God bless the reverse engineers and emulator developers.
The dolphin team is unironically a group of some of the best software engineers I can think of, solving problems outside the scope of basically any standard industry practice for free and getting results
The RPCS3 team who figured out how to emulate the wacky core design of the PS3 are truly mentally unwell and I hope they never get better because the world needs more people like them.
The blog post they did showing how they do a sort of regression testing is still some of the coolest devops I've seen.
Check the FifoCI stuff here.
Switch games look and run better on PC too.
Very true, Sword and Shield at 60fps is vastly superior to the 20-30 fps you get on Switch.
Not to mention that 60 FPS is at 4K.
Ah, Harry Picard and the revenge of the king. Big fan of that movie.
"Now that we've taken the picture for your Internet points dad, can I back to playing on the PlayStation now?"
Haha not really. He actually switched to Mario party. He’s also really into Paper Mario TTYD.
Yo, that laptop looks like it might be suffocating? We just gonna ignore that? Lol
Genuine question because I like retro games, what is the point of 4k here? It's blocky pixelated Mario kart, is there mods to update textures or something?
It just looks clean. Lowpoly games benefit from running at high resolutions to a surprising degree. The better the art, the more it benefits from being shown with as little obfuscation as possible. There are texture packs and shaders available for popular old games, but even without them, it's often worth it to ramp up the resolution, even far beyond 4K. I've played some old games at ridiculous resolutions like 5k or more, eliminating even a hint of jagged edges. You can then add a touch of retro flair through scanline and bloom shaders.
If you play these old games in fullhd etc, it actually feels like the game you remember. If you play it in original resolution it's nothing like that.
Agreed. That plus the fact that SD on an HD screen looks even worse. HD texture and up scaling really breathes a new life into the games.
It's also because it's missing that pattern CRT screens gave to old games
Modern LCD's don't have a pattern like CRT
I think their is an option for a simulated CRT pattern in some emulators but I'm not familiar with it
As others have mentioned, there are two schools of thought.
Crisp 4K rendering, no jagged lines, higher details added in textures, etc
Or emulating the look of a CRT by using high density displays to create the same look.
https://youtu.be/-B5ebucZ69s?si=0lDLAWdMlN77VQen goes into it a bit. This shows off a device for actual consoles. But the same principal applies when doing it in software for emulators.
I’m a bit in both worlds. I think that the split is at HD games. Up to SNES a CRT really makes things look as they were designed, but once you reach 3D games the low rez really feels like a limitation game designers had to deal with.
The textures themselves remain at their original resolution. But anything that was 3d rendered in the original console (like the karts and characters in Mario kart) will now have crisp lines. Additionally many emulators will support some form of texture scaling to make the original low texture stuff look marginally better. On a system like N64 it’s a toss up on looking significantly better. But on a PS3 emulator for example, since many environments are rendered in 3d, it’s a considerable improvement
Yea. There are Hd textures made by fans. And the 3D is generated in 4K. No pixels in sight!!!
Apple doesn't even make a 4k macbook....
There’s a 4K tv right above. We actually connected the computer to it not long after the photo.
Things still look better at 4k displayed on a 1440p screen than they do at native 1440p. If you have the power excess, why not?
I have a 2TB ssd on my PC that is almost full with all kinds of retro games. All the way up to the PS3. It's crazy how good these games look on my 4k monitor compared to those tube TV's I played those games on back in the day. Lol
btw the PS5 controller works flawlessly on the Nintendo Switch.
I played through several GameCube titles using the original Wii along with the Wii2HDMI dongle. I thought the games still looked great even on HD televisions. Burnout 2 is still awesome.
Adding to this you can use Playstation and other controllers with Nintendont. Pretty useful if you have a Wii and want to play GameCube games but don't have the controllers.
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