Do OLD game consoles NEED to look better?

How do you like to play your games? Enhanced as much as possible or however you can get it?

Can I just say, holy crap your recent thumbnails go so hard. This one is so silly. Love it.

Personally, I'm still hoping to find a game boy emulator that actually makes the screen look like I'm playing in on hardware, adding the proper palette and pixels. No luck yet. If you know of any, let me know.

They just need to look nice with my flatscreen setup, since it took a lot of convincing already to get those old consoles outta retirement let alone a massive ol’ CRT 😅

In general, I think games only need to look as good as they were intended to look. However, that's not always doable; a 2160p TV can't display 240p. Even if it "can," it's usually forcing it up to 480i or 480p with shitty internal upscaling, and it just...does not look the same. My RetroTink, however, upscales the console's display to 1080p, a resolution modern TVs can display natively, and that makes it look WAY better. A lot of games are also designed to use the fuzz of the CRT screen, so when you just plug it into an LDC or LED TV, the lack of CRT fuzz makes the game look much worse than it would have on a CRT; devices like the RetroTink (I'll never not shill that product) that can add in artificial scanlines can restore at least most of that intended look.

Depends, gameboy and gbc still is fun for me like it was, as well as snes, nes and meha drive. For Playstation 1 i really like higher resolution and with original wonderswan i couldn't see anything

I'm guessing you meant composite (red, white, yellow cables), because component (YPbPr) is actually not that basic and pretty great looking. Uh, I think it also has to do with how some consoles can have a good composite output while others look really bad with it. I think I can tolerate (not like, but tolerate) composite on an HD flatscreen TV with consoles that output 480p (Wii, GameCube, Dreamcast) but interlaced (I'm looking at you, PlayStation 2) and 240p consoles (e.g. SNES or Mega Drive) are really bad looking to me and I just wouldn't want to play on those consoles regularly because they look so blurry. And real hardware N64 is just awful looking, and not even a good SCART cable could save it because of forced antialiasing on top of 240p and also not having a good upscaler. I have to play those on emulators (official or non-official ones) to enjoy those games. But personally, I just emulate mostly everything nowadays to make it look clean, the blurryness (and the cost of getting a good upscaler and cables for the hardware) is a big dealbreaker to me. Funny thing is I wouldn't have those issues with the visuals if I played retro consoles on a CRT (lots of old games are designed for composite on a CRT), but the CRT whine hurts to listen to (among other reasons like how heavy they are or the maintenance they'd require) so that's also just not possible. I'm so glad that emulation exists to play those games with a cleaner image (and it's also honestly just more convenient lol). Hm, but I never had a problem with things being hard to look at, not yet at least. The blurry image is just unenjoyable to me. Unmodified N64 hardware without any fixes on a flatscreen TV can be hard to look at but that would go towards literally anyone. ^^' Handheld consoles on the other hand don't have all of these issues that home consoles have though, uh... but I don't really want to play on those either right now (not that big of a fan of Game Boy games tbh). Except for DS games on a 3DS or Vita sometimes. Especially DS games on a 3DS screen, with the crisp screen option to have it pixel perfect, those look nice... TLDR: A quality image and convenience really help at making something more enjoyable to me.

yes. they should at least all look and play good on 720p

I guess it depends on what you mean by "better." I think a clear picture is important, but going through a rabbit hole and burning a hole in your wallet isn't worth the bump in clarity for something like an NES or N64. I've been down that rabbit hole in the past and got out of it when I realized I wasn't playing the games on my shelf. I ended up selling a lot of my old consoles with limited analog display signals and just emulated them. I still have a retrotink2x for my Genesis, but I will probably not buy a 5x or any other scaler in the future. Sometimes it's worth remembering that I used RF as a child and didn't care back then.

Can i ask you about that thumbnail?👁👄👁