NES Classic Edition looks like great fun—but will it hack?

boing
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Non-CRT flat screens are terrible for retro gaming because of deinterlacing, upscaling, and lag. Also light guns won’t work if you’re into that sort of thing.

Old games were designed to look good on CRTs which is why if you’re serious about retro gaming there’s simply no substitute for an old tube TV.

The problems with flat screens are that they have to deinterlace the graphics and upscale to the native resolution of the display. This has two downsides: graphics will look worse (blockier) and this will introduce some lag into the stream. Even a few ms can be brutal for some of the twitchier games (think stage 4 in Battletoads). Some re-releases of old games have various “filters” but I usually hate those. Those that introduce fake scanlines are a crime against humanity.

If you’re serious into retro gaming, the holy grail is a Sony Trinitron CRT studio monitor. You’ll also often see RGB/Component/S-Video conversions done on old consoles to make sure the purest video signal possible is being output. About the worst you can do is use composite or RF output since it ruins the fidelity of the video signal.

Additional reading/watching:


http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/660

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Modern ARM devices are often called SoC as well because they integrate CPU, GPU, IO, and more info a single piece of silicon

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NES Classic Edition looks like great fun & mdash;but will it hack

Ah, fun and mdashing, my two favourite things when I was a kid! The many happy hours I spent mdashing from mplace to mplace, down to the old mfishing hole, with my mbrother and mpals…
Sorry. Silly spell over :wink:

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fixed it for you

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Luxury, bloody luxury. When I was a child, we only had space in our apartment to –

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So true. After watching that Game Sack video, I now miss my Trinitron.

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I was totally the dude in the Game Sack video saying dumbly “Buuhhh but I have a new HDTV, won’t it make my retro games look awesome?”

Now that I have a Genesis, Atari, and ColecoVision, a tube TV might have to be my next purchase. Given that Trinitrons are… yow… $1000+ on eBay, I think a cheap one from Goodwill will do.

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My favorite music in any game ever, by a longshot.

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LGR Thrifts frequently comments that finding a CRT at goodwill is a hit or miss proposition.

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It’s pretty terrific. DuckTales had a fantastic soundtrack too, one of my favorites.

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Oh geez. I mean, by all means do what makes you happy, but for any prospective buyers reading this: please don’t feel that you have to buy a special hipster TV to properly enjoy your $60 Nintendo. The screen-door grid look is kinda neat, yes, but you will not notice the difference unless someone has pointed it out to you.

If your goal is to be Serious About Retro Gaming, then sure, get the tube TV. (And you should probably also shun the NES Classic for an original frontloader NES, if not an actual Japanese Famicom.) If your goal is to have fun playing some old video games, the TV you have is absolutely fine.

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