Throwback

I just hooked up my N64 to the big screen television to see how badly it would look. With some major adjustments, the brightness mostly, I managed to get it working reasonably well. The whole reason I still hold on to my old CRT televisions is for old games and old tapes.

You can see why the old VHS tapes do not work as well on modern flat panel TVs. These modern sets are designed with the same philosophy as a computer monitor, which needs to get every pixel, and return it at the precise, right spot. Since old videos, old games, and poor quality television signals are not all high resolution feeds, the television needs to think about how it's going to stretch out the picture, and what it's going to use to fill in the gaps. Older televisions dealt almost exclusively with these lower resolution signals, and thus could blur the edges and it all falls together nicely.

All this thinking on the part of the new television takes time as well, causing a delay of several milliseconds when playing games. You maybe won't notice it at first, but if you're playing a game you know inside and out, you'll spot it instantly, and in the worst cases, it can render a game unplayable.

There, now you can't say I never taught you anything by coming to this blog!