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Retro game systems and HD TV's


Invictus Ordo

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Hello Sonic fans!

This is your friendly neighborhood Omnis Invictus, now as the topic title implies I have a bit of a question involving retro consoles and HD TVs. Just how bad are the 16 bit-ps2/Xbox games going to look?

(I've searched for answers but I only found out that Vice city becomes almost unplayable at high speeds on a HD set, which is unsettling because as of today there are not any SD TVs in my house and I love playing retro games. )

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Playability depends entirely on the TV. Get a TV that doesn't lag much, disable all the postprocessing, don't put the signal through anything else that introduces lag, and all but the most timing-sensitive games can be more than playable; even unnoticeable in some cases. Expect 0.05 to 0.2s of lag depending. Audio will also lag, and that can be dealt with by hooking the game console's audio directly into a set of speakers or headphones.

Audio redirection combined with the note scroll delay options in the game itself, I can play beatmania (very timing-sensitive music game on PS2) just as well as on a CRT SDTV.

Picture quality-wise, you're more likely to see a horrible picture because of that RF adapter you've got plugged into your 20-year-old Megadrive.

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(I've searched for answers but I only found out that Vice city becomes almost unplayable at high speeds on a HD set, which is unsettling because as of today there are not any SD TVs in my house and I love playing retro games. )
Edited by Tornado
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Ya know what I don't like? I have a NES hooked up to my HD TV at my new beach house and I have SMB/Duck Hunt. You cannot play Duck Hunt on HD TV's. The Zapper does not work for some reason. Any care to explain to me why?

Oh yeah, NES games look perfectly fine on an HD TV. The only problem is that games where you need to use the Zapper, it doesn't work.

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In order to avoid diving into technobabble, I will say that old school light guns work by looking for a signal displayed by the TV when you pull the trigger. HDTVs don't display that signal because they don't work the same way, and therefore light guns won't work.

Edited by GerbilSoft
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56k warning (points are separated by semicolons).

Most televisions in the Sonic Bravia series won't display a Dreamcast in VGA Mode, and give off a message reading "No Sync" (or somthing along those lines); most RF-based systems look like absolute shite when stretched, upscaled and mangled into a format that the HDTV will understand; all interlaced display inputs (SCART, S-Video and Composite) are fully exposed, and display an extremely low picture quality as a result; some Hitachi HDTVs are extremely fussy about VGA inputs, and won't accept anything from a Dreamcast or an Intel Graphics-powered laptop; 720p TVs don't actually have a native resolution of 1280*720, but rather 1366*768, so even when your Xbox 360 or PS3 is set to 720p mode, the image will still look slightly stretched and lacklustre (a way to solve this is to use the 360's VGA cable and setting the console's output resolution to that of your television, but even then there's no guarantee that it'll accept the signal); most built-in HDTV speaker systems are, quite frankly, utter crap, so you'll need to invest EVEN MORE cash on either a Hi-Fi or Home Cinema system; Plasma TVs are more prone to burn-in than TVs using other technologies, so make sure that the HUD on your FPS doesn't stay on-screen and in the same place for too long; some pre-Saturn systems won't run on modern HDTVs, due to their output resolution and/ or signal being incompatible with modern technologies, and will lag to buggery even if they actually do work (an upscaler like XRGB should solve this, but they're ~£75 each, so be sure that you're buying a decent one before you shell out for it); and finally, pictures with a 4:3, 14:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio will look extremely poor and badly stretched if no correction is applied to them (though this, fortunately, is something that some modern units can actually do). Phew.

So in short, good luck getting anything older than 10 years to work with your new HDTV - quite honestly, all brands, series and models work in slightly different ways, so the only thing that I can tell you for certain is this: it's going to be an extremely frustrating experience.

Enjoy.

Edited by eXtaticus
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Personally, I haven't had any trouble with old shit on my HDTV. The SNES works fine with the RF adapter (though everone knows that RF adapters produce a pretty bad picture regardless of the TV), the Mega Drive and Dreamcast look fine with the old AV cables, and using SCART for my Saturn, PSX and PS2 hasn't produced any problems whatsoever. The only isssue (if you can call it that) that I can think of, is that with quick flickering, (like the flickering character shading of games like Super Street Fighter II), the flickering doesn't look right. Cracked, if you will. But no unplayable scenarios have popped up yet.

Unless of course, you count the fact that old-skool games can look like a supermassive pixel-explosion if blown up on a big enough HDTV. But yeah, just sit farther away from the TV then. :)

Thinking on it though, I remember that FFXII looks terrible on an HDTV. It's really strange, since it supports widescreen and everything. And earlier Squenix games don't look so bad at all.

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For, anything pre-Saturn, things are a bit more confusing in why they look different, but I won't get into that because I'm not sure that's what you are talking about.

Thats exactly what I'm talking about, I play a lot of Sness and Genesis games and I need to know if I'm doomed to have to shelf my fav systems or not.

Edit: Wow I guess I should have refreshed after reading Tornado's post, I guess my question has been answered.

Edited by Omnis Kai Invictus
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In order to avoid diving into technobabble, I will say that old school light guns work by looking for a signal displayed by the TV when you pull the trigger. HDTVs don't display that signal because they don't work the same way, and therefore light guns won't work.

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I would need to hook it up to an old TV again in order to play Duck Hunt and other games where you have to use the Zapper. I doubt I'm gonna play Duck Hunt any time soon.

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