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Comment by spondylosaurus | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point).

Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache!

Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.

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I got lucky and snagged a 32 inch 720p TV that still had composite video connectors a few years ago. Works great with all of my consoles, as far back as my N64.

I’ve been snagging the smaller/nicer CRT TVs from the dump here and there, there’s now a market for them… besides the problem you’ve highlighted, some old games with screen aiming devices only work on these older tech TVs, and Goodwill no longer accepts them!

Ooh, in my hunt for a good scaler I did see some people working on light gun compatibility gadgets for modern TVs! No idea how well they work now, but hopefully they'll be perfected by the time the last CRT gives out.

The two big ones are the Sinden Lightgun and Gun4ir, the Sinden uses a white box at the corners of the screen and a camera in the lightgun while the Gun4ir is similar to the Wii's sensor bar. No first hand experience but the Gun4IRs seem to be pretty popular and can be DIY-ed with a guncon shell.

https://rpegelectronics.com/products/gun4ir-diy-mod-kit

There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably always be higher than analog, no matter what.)

Yep, spot on. The rabbit hole I fell down that eventually led me to the RetroTINK started with those cheap $30 HDMI upscaling devices, but they do weird stuff to your picture and add wicked amounts of lag. People who know more than I do have assured me that the RetroTINK in particular minimizes lag compared to other analog-to-digital converters, although I'm sure it's not quite as good as a setup without a converter at all.

I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal though. You can tweak about a million different settings and even add fake scanlines!

My somewhat old Sony AV receiver has one RGB input and HDMI output and my PS/2 works fine with a LCD screen.

I tried to plug in a wii the other day only to realize the TV had no RCA inputs, so I hooked the wiimotes up to the laptop for the kids and fired up the emulator...

Ps2 works fine, gamecube works fine, xbox works fine - what 20yr old console is having issues with an HDMI tv? Every TV I've seen in the past 2 decades includes RCA and RGB connectors.

S-video is gone, and RF is gone. Coax is still there though, so RF modulators should still work too.

Our relatively new Sony TV doesn't have component or composite input, hence the need for a converter. But you want to use a scaler versus a straight signal converter because HDTVs don't always support 480i input (meaning that you wouldn't get a picture at all), and even fewer support 240p, which is necessary for some PS2 and most PS1 games.

A scaler like the RetroTINK can add visual enhancements, but more crucially it ensures that your TV receives the signal in the first place.

Those inputs are at the bottom of the pile for QA. So they usually have dreadful amounts of lag. It makes a surprising amount of games unplayable.

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