Unrelated: Super NT (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, February 08, 2018, 07:41 (2481 days ago) @ stabbim

200 seems like a lot when you can get a real snes at a used game store or ebay for much less.

I cannot confirm this because I haven't tried it myself, but I have heard some people say that connecting those old analog consoles to modern displays results in not-great visuals. I've heard it described as "blurred" and "muted colors." Supposedly these newer FPGA jobbies which are intended to work with HDMI and modern displays look better.

This is true. Connecting old consoles to anything other than a CRT SDTV will make them look like ass. These old games were never intended to be seen on anything other than a CRT, so it will always look off on a LCD / Plasma / whatever. Scalers are not built to handle the pixel art, and so it looks terrible and blurry with the TV scalers. It is certainly possible that the new consoles have a different video output chip that handles scaling well, but results are still 'wrong', because the pixel art was intended to be shown on a CRT, where the edges are not so defined and sharp.

Basically, connecting the analog outputs to your HDVT will make it too blurry, and connecting an HDMI out will make it too sharp.

3D games fare much better when it comes to scaling, and have far fewer problems.

From best to worst:

1. Component, S-Video or SCART on an SDTV.
2. Composite on an SDTV.
3. RF video on an SDTV.
4. Scaler on the console or emulator.
5. Scaler on the TV.