My old trusty Philips 21'' CRT television has been placed in permanent tate mode and all other gaming happens on the larger Panasonic. I'll explain the little 14'' monitor in a moment. On the left is the japanese XBox 360, followed in the other shelf by PS1, PS2, GameCube with GBA Player, PC Engine Duo-R and Dreamcast with the Famicom on a small table with all the controllers. I'm starting to run out of space...
I have two active scart switch boxes so I can easily choose what console to use just by flicking some switches. The image quality is still excellent; the switch boxes take care of that. I have noticed that if keep both TVs on the colours dim a bit, but this doesn't present a problem in reality, as those two are never on at the same time normally. The switch boxes then output the signal to the tate TV, yoko TV and the DVD Recorder. If this sounds confusing, here's a diagram of the setup as it is at the moment. The DVD Recorder is a Sony RDR-HXD870 which I'm very pleased with - it can record PAL50, PAL60, NTSC and it accepts RGB, which all my consoles output.
This is where the little monitor comes in. I first tried having the DVD Recorder as a passthrough so it would just grab the signal on its way to the TVs, but I found this introduced a slight fade in colour and maybe a tiny bit of lag. So since I still had the 14'' Philips monitor from when I used it as my primary tate monitor, I just set the cables so the signal goes into all three outputs (both TVs and the DVD Recorder) and dedicated the monitor to the DVD Recorder. After I've recorded the footage to the device's harddrive I just burn it to a DVD-RW and transfer it to my computer, where I use MeGUI and Avisynth scripts to compress the video into a format more suitable for sharing. For PC games I just use Fraps or CamStudio, depending on which works best on a game.
