Guys I bought a new 70" Vizio 4k television on the 22nd of October. It does not recognize the traditional plugs into the composite side even though my old 50 inch Vizio 1080p tv does. I bought a composite to hdmi converter and the picture looks great on most games, but with slight bounce. Super Bomberman 2 menus bounce, Road Rash 64 menus bounce, and games like Zelda for the NES really bounce. Best Buy claims that there is no way to run a traditional system on a new tv but that does not seem accurate. Can anyone suggest anything that might help me out? I have approximately 5 days before my 14 day return policy runs out. I love the new tv, it looks absolutely breath taking on a Xbox One S, but classic gaming is just as important to me.
For classic systems get a CRT tv. Or you can play them via emulation on a 4k tv.
What I mean is, they weren't made for these tvs and these manufactures don't care about making these tvs compatible with 20 year old systems. It's sad.
nesrocks wrote:
For classic systems get a CRT tv.
Who still makes or even repairs those? I called a TV repair shop when my last CRT died, but they said they no longer had the parts to repair a CRT TV.
tepples wrote:
nesrocks wrote:
For classic systems get a CRT tv.
Who still makes or even repairs those? I called a TV repair shop when my last CRT died, but they said they no longer had the parts to repair a CRT TV.
Here in Brazil you can get a CRT tv for nothing everywhere (people are giving them away). I don't know the situation elsewhere.
For now, the best option seems to be keeping a CRT TV around exclusively for retro gaming, but it's true that eventually it won't be possible to repair them anymore. As for composite to HDMI converters, the consensus is that only the XRGB Mini, which is prohibitively expensive for many people, is capable of correctly handling the signals generated by old consoles and computers.
I can play games pretty well. Such as Road Rash 64. The game plays perfectly fine its just the menu seems to bounce a little. Bomberman 2 SNES plays perfectly fine except the menu and the top left hand corner of the score board has a little bounce as well. Games like Zelda NES however the entire screen really bounces.
Whats your guys thoughts on why a 70" 4k vizio does not recognize rca plugs but my 50 inch 1080p Vizio does?
Also thoughts on buying a Retron 5? I can get one for as low as $139.99 at Game Stop and use all sorts of store credit trade ins ect to help pad the bill just for games that do not play well on a 4k.
http://www.gamestop.com/consoles/retron ... tem/128223
Because the RetroN 5 is based on emulation technology, it has to dump an entire NES game to RAM before playing it. In order to do this, it is believed to recognize a game's mapper by dumping its fixed bank and comparing its hash value to those of known games. (This differs from Holy Diver Batman's approach of recognizing a mapper through the behavior of its nametable mirroring registers.) Thus it may require firmware updates to play new NES games released after Wario's Woods.
NYMike wrote:
I can play games pretty well. Such as Road Rash 64. The game plays perfectly fine its just the menu seems to bounce a little. Bomberman 2 SNES plays perfectly fine except the menu and the top left hand corner of the score board has a little bounce as well. Games like Zelda NES however the entire screen really bounces.
Is the aspect ratio correct? Aren't there any interlacing issues when the screen scrolls or when sprites blink?
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Whats your guys thoughts on why a 70" 4k vizio does not recognize rca plugs but my 50 inch 1080p Vizio does?
I believe this is the tendency. Cable television has gone fully digital, so have camcorders, VCRs are gone, and DVD/Blu-Ray players have had HDMI output for a good while. There's little reason for TVs to continue supporting composite video. The only people who still need it are us retro gaming nerds, and that's a very niche crowd that TV manufacturers really don't give a damn about.
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Also thoughts on buying a Retron 5?
If you're OK with emulation and you think the price is fair, go for it. Personally, I'd much rather get a Raspberry Pi if I decided to go the emulation route. More systems supported, ROM files are used directly (i.e. no firmware updates needed to play new games), and so on.
NYMike wrote:
Guys I bought a new 70" Vizio 4k television on the 22nd of October. It does not recognize the traditional plugs into the composite side even though my old 50 inch Vizio 1080p tv does. I bought a composite to hdmi converter and the picture looks great on most games, but with slight bounce. Super Bomberman 2 menus bounce, Road Rash 64 menus bounce, and games like Zelda for the NES really bounce. Best Buy claims that there is no way to run a traditional system on a new tv but that does not seem accurate. Can anyone suggest anything that might help me out? I have approximately 5 days before my 14 day return policy runs out. I love the new tv, it looks absolutely breath taking on a Xbox One S, but classic gaming is just as important to me.
Someone suggested the Framemeister Mini. It is really quite a good upscaler for old video games, though it costs as much as a modern game console. It's hard to do any better than it without HDMI built into the console (e.g. Retro AVS).
As for 4k TVs and gaming, this is probably not a good idea in general. The TV market is always primarily focused on non-interactive video. 4K requires more processing power to prepare the screen, and it's newer technology, which I have no doubt means more problems with lag etc. when it comes to games. (I could be wrong about this, though, and I'm sure it varies from model to model, some might actually have a gaming focus in mind.)
If I was looking for a TV, I'd probably spend the money on a good 1080p TV instead that has been reviewed well with a gaming perspective. (Personally, I don't really understand the concept of "4K" in a consumer television, even at 70".)
You keep saying "bounce", what does that mean, exactly? What is a menu that bounces?
Expecting 262.5 hsyncs per vsync but getting 262 could cause the scanline counter in the TV to drift out of sync with that in the PPU until it gets so far off that the TV instantly snaps the picture back into sync. I've seen this cumulative error followed by instant snapping back happen even on some brands of CRT.
I get this kind of "bounce" on my CRT when I connect consoles through the RF port (it doesn't happen on composite), which is the only option for the top loader NES and the Master System II (III in Brazil).
I would like to post a video here online to show what its doing. Is there any easy way to do it without making a video, uploading it to Youtube and then posting here?
Do you have web space anywhere?
OK so I took a few videos and my camera has a extremely hard time picking up on the errors. I fooled with the settings on the TV a bit and its not as noticeable off the vivid setting and full screen stretched image. The owner of my local retro store bought a new 4k tv for his Xbox One S as well (completely different model and manufacturer) and hooked his system up through the coax and has slight pixelization as well on certain games. I guess its just the nature of the beast when dealing with 4k.
I am going to try to get my hands on a coax to hdmi converter and see what happens. I would say a good 85-90% of games play ok its just certain load screens and menus. Eventually I guess I will have to pick up a system like the Retron 5 or give up and stop using cartridges and just go emulation.
NYMike wrote:
Eventually I guess I will have to pick up a system like the Retron 5 or give up and stop using cartridges and just go emulation.
The Retron 5 IS emulation, it just dumps your cartridges every time you play. Between emulation and emulation, I'd rather go with the Raspberry Pi, which supports more systems and loads ROM files directly.
I got myself a pretty new LG 55" 4K tv and my NES & Famicom AV works fine using the RCA-connectors so I guess I'm lucky.
4k resolution is technically useless, because the human eye cannot see any difference with a 1080p resolution. In order to see the difference, you'd need a televisor which is something like 6 meters wide. It is something purely commerical. It'd be the same thing as recording sound at 88200 Hz instead of 44100Hz for instance.
Bregalad wrote:
It'd be the same thing as recording sound at 88200 Hz instead of 44100Hz for instance.
People are using 96KHz or something these days though, aren't they?
I just went 1080p a couple of years ago, I'm not going 4k any time soon. Too little content for to much money, IMO. Waiting solves both of these problems, actually.
It also depends on seating distance.
My desktop PC monitor at work has 1920×1080 pixels and 24" (60 cm) diagonal visible image size. This 24" represents √(1920²+1080²) = 2203 pixels, for a pixel density of about 92 dpi.
An eye or camera works based on projected images, and these enter not as inches but as angles. The angle unit that makes most formulas simplest is the radian. One radian of arc length has the same length as the radius, or the distance from the center to a tangent point. So with the conventional arm's length of 28" (70 cm), we have 2203/24*28 = 2570 pixels per radian.
But an eye rated 20/20 can resolve details down to 1/60 degree, where a degree is π/180 = 1/57.3 of a radian. So we'd 180×60÷π = 3438 pixels per radian to saturate the detail that the retina can perceive, plus a bit more margin to account for occasionally leaning forward.
The difference is that a desktop PC user usually sits closer to the monitor than a living room TV user sits to the TV. This makes 1080p adequate in theory on a TV at a typical living room viewing distance.
Some of the purported advantages of 4K are related to intentional degradation of 1080p video to cut costs. Many providers of streaming 1080p digital video, whether over cable TV, satellite TV, or the Internet, compress the video at a bitrate that loses detail. In particular, common video codecs downsample chroma at 4:2:0 by default, reducing pixels in U and V channels horizontally and vertically by a factor of 2. This causes edges of red or blue objects to become blurry. They compress 4K at a higher bitrate, but then 4:2:0 downsampled chroma at 4K is still 1920x1080, and the compression applied to luma is lighter as well. So if a provider is overcompressing its 1080p stream, its 4K stream will still look better even through a 1080p monitor.
The 96 kHz rate is the native rate of many sound cards' DACs. This allows easy software upsampling of 48 kHz DVD audio, be it on the host PC or on the card's DSP. Digital upsampling before the DAC means the low-pass filter in the analog stage doesn't have to use expensive components to achieve steep rolloff. Long ago, CD players made by Philips used to upsample by 4x (called "oversampling" back then) as a cost-saving measure. This let them get away with using 14-bit DACs, which could be made more cheaply at the time than 16-bit ones, and cheaper analog filtering.
I have a 47" 4K Vizio from 2014, and it refuses to recognize any 240p inputs from a composite or RF video source. However, if I fire up games that use an interlaced mode like RPM racing for the SNES, they will display. Actually I can get the TV to display 240p if I do not connect the ground portion of the cable connector, but the connection is very unstable and the display is extremely noisy.
I have no idea why or how this is even possible... However here goes: Vizio in their quest to cut down on costs removed the coax plug from this model tv and seem to think this is a good idea. Classic gamers and even the average person with coax cable might think differently. I decided to buy a coax to HDMI converter box and somehow it fixed my problems. I have no idea how or why, but games now play 98% properly. Only a few games now have noticeable pulsing. I plugged this device into HDMI 4 port and have the RCA to HMDI converter to HDMI 3. Again no clue how, but it seems like the Coax converter manually adjusted a setting somewhere and now works much better.
NYMike wrote:
I have no idea why or how this is even possible... However here goes: Vizio in their quest to cut down on costs removed the coax plug from this model tv
Which model is this "70" Vizio 4k television", so I can read the published specs and guess an answer to the support question "Where do I plug in the antenna?"
Should be this one I purchased from Best Buy. If its really needed, I can dig out the receipt and double check but at a quick visual glance, it looks right.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/vizio-70-cl ... Id=5609000
As I suspected. From the page: "TV tuner is required and sold separately if you use an external antenna for broadcast TV signals." The product title on that page is also "Display", despite Best Buy mistakenly listing it in its "TVs" category.
Weird. All I know is Best Buy sells it as a "tv". Lets hope that tv/display/monitor ect does not become an interchangeable phrase. I get the feeling that will destroy classic gaming abilities very quickly.
NYMike wrote:
Weird. All I know is Best Buy sells it as a "tv". Lets hope that tv/display/monitor ect does not become an interchangeable phrase. I get the feeling that will destroy classic gaming abilities very quickly.
It's interchangeable as long as you are only talking about the HDMI connection. Most "TV"'s are TN panels unless they explicitly say they support rec.2020 . The panels are the same parts that go into the TV's and Monitors. The only thing that "TV"'s have that monitors do not is an analog/digital TV tuner.
I finally broke down and bought a Retron 5. Got crazy lucky (imo). Local Game Stop had one in their district so I asked them to get it shipped to the store. $139.99 + tax brand new 1 year warranty. I have been hoarded Power Up Pro points for a year or two though so I got to use a $50, $25, $15, $10, $5, and another misc $5 off coupon to get it for a meager $32.12. Not too shabby if you ask me. So far I am pretty impressed. It plays SNES games Super Famicom games I tossed in NA shells and even some repros/homebrews/rom hacks. The filters this thing has built in are amazing. On top of that having save states are quite impressive. Going into a HDMI cord blows using a rca to hdmi converter out of the water (cheaper $50 one from Radio Shack).
The bad news? Either a bunch of my INL.com boards either lost their saves or this thing killed their batteries. The carts are only 2-3 years old I am surprised that this many batteries would be bad already (3-5 games). Also some of the rom hacks I have personally made work fine on a SNES/Top loader, and Retro Duo Portable trip errors and will not play at all in the Retron 5. Either way, I am going to fool around a bit more and I will let you guys know how this ends up. I am assuming header issues or checksum errors ect are the culprit.
RetroN 5 dumps a game to determine how to emulate it. For Super NES, Genesis, and Game Boy, the internal header should tell all. (This is at $0134-$014F for Game Boy, $00FFB0-$00FFDF for Super NES, or $000100-$0001FF for Genesis.) But not all ROM hacks have valid headers. And NES games weren't required to have a header unless released for the Famicom Box. This means it has to dump the fixed bank first and then compare it against known games to know what mapper to emulate.
My Vizio 4K TV doesn't recognize my NES either
I'll have to buy an adapter sometime soon...
NYMike wrote:
Weird. All I know is Best Buy sells it as a "tv". Lets hope that tv/display/monitor ect does not become an interchangeable phrase. I get the feeling that will destroy classic gaming abilities very quickly.
RF is barely a requirement for enjoying classic games. Other than the very oldest consoles that only support coaxial RF, I would never choose an RF connection.
Hooking up old consoles with higher quality (S-video, component, RGB, even HDMI) inputs is getting easier and cheaper every year.
I don't know what to say. I could plug a NES/SNES/N64 into my 1080p 50 inch Vizio television without issue but this new 70" Vizio 4k does nothing. I even bought the $50 hdmi converter box and the picture jitters. Worse on certain games/sections the picture would just just out for 2-3 seconds. This makes games like Super Mario unplayable. According to Best Buy/Geek Squad/Vizio some of the newer screens like this do not support the 240p at all.
You need a good upscaler. The XRGB Mini/Framemeister is a popular one. Yes it will cost you between $400 and $500 probably but it's a scaler designed for these older systems. Newer TVs mostly don't bother with any analog video connections anymore because all the modern devices pretty much use HDMI now. So a separate unit like the XRGB can be used to deal with that since the TV itself doesn't support it. Even for older TVs that did have analog video support often had poor analog video support which again makes a separate scaler useful.
If you want to use original hardware your options are keeping CRTs around to play them, keeping a decent HDTV around that supports analog video connections to your standard, or getting a separate video scaler unit to hookup to any modern display. Depending on where you live you can possibly get CRT TVs for extremely cheap due to consumers no longer wanting them. You could get a lifetime supply of them.
But if you bought a huge TV you probably want to use it so you should get a scaler like the XRGB.
It's sad really how eventually every CRT will be broken with no way to fix it. Kind of like the CD-I and it's poor design choice to put the battery inside of the RAM chip. Thank god we have emulators.
DementedPurple wrote:
It's sad really how eventually every CRT will be broken with no way to fix it. Kind of like the CD-I and it's poor design choice to put the battery inside of the RAM chip. Thank god we have emulators.
If you keep a CRT around and don't use it, and don't physically damage it, it isn't going to just break on its own.
DementedPurple wrote:
It's sad really how eventually every CRT will be broken with no way to fix it. Kind of like the CD-I and it's poor design choice to put the battery inside of the RAM chip. Thank god we have emulators.
This is no different than any other item mankind has ever made. CRTs can last a very long time. They can be repaired. More importantly they could be manufactured again in the future. But until then you can collect some good CRTs and store them well and they should last. You might have to repair them at some point but you can get a lot of life out of them.
mikejmoffitt wrote:
If you keep a CRT around and don't use it
Things you never use do stop working sometimes.
MottZilla wrote:
CRTs can last a very long time. They can be repaired.
Not if the TV repair shops in your city no longer carry the parts. This has happened to me.
MottZilla wrote:
More importantly they could be manufactured again in the future.
I don't see how, at least until RoHS and foreign counterparts are repealed. Restrictions on manufacture of products containing the element lead (Pb) pose a serious problem for manufacturers of display devices using leaded glass.
tokumaru wrote:
mikejmoffitt wrote:
If you keep a CRT around and don't use it
Things you never use do stop working sometimes.
With electronics it's usually just the capacitors that don't age well with disuse. Easy enough to replace.
MottZilla wrote:
CRTs can last a very long time.
Totally agree with that!!
My parents have a CRT that is almost as old as me!!
One suggestion is to try to find a good CRT technician and ask if you can help him on the repairs for free.
This is how I learned the basics about electronics, I was about 14 back in the day.
That made learning electronics and building my "frankensteins" a little bit easier.
tokumaru wrote:
Things you never use do stop working sometimes.
I also have seem this! Specially with some VCRs and CD/DVD players.
Basically things that have mobile parts and belts on them.
How can it be explained?
Bad storage, maybe??
Electrolythic capacitors need to be used to last. If they stay without use they go bad and have to be reformed, which depending on where the cap is in the circuit can happen on the first power on, but that's not guaranteed to be the case.
CRT itself is not gonna go bad, unless the vacuum somehow gets lost. Cathodes will wear but that takes some 30000 hours to have significant effect, and on TVs with cathode calibration the tube can be used all the way until complete end of life without significant image degradation (some 50k hours). After the end of life period you can boost filament current to squeeze a few more thousand hours out the thing. At that point there will be severe tinting going on during warmup period and brightness will be poor.
Also settings drift over time, you will want to adjust the acceleration (G2) and focus voltages in your CRTs by now, you'll be surprised how much better the image can become by doing so.
In case of DVD players and other semi mechanical things, the rubber parts can go bad. Belts often turn into a nasty goo that stains everything and is really difficult to clean off.
If you enjoy CRTs and want them to last, you really have to become your own CRT technician or find a sucker friend to fix them for you. But to be honest, if the tube and flyback are good, the maintenance isn't really anything so complicated.
TmEE wrote:
Electrolythic capacitors need to be used to last
Interesting! I didn't know that. Thanks!!
mikejmoffitt wrote:
you really have to become your own CRT technician
That's one of the things I'm trying to do.
Unfortunatelly my knowledge is very basic, but I'm trying to learn little by little not forgetting the safety.