Retro Games - Part 2 - The Upscaler

Retro Games - Part 2 - The Upscaler

If you want to connect old gaming consoles with your modern TV, you quickly realize that you have a problem.

Most TV's don't have the S-Video, composite, or SCART inputs that the old consoles support. And if the TVs still have it, they are doing some magical stuff with the signal (on good purpose), which ends in even worse image quality, because they expect a movie image and not a pixel game image.

But what can you do? There are multiple simple and cheap adapters available that simply convert the signal to HDMI. But trust me, that's nothing you want to use, as you will get a mush of pictures displayed on your TV.

What you would like to use are upscalers. As there are many articles and videos about it, I let someone else test and explain it:

I then went for the GBS C Pro for the beginning and one from Kaico. And the first console I played around was the N64.

And now let's see the difference. The first picture is from the GBS C Pro upscaler and the second image is the Kaico Analogue x2 HDMI Adapter for N64.

Both are not too bad... but you can see the colors are better with GBS C Pro and also the aspect ratio is correct.

What I'm still missing is that my N64 is not delivering a S-Video signal. So I need to work with Composite for now. That is a big bummer... but as I have a US version of the N64, I'm struggling to find the correct cable for NTSC.

What's next

Next on my list is S-Video output for my N64. For now, I don't want to mod my console, but maybe later. First I will try out different other options, like cables, scalers, and Co.

Stay tuned!