Does an N64 look really bad on a flat screen TV?
I’m looking around for a good cheap flat screen TV, like 200–300 dollars. I found a couple at Best Buy that fit the bill. 29 to 32 inches. Insignia and RCA. Built in DVD and those red, white and yellow components I need for the N64, Gamecbue and PS2. See, I have this section of my room where I have my old video games, and I really need to replace the old bulky television badly.
However, the guy at Best Buy said that old video games would look terrible on a screen like that. I’m not sure he’s entirely correct. I remember playing games from the Gamecube and PS2 on hi-def screens back in college and they were fine. I’m not sure about the N64 though. What about even a Super Nintendo?
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I think the guy at BestBuy was talking out of his arse.
His job is to sell TVs. Clearly he’s not very good at it.
In my experience, yes. I don’t know if it’s just the particular flat screen TV’s I’ve tried, but my N64 games look snowy on mine, even small ones. I’ve actually kept an old boxy TV around my house that we would otherwise get rid of, because it’s the only TV that the games look good on.
Haven’t tried with a N64 but I’ve hooked my sega genesis up to my LCD screen and it was fine.
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The Best Buy guy was thinking that seeing the individual pixels in the game would be considered bad. If you run it thru a receiver that upscales the picture to 1080p (like my Yamaha 5063), it will look better.
64bit game consoles were not meant to run on the high resolution screens that we have now a days. The technology didnt exist back then so it wasn’t even considered. If you want to do this you’ll have to find a way to up the resolution like @RocketGuy said.
Pretty simple concept if you think about it.
Hrm. So I guess the question now is how do I upscale the picture to 1080p? What’s the device called to do that? Just a receiver? Is that the only way to raise the resolution?
I wouldn’t put much stock on anything a Best Buy employee has to say.
I recall 6 years ago, I asked one of them the difference between HD 720p and HD 1080i
He told me 720p was the newest version of HD and the reason 1080i was not seen in newer products was because it was an old HD format that was being phased out… ???
Maybe he was just saying that so he could sell you a more expensive product.
*Certain HD TVs (specially the cheap ones) do not do so well in displaying analog content.
@Sarah90 he wasn’t wrong…. 1080i is actually kinda old in the tech world. you can get 1080i on CRT tv’s…. What he meant was the i format was being replaced by the p format. the types display imaged differently, P is sharper, cleaner, offers better contrast, ect. 720P is better than 1080i in terms of quality of image.
N64 has a limit resolution of like 420 pixels or something like that. so the pixels are stretched to make the image fit the resolution of the screen.
Your answer is simple. Find a way to increase the resolution from the consel to the tv.
@Scotty – you need to find a device that can upscale the game’s video to at least 720p. The most common are AV receivers. My receiver was about $350 and can upscale to 1080p.
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