Comment by SirRockALot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SirRockALot | Hacker News Reader

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Having been following the retro gaming community for a long time, I think there's often just a small and sometimes deeply unpopular minority that pushes for doing things the 'correct' / maximum quality / authentic way while most just don't care or notice or just want to keep doing things the wrong way for whatever, maybe even perfectly valid, reasons. I think most people just don't care about shimmering, or a bit of extra softness or windowing 960p (4x240p) in a 1080p frame or using the wrong 8:7 aspect ratio for 256x224 or just stretching it all to 16:9 (shudder). Think of the motion smoothing + vivid TV preset crowd. Also a lot of things just went unnoticed for a long time, like until recently the RGB palette / colors for the PC Engine / Turbografx 16 console was rather wrong in both emulators and RGB-modified original hardware.

Thankfully, these days there is a community of emulator authors, console modders, FPGA developers, shader writers, YouTube creators and preservationists that have really dug deep into these kinds of issues and more and more implementations get it right out of the box.

It's really neat when the big boys end up doing it right in an accessible way. Nintendo's Virtual Console(VC) releases on the Wii support a lovely 240p over composite/s-video/component. This makes it easy for novices to get a clear image on consumer 480i TV without much fiddling.

Sadly not every VC game supports this feature. It's also hidden behind an undocumented button ritual to enable tje first time.

It's unfortunately rare that the big companies get these things right. Their efforts are mostly amateurish compared to the community provided solutions. Just look at the recently added N64 games on Switch with high input lag and plenty of graphical issues. Or the notoriously poor Game Boy Player software for the GameCube that now fortunately has a far superior community supplied rewrite. The Wii virtual console was decent, but remember how dark all the games on it looked? And then of course Nintendo made things worse on the Wii U. I think Nintendo actually knows less about their own hardware and software than the community that develops emulators, FPGA cores, upscalers etc. I rather give my money to these people than renting / buying the same poorly emulated 20 games from Nintendo again and again. But Raspberry Pis and MiSTers aren't exactly newbie friendly plug & play solutions. And the stuff from Analogue is too pricey, always sold out and out-of-the box requires original cartridges. Not really clear what a good recommendation for the non-technical crowd is.

I'm still not sure why the NES Virtual Console palette was so dark. My most guess was that it was trying to stay out of the automatic-brightness-limiter range that CRT TVs at the time had. This way the dynamic range between levels was preserved. Oddly none of the other VC emulators had that issue, so maybe it was just incompetence.

3DS VC improved things a bit with each colour palettes tuned for each game, though it brought it's own weirdness.

For pretty CRT gaming, I still recommend the Wii. It's straightforward to hack and install retroarch on and you can benefit from the component video out with many cheap and nice TVs. RetroArch can still be a bear to configure for novices, and the Wii can be a tad underpowered, but the good IO makes up for it. It also has oodles of plug and play controller options.

Sadly there's not too many other ways to take advantage of the 240p Y/Pb/Pr on consumer TVs with emulation.

I'm not aware of a single CRT TV or monitor that had a brightness limiter circuit or anything like it? CRT TVs never limit brightness, in fact most will quite happily burn themselves out if they suffer from a vertical collapse or such defect. There's an overload circuit, but that's for defects not bright image content. If that existed it would of course also affect all the original consoles.

OG XBox is also an option for hacking. I think the Wii is a great platform as it's relatively cheap, but following the hacking guide correctly (https://wii.guide/) and configuring RetroArch is so complicated you might as well get a more powerful solution. Raspberry Pi + one of the various analog output options with CRTPi or my more minimalist shader solution or MiSTer with the analog board / direct video are really good.

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