Why Virtual Console Does Emulation Right
For a geeky but dead-on blog post about why the Wii Virtual Console's emulation is a cut above the rest, you can't do much better than Ben '222b' Turner's in-depth analysis of the matter, as posted on his LiveJournal.
Turner notes of Sim City for the SNES, as emulated on the Wii: "Suffice it to say that, assuming you're on a regular TV (not HD), the game looks 100% exactly like it would on a real SNES. Perhaps better, if you're using the Component cable and haven't seen RGB. This is an achievement that very few recent commercially emulated games can claim."
Wait, and he explains why, too! "Most developers choose to present old, low-res games in a high-res interlaced graphics mode which makes the images appear swimmy, blurry, and sometimes blocky. Basically, 480i sucks for old games. This is not dissimilar to presenting a classic movie in the wrong aspect ratio. An essential, if often overlooked, quality of the original presentation is lost." There's also lots of detail on the widescreen problem.
[Oh, and elsewhere, Racketboy has some overarching impressions of the service, for which two TurboGrafx games are now available, thank the Lord - though someone said the emulation might not be quite as spot on for it. Hopefully they're horribly wrong!]
Comments
I heard the Mega Drive/Genesis sound emulation is off, can anybody confirm or deny that?
Posted by: JamesE | November 22, 2006 1:29 AM
I don't really understand why people are so nostalgic about scanlines. I thought part of the point of emulation was to present the game in a clearer, crisper format.
Posted by: d | November 22, 2006 11:52 PM
Not everyone likes the way emulators change the graphics.
Scanlines, for example, soften an image that would look very blocky without them. After all, if a game's only 320x240 (and that's best-case), that's a really low res! Stone age by PC standards.
The reason it doesn't look like crap is that the scanlines soften and smooth the image. Scanlines may be an accident of interlacing, but they are no less effective at improving low-res image quality for it.
If you disagree and prefer line-doubled images ala PC emulators (as you seem to indicate), that's fine. But a lot of us prefer the original "game on TV" look. To me, filters like EAGLE and 2x SAI and such are just pointless and ugly.
Posted by: Ben | November 23, 2006 12:50 AM