Allo .gs. I'm going to buy a Nintendo 64 for someone as a gift. I want it to connect to a Sony XF9005 TV.
I'm aware I'll need something like an A/V to HDMI converter, but I know these things can look shite if you don't do it right. Obviously it doesn't need to be crystal, but a good picture and sound would be nice. Is there a smart way of connecting it?
After having a Google I realise there are some interesting custom kits out there, like https://www.game-tech.us/product/ultrahdmi/, but that's a bit above my effort threshold at the moment. Any other recommendations?
The coloured cables, you mean? As long as they haven't been removed in the most recent generation of flat screens... Even searching on specs websites hasn't made this entirely clear.
It's not my television so I can't check physically, unfortunately.
They do specific ones aimed at the retro gamer. So long as you get one of those I don't think you can go far wrong, they usually also do stuff like compensate for frame delay, which is apparently a thing because analogue TVs at the time worked differently with the frame rate. You might have mixed results with a general purpose one.
When I was into retro games a few years ago the thing to get was called a Framemeister, but I'd imagine it has all moved on a bit now.
I'm going to start this by saying that it's going to look like absolute arse unless you pay a lot of money. It looking blurry and shitty might all be part of the fun, but if you're interested in why your childhood memories are going to look like a smudgy mess on that TV then read on, I guess.
Converting old analogue signals to HD digital ones is just massively more difficult than you'd imagine. Upscaling a DVD to make it look "ok" on a 4K set requires a lot of post-processing, and the end result isn't ever great. All modern sets that have analogue inputs are tuned to this use case - they will process the fuck out of composite video in an attempt to make DVD/TV look passable.
Unfortunately, this means that the situation is significantly worse for retro games. The aforementioned post-processing tends to add hundreds of milliseconds of latency, which makes anything other than turn-based games pretty much unplayable. This can sometimes be fixed to some degree by enabling "game mode" on the TV, and that may be good enough if you're just messing around and don't care how things look. It doesn't address the issue of scan conversion and upscaling, i.e. how to take a ~320x240 analogue signal and turn it into a 3840x2160 digital signal, in 16ms or less. The Framemeister >>22842 mentioned does a good job of upscaling, and the OSSC is also great, but neither of these are the kind of thing you'd give as a gift.
To make matters worse, an un-modded N64 doesn't output anything better than s-video, and that TV doesn't seem to have anything other than composite. That'll be composite "240p", and most consumer sets make a right fucking mess of upscaling this. Early 3D games get a particularly hard time of this as the aliasing (jaggies on polygon edges) tend to be much more noticeable than in 2D art.
>I'm aware I'll need something like an A/V to HDMI converter
There are no cheap composite to HDMI converters that are worth buying; they are simply the same chip (very likely worse, in fact) that's in that Sony TV.
Getting an N64 to look anything other than absolute shite on a modern set is really pretty hard. I'll almost always go with the original hardware for nostalgia purposes, but for N64, I'll go for an emulator-loaded laptop every time (not least because of the framerate increases).
