What is the best setup for retro gaming?

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

I have got a few retro consoles that i play using a modern HDTV and some av cables but i am wondering should i switch to RF connection and a CRT instead?

I have a old mid 2000’s TV in the garage that is about 19 inches wide that i can use that is not too much of a pain in the ass to get to.

So what are your setups and what do you recommend i do? i probably am gonna get the set and put it somewhere in my room so i can play games like duckhunt again.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[Anonymous 42]

Old TV, old video games, why not? beats sitting in the garage doing nothing!

I should hook up my old playstation and play return fire for the helloveit!

[UnicronParticipant 752]

If you have the money you, should invest in a framemeister upscaler.

Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

Unicron wrote:

If you have the money you should invest in a framemeister Upscaler.

F~~~ that i am not paying 833 dollars and 50 cents for one.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[Lone Wolf83Participant 825]

I personally love playing retro games on my modded original Xbox. It upscales all emulators to 720p on my HDTV. Nothing beats playing old school games on a couch and wired controller.

If it has tits or tires, you know you're going to have problems.

[DarkRyuParticipant 2354]

Emulators on the PC with the original controllers. You can buy adapters that connect Super Nintendo, N64, Sega Genesis, etc. controllers to PC via USB. Best of all, you can get ALL of the games for FREE! THOUSANDS of games at the push of a button!

Dragon Warrior, Super Mario All Stars, Mario 64, Thunder Spirits….good times. I still have all the original gaming systems and cartridges, but it’s so much better to just play them on PC. I have my main desktop connected to a big 70″ TV in my bedroom and I play them on there.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

Lone Wolf83 wrote:

I personally love playing retro games on my modded original Xbox. It upscales all emulators to 720p on my HDTV. Nothing beats playing old school games on a couch and wired controller.

How would you mod an Xbox to do that?

DarkRyu wrote:

Emulators on the PC with the original controllers. You can buy adapters that connect Super Nintendo, N64, Sega Genesis, etc. controllers to PC via USB. Best of all, you can get ALL of the games for FREE! THOUSANDS of games at the push of a button!

I already emulate but a want more of a classic experience with the games i already own emulation is good for the games i missed out on but i still have all the games i have had from the age 3 onward i can play.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

anonymousyam wrote:

i can play games like duckhunt again.

Hate to tell you, but shooter games like Duck Hunt don’t work on HDTVs. I tried it and those ducks kept flying away. It doesn’t work. You will need an old CRT TV to play those kind of games.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

ResidentEvil7 wrote:

Hate to tell you, but shooter games like Duck Hunt don’t work on HDTVs. I tried it and those ducks kept flying away. It doesn’t work. You will need an old CRT TV to play those kind of games.

I know and that is why i am planning on putting a early to mid 2000’s small CRT in my bedroom on the side so in case i want to play the retro consoles on original hardware (not the lcd one).

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

ResidentEvil7 wrote:

Hate to tell you, but shooter games like Duck Hunt don’t work on HDTVs.

That’s because the nintendo gun looks for a precisely timed flash on the screen. CRT’s can handle that timing because they just dump the signal sent to them directly into the scanning electron beam. Modern flat panel displays always have to do some signal decoding first before the data sent to them can be thrown up onto the screen. That delay f~~~s with the nintendo system’s timing. LCDs also have pixel lag which prevents sharp enough flashes for the nintendo gun to work.

You might be able to get it to work with a very fast plasma screen running at native resolution, but probably not. Most seem to do a lot of gratuitous and unnecessary signal buffering and decoding even when they don’t need to.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

sidecar wrote:

You might be able to get it to work with a very fast plasma screen running at native resolution, but probably not. Most seem to do a lot of gratuitous and unnecessary signal buffering and decoding even when they don’t need to.

Nope you need the response and the light of the CRT to use the zapper along with the robot if you have it.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

anonymousyam wrote:

Nope you need the response and the light of the CRT to use the zapper along with the robot if you have it.

A good plasma panel is actually faster than a CRT. You could probably get a plasma panel to work if you found a way to strip it down and drive it directly from an NTSC decoder. Incidentally this would probably also be a very good way of burning a permanent ghost image of duck hunt into your panel if you played it for too long. Part of the image processing routines in most plasma displays that delay the image response are for pixel rotation to prevent screen burn in.

I wonder if a DLP display would be fast enough? They’d probably have the same problems with image processing delays, but maybe there might be one with a “game mode” that could work.

How do the various emulators handle the light gun problem? I suspect a rewrite for the Wii uses those motion controllers which might be able to approximate the gun’s accuracy. The gun, since it received a signal from a flashing mask of the target on the screen, had inherently accurate aiming.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

sidecar wrote:

. You could probably get a plasma panel to work if you found a way to strip it down and drive it directly from an NTSC decoder. Incidentally this would probably also be a very good way of burning a permanent ghost image of duck hunt into your panel if you played it for too long.

This is why even if you could use it with a plasma TV to not use it. Its far easier just to buy a CRT then to use the Nintendo on it rather then to start messing with a Plasma TV just so you might be able to play it but to likely burn the image on the screen.

sidecar wrote:

How do the various emulators handle the light gun problem? I suspect a rewrite for the Wii uses those motion controllers which might be able to approximate the gun’s accuracy. The gun, since it received a signal from a flashing mask of the target on the screen, had inherently accurate aiming.

I do not know to be honest since i do use light gun games on emulators but i’m pretty sure emulators have options to use the mouse or maybe even a usb light gun in order to play the games.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

anonymousyam wrote:

Its far easier just to buy a CRT then to use the Nintendo on it rather then to start messing with a Plasma TV just so you might be able to play it but to likely burn the image on the screen.

For now. However CRTs are getting more and more scarce these days. There may soon come a day when that isn’t an option. Is anyone even still making them?

anonymousyam wrote:

but i’m pretty sure emulators have options to use the mouse or maybe even a usb light gun in order to play the games.

They’d have to be more than just an emulator to use a mouse. They’d have to do at least a little re-writing of the code from the ROM to make that work. And a USB light gun would still need that re-write, because the original zapper took advantage of a quirk of the NTSC standard on CRTs to work.

In the original, whenever the console detected a trigger pull, it would blank out the entire screen for one NTSC frame except for white masks of the targets. Then the targets would themselves go black in either the next field or the one after. So the gun would look for a flash of light at the tight time to know it was on target, and the duration of the flash would tell the console which target it was on. If you pay close attention to the game in a dark room you can even see these flashes.

With the right hardware you could reproduce those flashes with LEDs to cheat and get a 100% score.

Without a fast enough response time to get the flash timing’s right you can’t use the original, unmodified duck hunt code. Especially with USB because you’d be adding in the USB delay to the display delay. You would have to find some other way to ensure the gun is on target, and that requires modifying the duck hunt code.

[RennieParticipant]

I’ve scrapped all my CRT’s except for one and it just sits in the basement because it’s huge and heavy.

I just use emulators for game consoles. PCSXR is good enough that I beat most of Gran Turismo II on it.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

sidecar wrote:

For now. However CRTs are getting more and more scarce these days. There may soon come a day when that isn’t an option. Is anyone even still making them?

Nope ever since 2007 when the government mandated that by June of 2009 that TV’s must be made digital however in foreign country’s some still use the old analog set up.

As for getting CRT’s they are easy nowadays with thift shops, yardsales, flee markets and good will since a s~~~load of them were made from the 30’s on that still support some form of gaming (for example older games used the screws and the mid 80’s to early 00’s consoles supported the RF output).

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[LexParticipant 117]

I have personally had luck with the raspberry pi….
I did have a large retro collection. Though as life happens that was “lost”. The Pi is a nice alternative to upscale emulation with a decent navigation setup, and easily connect a Xbox controller for comfortable playing in front of the TV.

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-retro-game-console-498561192

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

anonymousyam wrote:

As for getting CRT’s they are easy nowadays with thift shops, yardsales, flee markets and good will since a s~~~load of them were made from the 30’s on that still support some form of gaming (for example older games used the screws and the mid 80’s to early 00’s consoles supported the RF output).

You can expect that supply to dry up eventually.

Lex wrote:

I have personally had luck with the raspberry pi….

I run retropie myself. But we’re specifically talking about running old nintendo games that depended on specific hardware like the light gun, and those are not easily emulated. sure you can rewrite them to use the mouse, but it doesn’t have the same feel as the original gun.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

sidecar wrote:

You can expect that supply to dry up eventually.

This is why you get them while they last.

sidecar wrote:

I run retropie myself. But we’re specifically talking about running old nintendo games that depended on specific hardware like the light gun, and those are not easily emulated. sure you can rewrite them to use the mouse, but it doesn’t have the same feel as the original gun.

All you really need is a rom hack and yes it sure hell won’t feel the same.

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

anonymousyam wrote:

All you really need is a rom hack and yes it sure hell won’t feel the same.

I’ve been thinking about that, actually. It shouldn’t be that difficult to put a small CCD camera into a nintendo zapper. Even 640×480 should be sufficient so long as it’s fast. And the sprites in duck hunt and other such games are fairly simple. With a little image recognition intelligence embedded in the gun and a slight rom hack to tell it to wait for hit confirmation from the gun instead of just pulse timing, you probably could get the original look and feel. Delayed by a few milliseconds or so, but that’s hardly noticeable.

I doubt the market is big enough to justify any mass production, and Nintendo would probably sue your ass off in any case, but it seems doable.

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