There’s nothing quite like playing retro games on the original hardware they were designed for, but if you try to hook up your NES to a modern 4K TV, the results might be too ugly to handle. That’s where specialized retro upscalers come into the picture.
What Is a Retro Upscaler?
A retro upscaler is a device designed to take the output of a retro gaming system, and then upscale and convert it to look acceptable on modern display devices. These devices do much more than simply multiply pixels, since many retro games were designed for display devices that work on completely different principles than an OLED or LCD TV.
Since game developers targeted the display devices of their time, the games themselves took advantage of the nature of those displays to make the games look as good as possible. So it’s not your imagination that your NES or PlayStation graphics look worse now than they did back in the day; they really aren’t a good match for modern screens. That is, without a retro upscaler.
Retro upscalers come in many varieties with different promises. Some are designed for a specific console or set of consoles, while others are more universal. They can range in price from less than $100 to price tags closer to $1,000. The final results can also be quite variable. Upscalers may need formidable processing power to perform their magic quickly enough to leave the game’s responsiveness and playability unaffected. Suffice it to say that with these devices the rabbit hole can be quite deep!
Why Do We Need Retro Upscalers?
To play a retro game on a retro console using a modern screen, you need some sort of upscaler. If there was no upscaling, the game would be a tiny postage-stamp sized image in the middle of your TV. All modern TVs perform upscaling, but they are generally designed to upscale video signals such as 480p, 720p, and so on to resolution of the TV, such as 1080p or 4K.
So, you might find that the game looks terrible because the TV’s upscaler isn’t simulating the attributes of the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) technology from old TVs. Or there could be so much input latency (the gap between pressing a button and the game responding) after going through the upscaler that games are unplayable. There are also issues where retro consoles switch between different video modes on the fly, which would have been invisible on a CRT, but which can cause the screen to go black or the signal to be lost on a modern TV.
There are numerous small issues like these that are solved by the use of a dedicated retro upscaler.
Are Retro Upscalers Worth the Price?
Whether something is worth the asking price is always a tough question to answer because that’s a value judgement relative to how much you value the function of that device. If you’re a retro game enthusiast, getting the best possible image from your retro console on a modern TV might be highly valuable to you.
First ask yourself whether you would want that upscaler if money were no object. Then, if the answer is “yes,” ask yourself whether the actual asking price still makes you excited for what it can do. For example, one of the most advanced retro upscalers is the RetroTINK-4K, which has a recommended retail price of $750.
That’s a lot of scratch, but it’s also understandable why it costs that much. It’s a niche, small-volume product, that has been engineered to a high standard. It also does a huge number of things and offers excellent flexibility. So if you have multiple retro consoles, it might actually be cheaper than buying multiple specialized units.
Then again, if you only have, for example, a NES or an N64, you might find the price of a specialized upscaler meant for those consoles to be more appealing. And if you only play old consoles occasionally, spending any money for better image quality may not seem worthwhile at all.
If you’re not an original hardware purist, you have many other options as well. For example, you can simply emulate classic games on a PC, or buy modern emulated versions of those games on consoles like the PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch. There are also (rather expensive) FPGAs that almost perfectly replicate original hardware while offering much better performance and native high-resolution output without the need for an additional upscaler.
Alternatively, you can skip this entire song and dance by tracking down an old CRT TV for your vintage console, but that comes with its own set of compromises.