Originally Posted by
Mad-Mike
I tend to prefer CRTs. I own SEVEN now....for PC and console, and all of them work. I paid no money for any of them, they were all free. Three TVs, 4 Monitors. The monitors are for my PCs, the TVs are swapped around, and one TV is a B&W portable from 1987 - 5" of course. Some of them I had to fix (weak tubes, cold solder joints, cracked PCBs, bugs living inside, etc.). Also, as one who owns three 4K TV's, some of which have so much DSP Gaming mode makes playing old games from the CRT age feel like you're trying to
What I prefer for input depends on the console...
ATARI 2600 - RF straight into COAX via one of those 75 Ohm COAX to RCA adapters
NES - Composite with a stereo-splitter offf the NES into the 3 connector cable so on a Stereo TV it comes out of both speakers (consistent volume)
WII - Composite of course
I have a profound hatred of modern TVs for not just gaming, but just about everything. 4K Smart TV's make me want to Rage quit sometimes trying to access a basic YouTube video. I'm a damn good I.T. guy but I have my limits, and closed source O/Ses designed to run heavily on-rails software for watching basic videos, run through a barriage of custom Digital Signal Processing (DSP) - hence lag with anything "analog", drives me nuts. Our Samsung is slower than a 286 running Windows, even clearing the Cache, mTCP suite on a 512K XT finds an IP Address faster than it's WiFi does. Our TCL I've only put the Wii on because the $300 Sharp has so much input lag, even in game mode, anything on it is almost unplayable. The Sharp has my RetroPie....which is a big reason I've been moving away from Emulation....
RetroPie is fun if you're a tweaker, or a tuner IMHO. I enjoy it more when I'm in the mood to tweak and tune plaintext settings in most cases, it's saving grace is MAME, but I could literally do that in DOS on my CRT TV if I wanted to using one of my many vintage PCs. But trying to play 2 player games with the wife is an extercise in frustration. Either a key combo no longer works, or the controllers change players if I have to reboot, or the input lag is so bad we can't play as good as we do on actual hardware on my old TVs, or even the Wii. The Wii is my favorite source of emulation TBH.
Plus, to me, I grew up with this stuff on 13-27" CRT Televisoins and monitors. Nothing takes me back as much as playing video games on an old TV on an actual game console from the past, as the designers intended.
On the subject of RF, my Magnavox TV is RF only, as is my Rhapsody 5" B&W. I don't mind RF either, I swapped though because my Mitsubishi 27" has a cool feature that my old 19" 1984 Mitsubishi Console had - a passthrough that allows me top record ANY input to a computer easily using a Composite USB capture device. Atari 2600, yep, NES, youbetcha, Tandy 1000, yep, Wii, yeah, that too. It's nice to be able to record the TV, and not have to spend extended amounts of time shuffling cables around or dealing with lag to capture.