1UP's tips for that perfect gaming rig

I've recently found a way to get my oldschool games to look fantastic on my HDTV.

Just play it in a PIP window.

I completely disagree with their tv advice - I've been gaming on a tube hdtv 27" for a year now and the picture is absolutely beautiful. Sure, there is the problem of too many pixels but it still looks better than a standard tv. To fix the problem of stretched images, make sure to either get an hdtv with a 4x3 screen or a zoom feature. With this feature, you can quickly switch between widescreen and 4x3 depending on what game you're playing. No matter what console you play, upgrading to hdtv is highly recommended - the picture quality is superb.

From what I understand, and on my own HDTV, when you have a widescreen TV, you are able to adjust the format to full screen and have black/gray bars on both sides of the screen. This is what I do for all my Standard-def games for gamecube and PS2. And when playing original Xbox games on a 360, it does this for you automatically. I hate streched screens more than anything, so I don't mind making my Widescreen TV a Full Screen TV for certain games and some TV shows (i.e. Scrubs and Freaks and Geeks).

I actually have one of these setups at home. When I couldn't buy a an XBOX 360 around the TES:Oblivion launch, I decided to break down and buy a PC system that was capable of running it. Due to space factors in my apartment, there just simply isn't room for another keyboard and monitor so I run it off my TV. My partner uses the other desktop where the desk is.

I caution anyone who wants to hook up their PC to their TV for gaming though. I thought that getting everything hooked up was pretty easy, but it seems like the majority of games aren't designed with the thought that you won't be 18 inches away from the screen. The consistent problem is that there aren't any scaleable fonts. If you run Far Cry in 1024X768, you just can't read the text unless you get up and stand right in front of the TV. The same thing can happen with any GUI interface or menu. Oblivion seems to share the 360's Console-style interface with big text and large menus so it works fine, but the majority of my other games don't. Lowering the resolution helps but some games don't go below 800X600 and it can cause other weird problems.

Overall, I thought they had good things to say. Especially with the wireless setups, but unless you are going the Console route, you may not be able to play a lot of PC games on your TV unless you get really close.

What the hell's a "Joystiq machine"?

About HTPC gaming Rig for console gaming:

I have done this. Its ok on platformers and things like that, but if your playing a game where you absolutely must have perfect timing, like any golf game with a moving power bar, then get ready to adjust to about a 1/4 second delay from your button press to when the game actually reacts (on screen) to the button press.

This is due to haveing to take and analog signal, deinterlace it, digitize it, and then scale it to your desktop resolution.

I have a WinTV-GO TV card and more than enough ram and hardware power to run this thing at full speed. You will probably have better luck if you can find a TV card that will take a Progressive source (I only know of 1), and/or find one that will do all scaling in hardware, rather than in software. These kinds of cards run a good bit more money, though.

Another downside, finding the right settings for colors and brightness can be a bit difficult on HTPC, as well as finding the right de-interlace settings for a pretty picture that isn't fuzzy all over.

"That HD box is gonna stretch that signal to fill up the frame."

Well, no, unless you want it to.

All HDTV's that I've ever seen have at least 4:3 and "fill" or "stretch" modes. Most also have a "panorama" mode that stretches only the sides (leaving the middle intact - I think this looks really weird, though).

Have the guys at GameSpot ever even *used* an HDTV? I have no idea how they could not know this if they have. It's a pretty standard feature.

Er, I meant 1up, obviously, not GameSpot.

I like the broken mirror in the background of that picture. Excellent touch...

Thats why I want this:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Sony_MFM_HT205/4505-6482_7-31813569.html

So I can have an awesome PC monitor and HDTV for my 360 :)

I've got a solution for the HD problem. First of all, image stretching is not the real problem. Any widescreen TV is going to have a 3x4 mode. When I first got my DLP TV, the problem was that there is a delay as the TV upscales the interlaced image to progressive scan in software, so that everything you see onscreen is delayed by nearly half a second after it happens! This, of course, makes video games unplayable. My solution was to get a high-quality TV-to-VGA upscaler, and plug my systems into my TV's VGA slot through it.

Jeff: aspect ratio is one thing, stretching is another. HDTV's stretch the images since they need to fill more space. This is the case on 4:3 HDTVs or 16:9 HDTVs with black bars on the left/right.

Every TV worth the money has different view options. I find a lot of games really don't look too bad filled in to widescreen, but if they do... well there should be a 4:3 mode.

Also, telling someone if they like old games to go out and purchase an EDTV at this point is absolutely bizarre. If you're in the market for a new TV, why even bother?

Like others here have said, not all HD sets will stretch 4:3 information. Some sets will automatically stretch a 4:3 signal if it's 480p.

And, if you want your old school stuff to look good on an HD set, buy a tube. I have a 34" tube HD and everything looks great.. analog TV, HD, and games. It may be 24" deep and weigh like 300 pounds, but the picture is consistently better than the plasmas and LCDs that cost $1000-$2000 more than what I paid. 50" DLPs sure are nice for watching digital TV, but anything analog is always going to look like crud. And on top of that, most of the pixel based HD sets out there have native resolutions that are less than 1920x1080, or true HD. It may not be sexy, but if you want a lot of bang for the buck there's nothing wrong with a tube HD set.

I also have a tube HDTV 30" WideScreen and does wonderfully on PC Games and all old/new console games, I have all my Gamecube games on widescreen only 2 look a little choppy which are FF:CC and Tales Of S. the rest look pretty good (hell even some have wipecreen modes built in!) Plus my NES looks fantastic on it. Tube HDTV all the way but rememeber its heavy.

I work in Home Cinema / Home Entertainment, why on Earth would a 480p TV (EDTV) set look better than a 720p, the TV does the upscaling for you and simply replaces a single pixel with a cluster of pixels the same size. All the ratio's stay the same, there is no weird stretching of any sort, 480p is 16:9 as is 720p.

Lets repeat that for 1up, 480p is exactly the same ratio as 720p, 16 horizontal pixels to every 9 vertical. But of course technology today hasn't quite caught up with "multiplying by fractions".

There is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED for an "expensive upscaler box" (and in fact these are generally only used for high end 1080p projectors nowadays as a way to easily send all the video from a number of sources over a single HDMI/DVI cable). All HDTV's and EDTV's process pictures to their native resolutions automatically. Even if you were talking about older 4:3 games, an EDTV at 480p would crop or distort the image in an identical way to an HDTV at 720p - Was that article written by someones grandmother?

I have a 720p Projector personally and everything looks great on it, from the Dreamcast, Gamecube up to the Xbox360.