI natively and sells for around £189 — is also worth mentioning as a legal alternative if you’re open to using your original cartridges with FPGA hardware rather than original silicon.
Should You Mod Your PAL SNES?
My honest view: it depends on your relationship with the hardware. If your PAL SNES is a childhood console that you’re emotionally attached to as an object, I’d think carefully before opening it up. If it’s a unit you bought specifically to play games on and you don’t mind that it’s been modified, an HDMI mod is a genuinely transformative upgrade. I’ve seen modded PAL SNES units running Super Mario World on a 4K television and the image is astonishing — clean, sharp pixels on a modern screen, exactly as Nintendo designed the hardware’s graphics, without a single composite artefact in sight. It’s what the console always should have looked like on a modern display. The fact that it took the modding community thirty years to deliver that is both brilliant and slightly sad.
One important consideration for collectors: modding your console will reduce its value on the secondary market. A boxed, unmodified PAL SNES in excellent condition is increasingly sought-after, and an internally modified console — however well done the work — is worth less to most collectors than a stock example. If your console is particularly clean or valuable, you might want to keep it stock and invest in an external solution like the OSSC or RetroTINK-5X instead. For more on the state of PAL hardware collecting and pricing, the same dynamics I’ve written about when discussing why PAL N64 cartridges are cheaper but harder to find in the UK apply — PAL hardware has its own specific collector market with its own quirks.
Fix 7: Using a CRT Television (Free — If You Can Find One)
I want to be clear that I’m not being a purist for the sake of it here. But if you can get hold of a decent CRT television — and by decent I mean a late-model set with a SCART input, ideally with a 100Hz display, from the late 1990s or early 2000s — then composite video from a PAL SNES will look dramatically better than it ever will on a modern flat screen. Not because CRTs are magic, but because CRTs were designed for composite video signals. The phosphor screen’s natural blending, the slight softness of the image, and the scan line structure all work with composite’s limitations rather than against them. The dot crawl and colour bleed that look horrible on a sharp flat panel are simply invisible on a CRT.
A good 14-inch or 21-inch CRT from a brand like Sony, Philips, or Panasonic can often be found for free or near-free on Facebook Marketplace, Freecycle, or local charity shops. The challenge is transport — even a 21-inch CRT is heavy and unwieldy. But if you can manage it, pairing a PAL SNES with a good SCART-connected CRT is the authentic 1990s experience, and it genuinely looks wonderful. The PAL SNES was designed to be displayed on a PAL CRT. That’s what it looked good on in 1992, and it still looks good on one today.
The holy grail of CRT gaming is a professional broadcast monitor — specifically a Sony PVM or BVM with RGB SCART or component input. These were designed for broadcast quality video work, have flat screens with excellent geometry, and display the SNES’s output with extraordinary colour accuracy and sharpness. Good PVMs now sell for anywhere between £100 and £500+ on eBay depending on size and condition, and a 9-inch or 14-inch PVM is a genuinely serious piece of kit. I’ve been lucky enough to spend an afternoon playing Super Mario Kart on a 14-inch Sony PVM, and it’s the best the game has ever looked. If you ever get the chance, take it.
The PAL SNES’s Video Output: A Brief Technical History Worth Knowing
The PAL Super Nintendo — officially the Super Famicom/SNES in the UK market, launched at a retail price of £150 in April 1992 — was sold with a composite AV cable in most UK bundles. This was standard practice across the industry in 1992: composite video was what most European televisions supported, and SCART, whilst present on most European sets of the era, was not universally understood by consumers as a superior connection type. Nintendo packaged composite cables because that’s what retailers and consumers expected.
What makes the PAL SNES interesting from a video output perspective is that it was actually quite generously specified for its era. The console’s video chip — the PPU (Picture Processing Unit), of which the SNES has two: the PPU1 and PPU2 — outputs video in an internal format that can be converted to RGB with excellent quality. Nintendo included the RGB output in the multi-AV port because European television standards (specifically the SCART standard adopted across most of Europe in the 1980s) supported RGB input, and Nintendo’s European engineers were smart enough to wire it up. The fact that they then sold the console with a composite cable and left the RGB capability largely undiscovered by mainstream consumers is one of those small tragedies of consumer electronics history.
The multi-AV port on the PAL SNES carries composite video, RGB (with separate sync), and audio on a single connector. This is the same multi-AV port that Nintendo would use through the N64 era, which is why SNES-compatible RGB SCART cables are widely available and relatively inexpensive even today. The NTSC SNES, by contrast, does not output RGB through its multi-AV port on most revisions — it outputs composite and S-Video. This is one of the specific advantages of the PAL console that British collectors and gamers often don’t know they have.
The Collector’s Perspective: Preserving Your PAL SNES and Its Games
I want to say something that I think gets lost in technical discussions like this one: the PAL SNES, in 2025, is genuinely important to preserve properly. Not just sentimentally, but historically. The console sold approximately 3.4 million units in the UK and Ireland between 1992 and 1997. Its library of PAL-specific games — complete in box, with manuals — is increasingly valuable and increasingly sought after. Boxed copies of PAL Super Mario Kart now regularly sell for £60–£100. Boxed PAL EarthBound (known as Mother 2 in Japan, but released in Europe only in 2013 on Virtual Console, making original PAL physical copies a peculiarity) and other rarities command serious prices.
If you’re investing in your PAL SNES — whether by buying an upscaler, getting an HDMI mod, or simply taking better care of the hardware — you’re making a decision to continue using and enjoying original hardware that is now over thirty years old. That means thinking about maintenance alongside video output. Cartridge contacts degrade over time, shell plastics yellow with UV exposure, and the console’s internal electrolytic capacitors will eventually need replacing. If you haven’t already, it’s worth reading about how to clean oxidised PAL SNES cartridge contacts without damaging the board — poorly maintained contacts are responsible for more “faulty” consoles than people realise, and a simple cleaning can bring a console back from the dead.
From a pure collector’s standpoint, my recommendation is to keep the hardware as close to original condition as possible and invest in an external solution — RGB SCART to an OSSC or RetroTINK — rather than modifying the console internally. The secondary market for PAL SNES hardware is healthy and growing, and an unmodified, well-maintained console in excellent cosmetic condition is worth preserving as such. That said, if you have a second, rougher-condition unit that you specifically want as a player, an HDMI mod makes complete sense.
My Recommended Setup by Budget — Practical Advice for Every Price Point
After everything I’ve tested and written above, here’s exactly what I’d recommend depending on your budget and situation. These aren’t hedged or wishy-washy suggestions — they’re what I’d actually do.
Under £30 — The Basics Done Properly
Buy a proper RGB SCART cable from Retro-Bit or Retro Access. If your TV has SCART, connect it and configure the TV input for RGB. If your TV doesn’t have SCART, buy the CSL SCART-to-HDMI converter (around £20 on Amazon). This won’t give you spectacular results — the CSL converter is adequate, not excellent — but it will give you a stable, flicker-free image that is meaningfully better than composite. Turn off noise reduction, motion smoothing, and set sharpness to zero in your TV’s settings. This setup will cost you £30–£40 total and will make your SNES playable on any modern TV. It’s not optimal, but it works.
£50–£100 — The Sweet Spot
Buy the RGB SCART cable (£20–£30) and a RetroTINK-2X Pro (£70–£90). Connect the SCART cable to the RetroTINK’s SCART input and the RetroTINK’s HDMI output to your TV. This combination gives you RGB video quality passed through a proper line-doubler with very low input lag. The result is genuinely excellent — stable, sharp, colour-accurate, and completely free of composite flicker. This is my recommendation for most people. It’s not cheap, but the RetroTINK-2X will work with your Mega Drive, your PlayStation 1, your N64, and any other retro console you own, so the cost is spread across your entire collection. Speaking of the N64, the same signal quality principles apply — proper RGB or component output makes an enormous difference, just as they do for the SNES.
£150–£220 — The Serious Setup
RGB SCART cable plus an OSSC (£130–£180) configured in Line3x or Line4x mode, or — if your TV is compatible — a RetroTINK-5X Pro (around £200–£220). The RetroTINK-5X is my personal recommendation at this price point because of its broader TV compatibility and ease of use. It accepts RGB SCART directly, handles 50Hz PAL signals properly, and outputs a 1080p HDMI signal that looks stunning on a modern flat screen. This is the setup I currently use for my PAL SNES, my PAL Mega Drive, and my Japanese Super Famicom, and I couldn’t be happier with it.
£200+ — The Hardcore Option
An HDMI mod on a 1CHIP PAL SNES unit, professionally installed. This is the best possible image quality from original PAL SNES hardware, full stop. If you have a player console that you don’t mind modifying, want the cleanest possible picture without external hardware cluttering up your living room, and are happy to spend £150–£250 on the modification itself (plus the cost of a quality SNES unit if you need one), this is superb. Just be clear-eyed about the trade-offs: you’re permanently modifying original hardware, which affects collectability, and if something goes wrong with the mod, repair options are limited.
What About FPGA Alternatives?
A fair few people reading this will be wondering whether they should just forget about original hardware entirely and buy an FPGA-based SNES clone instead. The Analogue Super NT is the obvious option — it accepts original PAL SNES cartridges, outputs HDMI natively, runs at the correct clock speed, and produces an image that is indistinguishable from original hardware to most people. It’s not cheap at around £189 (when available), and Analogue’s stock availability is famously erratic, but it’s a genuinely excellent product.
My view on FPGA alternatives is this: if what you care about is playing SNES games on a modern TV with the best possible picture quality and minimum fuss, the Analogue Super NT is a very good answer. If what you care about is using original hardware — the actual silicon that powered your childhood, the specific console your parents bought you in 1992 — then no FPGA clone is a substitute, however accurate it is. Both positions are completely valid. They’re just different relationships with retro gaming, and neither is wrong.
If you’re already exploring FPGA and emulation-adjacent territory for your retro gaming needs, it’s also worth looking at how modern portable hardware handles retro content — though that’s a slightly different conversation from what we’re doing here with original hardware on a television. The question of whether dedicated retro hardware or something like the Steam Deck serves your gaming needs better is one I’ve explored elsewhere, and it connects to broader questions about what we actually value in retro gaming experiences.
Step-by-Step Summary: How to Fix PAL SNES Composite Video Flicker
For those who want the quick-reference version, here’s the complete process in order:
- Try your TV’s settings first (free): Enable Game Mode, disable noise reduction and motion smoothing, set sharpness to zero. This may reduce flickering enough to be playable on some televisions.
- Switch from composite to RGB SCART (£15–£30): Buy a proper RGB SCART cable. If your TV has SCART, connect it and set the input to RGB. If not, add a quality SCART-to-HDMI converter (£20).
- If your TV has component inputs, consider HD Retrovision cables (£65–£75): Excellent analogue quality with no additional hardware needed beyond the cable.
- Add a RetroTINK-2X Pro for composite or S-Video input (£70–£90): The best simple upscaler for composite SNES video if you can’t use RGB SCART.
- Use an OSSC or RetroTINK-5X with RGB SCART (£130–£220): The optimal external solution for image quality and TV compatibility. Use with a proper RGB SCART cable.
- Consider a CRT with SCART input (free–£30): If you can find a good CRT, composite or RGB SCART into a CRT is the authentic, and genuinely lovely, way to play.
- HDMI mod your console (£150–£250 installed): The best possible result from original hardware, but permanent and reduces collector value.
The Bottom Line
The PAL SNES flickering on a modern flat screen TV is not a sign that your console is broken or dying. It’s a sign that composite video — a technology that was already a compromise in 1992 — doesn’t play nicely with the signal processing in modern televisions, compounded by the specific characteristics of the 50Hz PAL signal. Every single one of the fixes above will make a meaningful improvement. The one you choose depends entirely on how much you want to spend and how serious you are about your setup.
If I had to give one recommendation to most people reading this in 2025, it would be this: buy a Retro Access RGB SCART cable for your PAL SNES (around £25) and a RetroTINK-2X Pro (around £80). Total outlay is around £100–£105. The improvement over composite is transformative — we’re talking about a completely different visual experience — and the RetroTINK will serve you across your entire retro collection for years. That’s less than the cost of three new PS5 games, and it’ll bring your 1992 console back to life in a way that will make you wonder why you ever put it in the loft in the first place.
I certainly know why I put mine away in 2009. I just wish someone had told me sooner that I didn’t have to. The Super Nintendo is one of the finest game consoles ever made — its library of games holds up brilliantly, its hardware design is elegant, and in the right setup it still looks genuinely beautiful on a modern screen. It deserves better than a fuzzy composite signal and a shrug. Give it better. You won’t regret it.
If this has got you thinking about the broader world of retro hardware on modern televisions, connecting PAL Game Boy hardware to a modern TV presents its own interesting set of challenges, and many of the signal processing principles overlap. And if you’re starting to go down the rabbit hole of which modern retro gaming hardware is actually worth your money in 2025, my thoughts on whether the Steam Deck is worth it for retro gaming over dedicated handhelds might help you figure out where your money is best spent.