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How Modern TVs Ruin Old Games

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Big, fancy LCD and plasma TVs are just wonderful for 360 & PS3 games. But for older games (and some new ones!)- and by old, we mean old - they're not so hot. And this is why.

This write-up by NFG (of the selectbutton forums) goes into astonishing detail on just why fixed-resolution displays aren't up to the job of displaying retro games the way they were meant to be displayed.

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See, old cathode ray tube sets (ie your old TV) could handle the resizing of pixels - which is what your old 8-bit & 16-bit games were made of - just fine. But newer TVs need to digitally "fudge" the picture, and the way they go about fudging it results in a distorted, often ugly image. As you can see above.

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Sure, this won't matter for 90% of you (who probably don't even notice anything wrong), but if this kind of thing gets your goat up, the full run-down is below.

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Aspect Ratios, Scanlines and Modern Displays [via GSW]