Vintage Games Available Again

The Nintendo Switch has a massive game library that includes a lot of ports of classic games, keeping these games available for a new audience to discover. Often, they include faster loading, wide-screen HD graphics, fast forward, or other modern, quality-of-life improvements to make playing these games more enjoyable.

Some of these ports look great with proper scaling and sharp pixels. Some of them miss the mark with smeary upscales and bad UI choices. Almost none of them have good scanline or CRT filters.

RetroTINK CRT Filters FTW

This is where the RetroTINK 5x (RT5x) comes in handy. It can make games look like they are on a CRT by adding scanlines and shadow masks. (I’ve done this with the Wii on the Konami eShop ReBirth trilogy games with great success.)

These filters will dim the image, so you may want to up the brightness on your TV or enable the RT5x’s HDR setting if your TV Supports it. Here’s an example of how good these filters are. One photo is of a PVM and the other is on an LG OLED TV. Can you tell which is witch?

Setting up the Switch

To get a Switch signal into the RT5x, an HDMI to component converter is needed. I used this Portta HDMI to Component Converter. These are inexpensive and lag-free. To get a compatible signal for the RT5x, the Switch will need its TV Resolution set to 720p.

RetroTINK 5x Settings

The idea here is to take the image from the Switch and apply CRT filters to it using the Post-Processing settings you like. The Scaling/Cropping options help make the image fill the screen (these will vary per game). The Switch puts out a widescreen image, so Horizontal Sampling needs to be set to 16:9.

If the game was originally 240p, set the Pre-scaler to 1/3 in order to cut the Switch resolution from 720p to 240p. That will make scanlines line up with the pixels and give a more authentic look (That’s the idea, anyway). If the image doesn’t look quite right after setting things up and applying CRT filters, you might have to adjust the picture up or down one pixel to get scan lines to line up with the down-scaled pixel grid. You can do this in the Scaling/Crop settings of the RT5x and change the V Position one or two units to get everything lined up.

If the game was originally 480i, set the Pre-scaler to 1/2. This drops the resolution to 480p.

Omitted settings are the default. Your setup will vary, so use this as a starting point. Be sure to try out the Post-Processing Presets to find the look you prefer.

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- Output Resolution
    - 1080p (fill) 
- Scaling/Cropping (Adjust these settings as needed for each game.)
    - V Position: 0 (You may need to adjust this 1 to get better pixel alignment depending on the game.)
- Horizontal Sampling 
    - Generic 16:9 (The Switch is widescreen)
- Interpolation/De-Interlacing
    - Pre-scaler: 1/3 (For games that were originally 240p.set to 1/2 for 480i games.)
- Post-Processing
    - Preset: PVM-600 
- HDMI Output
    - V-Sync: Framelock
    - Colorspace: RGB Full

Screenshot Comparisons

I took a few games and tried to make them match the originals as close as I could. The results weren’t too bad.

Final Fantasy VII

(Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII Remastered - Twin Pack)

This game (and FFVII) works really well with this technique. Text is sharp and readable. The characters seem to have more detail than the original game, but still look good downscaled. The downscaling makes the sharp polygons match the low-resolution of the backgrounds giving a more cohesive look. I prefer to play this one on the Switch, especially with with added features like fast-forward, one hit kills, and disabling random encounters.

Grandia

(Grandia HD Collection)

This game was butchered with all the lovely sprite art getting the blurry treatment. I guess “HD” means no pixels allowed! Widescreen is nice, but I couldn’t ever get the scaling of this game to align with scanlines.The text just never looks right. Grandia HD has no added features other than widescreen, so I still prefer playing this on the original hardware.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time

(The Cowabunga Collection)

This is a very good port with sharp pixels and proper scaling. I was able to get it to look really close to the original SNES game. I turned off the game borders and set Screen Size to Full. It’s really close, but I still prefer playing this one on the SNES.

MegaMan 2

(Megaman Legacy Collection)

While this game looks nice and sharp at 1080p, I just couldn’t get it to downscale correctly. You can see how inconsistent Megaman’s life bar looks. I’m guessing the scaling on this one isn’t accurate to begin with.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun experiment even though most games I tried didn’t quite downscale exactly to line up with CRT filters. I first tried setting the Switch to 480p and having the RT5x downscale from there, but the results weren’t good. Setting the Switch to 720p and having the RT5x downscale from there made a big difference. I think the Switch just downscales 720p in 480p mode throwing scaling off before the RT5x does anything.

With the new 4k scalers about to be released that support 1080p, I think we’ll get better scaling of vintage games on modern consoles, getting things closer to that vintage CRT feel on an HDTV.