/vr/ - Retro Games

Does this even count as running on original hardware anymore?

I like RGB/HDMI mods mind you. I prefer them actually, CRTs are not being made anymore and are not going to last forever, the last one rolled off the assembly line about 20 years ago, and they weren't even good ones by that point but the cheapest of the cheap.

Nothing against those who still prefer a CRT, I just feel it's better to try to get my retro systems to play nice with newer displays than chase after these things, especially thanks to idiots scalping every shitty old tv they can pull out of their mom's attic for prices as if it's some state of the art Trinitron PVM.

Most of the RGB or HDMI mods more or less either take the analog signals that the system naturally uses to create the video and output it as RGB or converted to HDMI before it goes through circuitry to convert it to composite/RF. It's still the console rendering the image, just that the mod takes those signals after it has rendered the image and outputs them over newer and higher fidelity connections before the console outputs them over the lower quality ones.

But the NES is too simple and old to do that, the mods have to piggyback off the PPU or both the PPU and CPU and reconstruct/re-render the image themselves in order to output it over anything higher than composite. It's not the console really rendering the RGB or HDMI image anymore, but the mod acting as basically it's PPU. Are you even really playing on actual NES hardware at that point?