The Quest for the Perfect Retro Game Experience
Jeremy looks back on a decade-long mission to relive the classics amidst changing technology, and explores what drives other like-minded enthusiasts.
This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.
In too deep
While my own quest for an authentic experience puts much less at stake than Oliver's crusade for a spot on Twin Galaxy's leader boards or Cifaldi's desire to perfectly recreate NES classics for modern hardware, I nevertheless have been motivated by a desire for precision. As I undertook my journey to explore and document the Game Boy library last year, I quickly found myself abandoning emulation and even Virtual Console (for the handful of Game Boy titles available through that service) in favor of playing the games on an actual Game Boy. To some degree, I'm attempting to create a chronicle — a piece of historical preservation — of the Game Boy, and such a task demands authenticity.
For all its deficiencies, the Game Boy hardware was the intended medium for which Game Boy designers crafted their software. Emulating Game Boy software on a PC presents those games through a filter that was never conceived of by programmers in the '90s. They could only target original hardware, and the flaws of the handheld became an integral part of the experience they created. Game Boy's blurry, passive-matrix LCD screen was the sort of thing players tolerated rather than enjoyed, but savvy developers knew how to use the ghosting and other artifacts of the cheap LCD screen to their advantage. Those elements don't come through via emulation (even in applications that attempt to replicate the Game Boy's LCD side-effects), so in order to gain a proper appreciation for the system's successes and failures, you really need to play the games on their original platform.
Obviously, it's impossible to capture truly faithful video of play on an actual Game Boy, so I decided to settle for the most minimal compromise I could come manage: Capturing instead from a Super Game Boy, the Nintendo-made device that essentially crammed Game Boy hardware inside a Super NES cartridge to output portable software to television. While this obviously makes for a different experience from playing on a 2-inch monochrome LCD screen, it offers a different kind of authenticity.
Or so I thought. My original plan was to use a RetroN 5 for Super Game Boy capture, but that didn't pan out. Despite the device's ability to play Game Boy and Super NES software, it couldn't actually play Game Boy software via Super NES: The Super Game Boy didn't have an entry in the RetroN's software profile. Reportedly a firmware update has rectified this issue, but I had already moved along to what I figured would be the next best thing: Capturing from a Hyperkin Retro Duo Portable, a self-contained system-on-a-chip device capable of playing Super NES games.
It quickly became clear that this approach, despite using genuine game software, was actually worse than simple PC emulation. Despite its high degree of software compatibility, the Retro Duo was nevertheless functioning as an emulator. Worse, it only allowed composite video output, so the media I captured looked terrible; after being processed, compressed, and scaled by YouTube, videos displayed all sorts of distracting artifacts, from fuzzy edges to excessive dot-crawl to shimmering colors.
After weeks of complaints, advice, coaxing, and even some generous contributions, I eventually made the transition to a professional-grade setup: A real Super NES, modded to output high-quality RGB video, running through an upscaler to high-definition. Despite my initial skepticism about the expense involved, the results spoke for themselves:
However, this sort of fidelity comes at a considerable cost. Between an RGB-modded Super NES, a Framemeister upscaler [see the Making the Connection companion feature], and a Super Game Boy 2 imported from Japan — the American Super Game Boy has a speed discrepancy of about 3% from the original Game Boy hardware, making the imported device more authentic — my setup for recording Game Boy footage represents roughly $500 of hardware. The Analogue NT has inspired wave after wave of amateur price comparisons in response to its sticker price, but the reality is that a comparable setup made of properly tuned "normal" hardware is hardly cheap. On the contrary; until recently, the only way to add RGB output to an NES was to scavenge the picture processing unit from PlayChoice-10 hardware, a single chip that could cost upwards of $250 in addition to the cost of the NES or Famicom itself. There are less expensive alternatives now, but make no mistake: It requires a serious investment in any case.
That, unfortunately, is the nature of the beast. It's a reality Oliver has encountered in her quest to hunt down the optimal Splatterhouse experience, too.
"I do not own a Splatterhouse machine," she admits. "Unfortunately, due to the rarity of the board — being a horror game made in 1988, when there was little to no market for such an 'adult' game in many gaming establishments — it is a rather expensive PCB to come across. The machine I use at Galloping Ghost Arcade is the first one I had ever seen in the wild in my entire life. If I managed to find a PCB, I'm sure I could come up with the cabinet, but as it stands it's just not financially reasonable for me to pursue. I have, however, been trying to save up for something like an Astro or a Blast City cabinet."
The choice of an old generation
What precisely defines a perfect gaming setup varies from person to person, each to his or her own tastes and needs. Arcade junkies hoard boards, where a single PCB for a rare or highly sought-after game can easily eclipse the cost of an RGB-modded console and a Framemeister combined — and that doesn't include a working cabinet to house it. Some console enthusiasts take a scattershot approach and try to acquire a little of everything, while others specialize on a single system or even more selective groupings.
And then there's the question of how to display the games: On a massive HDTV? Or by wrestling with aging, cumbersome, obsolete cathode ray tube technology for a more faithful presentation? Thankfully, the technology exists to make both formats viable — though enthusiasts universally agree that a high-end CRT broadcast monitor such as the Sony PVM is the way to go.
"If you have the room, and your significant other won't kill you, then a CRT is the best option in my opinion," says baphomet. "It's a softer picture compared to an upscaler, but it's also lagless. Different colors will cause the phosphors to burn lighter or darker, which in turn will cause the scanlines to be thicker or thinner in certain areas. It reminds me of how arcade monitors looked growing up.
"For an existing HD setup where you don't want to put a large CRT for aesthetic or space reasons, the XRGB Mini is the way to go. Of the upscalers on the market, it produces the best image quality for 240p/480i content. You get those razor-sharp pixels, much like an emulator, which a lot of people want. You also have a scan line option that gives a pretty good, and adjustable, effect.
Cifaldi agrees that for old games, the older display tech works best. "As for my preference, I tend to play on a Sony PVM," he says. "I use my XRGB Mini when I'm capturing footage. Both have pros and cons, but you really can't go wrong with either."
At first glance, this obsession with fidelity and forgotten technology might seem almost cult-like. But ultimately, I suspect, it's simply a different manifestation of the fixation on 1080p/60-fps that inspires so many howling mobs when it comes to current-gen consoles. PVMs and RGB cables simply offer pursuit of a different sort of perfection: The optimal experience possible within the limits of '80s and '90s tech rather than for 2013's top-of-the-line consoles.
"Since I'm not too much of a collector when it comes to old games, I've replaced that hobby by being more focused on making old games look and sound as good as they can," Cifaldi says. "I focus most of my 'hobby' time on getting old games to run with the cleanest signal possible on my gorgeous Sony PVM-2530 monitor, with properly calibrated colors and all. Sometimes I think I spend more time playing with that stuff than I do playing with games, but I don't mind. It's fun for me!"
By no means is that level of precision necessary to enjoy a game like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3. They run perfectly well on Virtual Console, and the soft edges and muted colors of Nintendo's official emulation won't bother most people. But for the compulsively detail-oriented, or for those who simply want to recapture the magic of bygone days of gaming, the realization that old games can look better can be a powerful motivator.
"I'm the kind of person who has a really hard time watching a movie in standard definition," says Cifaldi. "It's not because I think it's ugly or I spend time picking apart its flaws — I lived with standard definition for most of my life, I'm fine with it — it's more that I know there's an HD version SOMEWHERE and I'm missing out. I guess the reason I play old games on original hardware on a CRT monitor is related to that. I respect games so much that I want to play them as 'authentically' as I can feasibly manage.
"I got into RGB and RGB modding like most other people," says baphomet. "I had been on the Neo-Geo board as well as the shmups board and would see these amazing quality pictures of games running on member's arcade monitors or broadcast monitors. Something about those pixel-perfect images with super thick scan lines was really amazing. It was not only appreciating the games, or even the graphics of the games, but the hardware behind them that could make them look so absolutely perfect. I eventually got enough space to purchase an RGB monitor for myself.
"A good amount of the classic systems already support RGB, so things like your Genesis, Saturn, SNES, PlayStations (and so on) only needed to have a cable purchased to get the benefits of RGB. Then you have this handful of other consoles that max out at S-video or composite. In the case of the TurboGrafx or NES top-loader, RF even. So you have a handful of systems that look, literally, perfect on your monitor, and this other handful that don't look as good as you know they can. You start looking into all the information you can find about how to get more out of them...."
"We didn't develop [Analogue NT] to cater to the 'average gamer' or sell 100,000 units," says Taber. "The NT was developed to be a legacy product. We designed it to be the best in its class, with no compromises. As a company, if these are the kind of products you're interested in producing, it's naturally going to come at a higher price tag.
"We intimately care about making beautiful things. There is a quote from the designer Saul Bass that has always resonated with me: 'I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don't give a damn whether the client understands that that's worth anything, or that the client thinks it's worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It's worth it to me. It's the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.'
"Ultimately, there is a basic rule of business: It doesn't matter how many people don't get it. It only matters how many people do."