In what resolution are games outputted on the Wii Virtual Console?

[Josh7289]

I am hesitant to purchase anything that I download, especially things that are also available as hard copies, like games. For that reason, I am really apprehensive about buying any Wii Virtual Console games, and would rather own the originals. At the same time, I hate having to deal with old consoles or cartridges that die on me, or having to use lower quality cables, since many of these old consoles only supported composite or S-Video at best. The idea of playing these games again with a component video cable connection does sound enticing to me, but I am wondering about in what resolution the Wii outputs these emulated games.

For example, the NES could render games at up to 256 x 240, though most games seemed to be programmed to be rendered at 256 x 224. This would be outputted as a 240p signal (by some magic, do doubt, that I'm not too sure of) to the TV and displayed as such. What I want to know is how the Wii handles, say, NES games. Does it render them in their native resolutions and output them to the TV just as an NES would? Does it upscale them to 480i/p, or what?

Also, I may have heard that the Wii outputs Virtual Console games differently whether it's set to output at 480i or 480p...Or widescreen or not...? Does anyone know about this?

Anyway, if you could give me this kind of information for any (or all) of the systems supported by the Virtual Console, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Josh7289
I am hesitant to purchase anything that I download, especially things that are also available as hard copies, like games. For that reason, I am really apprehensive about buying any Wii Virtual Console games, and would rather own the originals. At the same time, I hate having to deal with old consoles or cartridges that die on me, or having to use lower quality cables, since many of these old consoles only supported composite or S-Video at best. The idea of playing these games again with a component video cable connection does sound enticing to me, but I am wondering about in what resolution the Wii outputs these emulated games.

For example, the NES could render games at up to 256 x 240, though most games seemed to be programmed to be rendered at 256 x 224. This would be outputted as a 240p signal (by some magic, do doubt, that I'm not too sure of) to the TV and displayed as such. What I want to know is how the Wii handles, say, NES games. Does it render them in their native resolutions and output them to the TV just as an NES would? Does it upscale them to 480i/p, or what?

Also, I may have heard that the Wii outputs Virtual Console games differently whether it's set to output at 480i or 480p...Or widescreen or not...? Does anyone know about this?

Anyway, if you could give me this kind of information for any (or all) of the systems supported by the Virtual Console, I would greatly appreciate it.

Well, even though the games themselves were 240p, there's no such thing as a 240p TV. All older TVs were 480i, and they were hacked to run under such. 240p is basically 480i anyway.

If you output the VC through 480i, it should basically look exactly like the old console.

But because the old consoles were lower than low rez, there were always scanlines in between each line. This had the effect of dimming the image to your eye. So in order to duplicate that, NES (and NESonly, as far as I can tell, even though it should apply to others) games outputted at 480p are somewhat dimmed in order to recreate the effect. I personally dont like that, but theres no way to change it.

N64 games on the other hand, are rendered in full 480p, not just upscaled. They look MUCH better than the original N64 games.

As far as widescreen goes, it just outputs the raw signal. 480p isnt a 16:9 only res. You have to set your *TV* to what aspect ratio you want it, it doesnt fake it by outputting an image with black bars. They could technically do this without losing resolution for everything but n64 games, but they just dont do it at all. On the 360, in HD, theres plenty of resolution to spare, so it doesnt really have that problem.