Finally got an HDTV... How to properly see 240p video?

[Asaki]

My solution was to keep a CRT around and use that for retro gaming, and for newer consoles, to try to update as many as I could to component video.

Another solution would be to use emulators.

Sorry, that's all I got =) Not a huge fan of NES on an HD. Heck, even a Wii with composite video looks pretty bad on an HDTV; you can see interlacing all over the place.

[tokumaru]

My solution was to keep a CRT around and use that for retro gaming

Yeah, I'm keeping the old TV. This is not a permanent solution though, since it will eventually break, and I can only imagine how hard it will be to get another one in the future considering how hard it already is to find one now.

and for newer consoles, to try to update as many as I could to component video.

My newest console is a Playstation 2, but I'm still considering getting a Wii at some point.

Another solution would be to use emulators.

I do in fact use emulator more often then the actual consoles, but I don't think either one replaces the other.

Sorry, that's all I got =) Not a huge fan of NES on an HD.

Yeah, I can relate. Even if you get a good picture at the proper frame rate, the pixels are so big it's distracting. An SD CRT appears to add detail to the images produced by old consoles, and no HDTV I have ever seen has been able to replicate that.

Heck, even a Wii with composite video looks pretty bad on an HDTV; you can see interlacing all over the place.

This sucks.

[Movax12]

I have a CRT HDTV that looks okay with NES, but still doesn't work properly. The main problem with it is with any game that scrolls - the frame will jump every few seconds or so.
I believe this is due to the NES running at almost 60.1 frames/sec and the TV being locked to 59.9 frames/sec and the hardware periodically re-syncing to the NES signal. Until a hardware manufacturer properly addresses these issues hold onto your old CRTs tight.

[Drag]

I think LCD TVs will eventually be tolerable enough for retro gaming. My HDTV has mutliple different picture settings I can switch between. In nearly all of them, I've turned the backlight intensity down because holy shit, but on the one I reserve for retro consoles, I have the backlight intensity turned all the way up, but the brightness turned down. The reasoning behind this was because I saw the colors clipping when I adjusted the brightness and contrast settings, so I adjusted the brightness and contrast until the colors weren't clipping anymore, and I turned up the backlight intensity to compensate for the darker palette. It wasn't perfect because the TV I'm used to uses a modified FCC standard, but LCDs tend to use the sRGB standard, but it was close enough to call it a day.

As for the future of retro gaming, I believe the answer is with the development of a CRT emulator that you plug your console into, which simulates a CRT genlocking and positioning, with its output being in 1080p. Kinda like if you were to rip the guts out of an old CRT television, and have the circuit board logic driving raw RGB outputs or something. (Buffered so you can repeat the scanline 4-5 times for upscaling)

Anyone developing this idea is sure to earn a buck or two.

[lidnariq]

I have a CRT HDTV that looks okay with NES, but still doesn't work properly. The main problem with it is with any game that scrolls - the frame will jump every few seconds or so.
I believe this is due to the NES running at almost 60.1 frames/sec and the TV being locked to 59.9 frames/sec and the hardware periodically re-syncing to the NES signal. Until a hardware manufacturer properly addresses these issues hold onto your old CRTs tight.

I have this sinking suspicion it's due to the missing pixel that the 2C02 deletes to keep dot crawl to a pattern two frames long instead of three.

If the NES simply generated video at the right rate—60/1.001— the two different badnesses might cancel each other out. But as stands, the missing pixel means the sampling PLL in the TV can't ever get a lock.

The fix is straightforward, albeit invasive—intercept the system clock, detect when the PPU's data bus fails to go idle for the the sometimes-missing pixel, and then deliberately conceal four master clock cycles from the PPU.

[thefox]

I have a CRT HDTV that looks okay with NES, but still doesn't work properly. The main problem with it is with any game that scrolls - the frame will jump every few seconds or so.
I believe this is due to the NES running at almost 60.1 frames/sec and the TV being locked to 59.9 frames/sec and the hardware periodically re-syncing to the NES signal. Until a hardware manufacturer properly addresses these issues hold onto your old CRTs tight.

I have this sinking suspicion it's due to the missing pixel that the 2C02 deletes to keep dot crawl to a pattern two frames long instead of three.

That's easily testable at least, just play Battletoads.

[tokumaru]

I think LCD TVs will eventually be tolerable enough for retro gaming.

I seriously doubt it. With less and less devices outputting analog video, there's absolutely no motivation for TV manufacturers to improve support for it. If anything we'll see this getting even worse, until analog inputs are completely eliminated.

[Drag]

With less and less devices outputting analog video, there's absolutely no motivation for TV manufacturers to improve support for it. If anything we'll see this getting even worse, until analog inputs are completely eliminated.

That's why I mentioned the CRT emulator in the next paragraph.

[tepples]

In other words, an upscaler. Good luck designing one of those to allow for scaling up production to make it affordable.

[Sik]

I think LCD TVs will eventually be tolerable enough for retro gaming.

I seriously doubt it. With less and less devices outputting analog video, there's absolutely no motivation for TV manufacturers to improve support for it. If anything we'll see this getting even worse, until analog inputs are completely eliminated.

There are TVs that already got rid of them, the only reason there are still TVs with analog support is that there are countries that haven't switched to digital TV yet. In fact expect anything older than HDMI to get dropped.

The only reasonable solution is an upscaler, but that still won't help you with non-standard refresh rates (which is true for practically all old consoles), short of having the upscaler drop frames every so often (which will cause the same kind of bugs you can see in an emulator with vsync enabled).

[mikejmoffitt]

I think LCD TVs will eventually be tolerable enough for retro gaming.

I seriously doubt it. With less and less devices outputting analog video, there's absolutely no motivation for TV manufacturers to improve support for it. If anything we'll see this getting even worse, until analog inputs are completely eliminated.

There are TVs that already got rid of them, the only reason there are still TVs with analog support is that there are countries that haven't switched to digital TV yet. In fact expect anything older than HDMI to get dropped.

The only reasonable solution is an upscaler, but that still won't help you with non-standard refresh rates (which is true for practically all old consoles), short of having the upscaler drop frames every so often (which will cause the same kind of bugs you can see in an emulator with vsync enabled).

My XRGB-2 does a great job dealing with odd refresh rates, and it just spits out exactly doubled VGA. However, the TV I'm feeding it a signal to will drop frames every now and then as you've mentioned. My LCD monitor, which takes VGA, doesn't do this, and does a correct job. My test of this is some Neo-Geo games that use flickering transparency for shadows. Every ~second or so the shadow is either doubled or skipped for one frame. The PC monitor doesn't do it, though.

I'm sure some TVs that take VGA won't have that issue, and maybe some through HDMI. It will be dependent on implementation of the set, I suppose.

[Sik]

Yeah, pretty much that's the issue I was talking about. The idea was to have the upscaler do the frame dropping though just in case a TV goes bonkers with the non-standard refresh rate.

For the record, PC monitors may be better for this, since they don't expect a very specific refresh rate. In fact Nvidia is working on a technology where the refresh rate is variable (i.e. data is not sent unless the screen changes), monitors supporting that would be probably ideal for this purpose since they'd be designed to take anything (within a certain wide margin at least). As a bonus you get better picture quality than a TV.

[mikejmoffitt]

I had an HD CRT that got real bad with handling that missing 2C02 dot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bbXdLngxdc

It would get screen tearing every few seconds or so, and the tear point slowly scrolls down the screen. Oddly, the Super Famicom did not do that.

[Movax12]

That is not the same thing my TV does. It looks more like dropped frames, there is no mid-screen tearing. The cause may be the same and my TV is handling it differently.

[rainwarrior]

Yeah, my LCD TV skips 2 frames about every 10 seconds to catch up with the NES' out-of-spec frame timing, very easy to notice during smooth scrolling. It does two frames at once because it's 480i displayed at 30hz.

I tried the composite-into-component trick and the component input still says 480i, so, I guess that's not an option for me.

Maybe someday when I have a job again I'll splurge on one of those $300 Japanese upscaling machines...