I am really going to sell half of my collection due to HD?

[batman877]

OK, hear me out...

I'm a hoarder, I rarely sell anything. If I buy it it's mine!

I have 100s of games for my SNES, Megadrive, Master System and N64. However, since I upgraded to a HDTV, all of these games look awful. Really awful. Blocky, blurry, jerky. Some better than others but it's really starting to impact how much enjoyment I can get out of these retro machines.

Possible solutions

1. Play with your HD settings - I've tried everything! Turning the sharpness down helps a little but not much.
2. Try a different HDTV - I've tried three. Some display better than others but they still make retro look awful.
3. Use an old CRT - I don't really have room for one after my old one broke. Also if I picked up a used one, how much longer will any CRT last from now? Another 5 years? What then?
4. Get an SCART to HD upscaler - recently bought one for £40. Sure, it upscales. But it just upscales my awful picture to an awful picture in 1080p or 720p! There is very little improvement over using a standard SCART.

I've solved the problem I had with my Gamecube, PS2 and XBOX games by purchasing component cables - these work really well. Using PS1 games on my PS3 sorts that problem too!

But I'm left very frustrated with anything older and thinking of selling half of my collection.

How are the rest of you handling this? Any advice?

[theantmeister]

I just went through a similar crisis. I ended up just buying a little 14" Sony Trinitron. CRT really is the only way these consoles were meant to be played.

Alternatively, you could spend a fortune on an SLG3000 and a Syncstrike. Check out http://www.arcadeforge.de/. I was considering this, but honestly, I just went for the cheaper/better solution for now. Maybe I'll reconsider this when the CRT dies.

[greenberet79]

How does the N64 look using the Gamecube lead? I haven't powered mine up in a while now, but it was okay on my smaller non-HD lcd telly in the spare room (think it's 24 inches).

I need to get myself a Gamecube component cable though, what a box of joy it is.

[morch-uk]

people give away 25+" crts these days, maybe that or an slg3000 and sync strike as mentioned

[James A]

Well ive got my old consoles going through a 37 inch LG TV that i run my current gen through and theres no problems.

[ToxieDogg]

I never really 'get' dilemmas like this much. I know my vision isn't great but I can appreciate HD, and I don't think any of my old games look that bad at all when plugged into my 48 inch LCD TV at all. I had my SNES on a couple of weeks back playing Mr Nutz and Turtles In Time, and they both still looked as great as they did 18 or so years ago to me. Same experience when I had my MD on a while back to play Desert Strike too, it looked fine to me.

Are you sure you're not just fed up of your old games?

[Antiriad2097]

Perhaps a cheap small HDTV is the answer? That way you won't have the big pixels you seem to dislike but it doesn't take much space.

Old games were made for small screens. Yes, CRT display plays a part, but blowing things up makes for big pixels. Dare I say it: I sometimes try the various filtering options in my emulators, and they can make some games look better om a digital display. This from a man who likes big sqare pixels.

[shiftytigger]

Snes doesnt look too bad using the GC component lead - but then we only have a 37 inch tv.

Actually , saying that I coped fine with my megadrive running through RF as my scart lead seems to be dodgy. Not sure I'd be willing to play speccy games on that size screen though - 14inch crt used to be fine for that.

#edit# - notice i say 'coped' - I didnt notice lots of problems with graphics etc as i was a fair distance from the screen - probably looked a lot worse than I think - coming from the spectrum days where we make do and put up with lots of problems to make the best of the gaming experience.

[theantmeister]

I don't know about the OP, but for me the cutoff was the NES. My 30" LCD was fine for the SNES and upwards, but the NES was horrible. Mind you, the NES was the only one that only supported composite, so that might explain the image quality somewhat.

My main issue was closely repeating patterns, which makes up the backgrounds in a lot of NES games. The jungle in Contra, for example, would strobe horribly as it scrolled. Probably something to do with the sharpness trying to pick out all the dots in the jungle background. The backgrounds in Faxanadu have a similar issue.

Anyway, even if it doesn't look terrible on an HDTV, my little CRT is 100x better. Especially for PS1 games, where the low texture quality and polygon count are really shown up on larger screens. So yeah, maybe a smaller TV is in order?

[pratty]

I think it all depends on the TV, the system, the game, and the method of connection. So different people will probably have different experiences.

I'm still on CRT myself, but my Cube looked all right on my parents Sony HD LCD, yet pretty bad on my brother's Samsung which is all round a superior HD TV.

So I've kind of resigned myself to the possibility that in future my retro gaming might have to be done on my little 14inch Grundig TV/Video combi, perhaps just as a result of the pot-luck of which HD TV I might buy.

That said I wonder if any clever people on here would know if it's likely that future HD TVs could one day somehow display these old consoles just fine due to some kind of technical advancement?

[nakamura]

I would sell my HDtv before my CRT. That said I find that 2D looks on a HD set, just 3D looks terrible.

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

It's definitely the TV. For example, my Panasonic Plasma is pretty good as upscaling, so most stuff actually looks rather decent on my HD. My friends Samsung makes a lot of stuff look gash though. The point of the matter is TV companies don't give a crap that you might be using their spanking new tv to play consoles and computers on them with resolutions that went out of fashion many years ago. It's not right, but it's something we have to deal with. In a perfect world you'll hopefully have space in your room for a spare CRT. Otherwise you're going to have to invest in an expensive upscaler (which still won't be perfect) or simply put up with it. Sorry that's not very helpful, but it's a reality I also found myself in recently.

[JazzFunk]

That said I wonder if any clever people on here would know if it's likely that future HD TVs could one day somehow display these old consoles just fine due to some kind of technical advancement?

^I might be getting the wrong end of the stick a bit (I'm not really a technical-type bod) but I've heard a fair bit about people adding scanlines to their HDTVs using VGA devices, to get 'purer'-looking shooters on their 360s etc. Maybe someone'll do a gaming telly with that option built in someday?

In terms of your telly, what's the lag like? Lag can really affect fast-moving games, especially action titles. Have you tried turning off all the fancy processing effects your telly might have turned on by default? A lot of TVs have a 'game mode' which usually switches off these effects and gives the most lag-free image your TV can output, or thereabouts. Try playing in 4:3 (I assume you already do this, anyway?) High contrast, experiment with black levels etc.

Trouble with TVs these days is that they offer so many damn permutations, and it's a bit of an OCD-type nightmare when it comes to getting the best gaming image - there really is no other thing to do than to spend a good bit of your time tinkering with stuff.

Like others have said, could also be the telly...my last HDTV was good for telly but sh!t for gaming, an ASDA 'Luxor' one, Wii and PS2 looked horrendous on it I've now got a 32" Samsung and it's proving to be really cool with the older consoles, especially the SNES and MD - Xbox1 is a bit 'off' thru RGB but it's an unmodded one so is aliased to buggery, but still is good enough to play. Got PS2 and Wii/GC going thru component and have managed to get most games looking pretty decent - PS2 can suffer with certain games, though 4:3 for PS2 usually solves any problems.

[SexyWayne]

Snes doesnt look too bad using the GC component lead - but then we only have a 37 inch tv.

Just as a matter of interest how on earth did you get a Gamecube component cable into a SNES?? afaik the Cube outputs component from it's digital port.. are you sure you're not mixing up composite with component?? component is wired red, green, blue.. composite is wired red, white, yellow, I'm not even sure the SNES can output component... RGB and I think S-Video is the most you can expect out of the SNES

[necronom]

I think it depends on the HDTV and settings. My Sony 40X3000 looks great with all my retro computers.