Now I'm not saying that playing 2d VC games on my HDTV makes them look downright terrible, but are these games just not as sharp looking as I remember. I recently played through A Link to the Past on my 40'' Sony HDTV, via component cables and 480p...it looked good, but I remember it looking so much better, playing it on a Standard TV on my Snes, years ago. Is it best to play VC games on a Standard Television with AV cables, or do they indeed look better on an HDTV in 480p? Any thoughts or suggestions to clear this up for me would be great.

I play on a standard tv with composite cables and the games look perfect to me - exactly as I remember them. Also on some hdtvs I have experienced input lag with VC games.

I agree that they usually look better in the original aspect ratio(4:3 instead of 16:9). I usually put my HDTV into 4:3 mode while playing VC games.

Edit: I would also recommend putting you're Wii into 480i instead of 480p due to the aforementioned lag in controls.

What about the resolution though? I'm starting to think that these games were not meant to be played in 480p...

I play on a standard 16 inch television

I've heard that n64 games are optimized to run in both widescreen and 480p...can anybody elaborate on this?

N64 games look like crap in widescreen, but they are optimized for 480p. If you're TV lets you choose between 4:3 and 16:9 then go with 4:3. That's what I do.

They sure weren't, and they weren't meant for modern pixel-based TVs at all, so if your high-def set is an LCD or other non-cathode type you simply won't ever get the same visuals you would get from a good tube-based television. Low resolution games are nicely blurred and smoothed in a purely natural way by a normal TV, and nothing you can do will perfectly replicate that on the newer tubeless sets. There's also the issue of lag on many HD setups.

I'm a stubborn purist sometimes, but for me the only way to experience classic games is on a good standard television.

What's tough is that these CRT television are getting damn tough to find. I bought an extra one last time I was at Best Buy for my classic gaming rig. They had two Sony Wega 24" sets left and I bought both of them on the spot.

HDTV with Component Cable, 480p and widescreen -
For some reason I cant get NeoGeo games to display through component cabels (only displays when you press the "home" button, and this also applies to some Megadrive games. It doent matter if I change the settings to 570i or 480i they still wont show, but through a Scart they display fine ?!?
However TurboGrafix game look amazing, sharp and bright.
N64 games are a bit hit and miss, because they look so good sometimes you notice some flaws in the graphics, but then other parts look amazing. eg. PaperMario - some background textures look rough whereas the main 2D character sprites look nice, sharp with flat but bright colours and look really well.
As far as im aware Virtual Console games will have black borders if the settings are different from the original so switching from wide to 4:3 shouldnt make much difference.

I play all my Wii games on a 42" Plasma EDTV, which for those who don't know, that's a standard resolution screen with progressive scanning. This is no doubt the best way to go for Wii as the monitor doesn't add any upscaling lag or artifacting to the picture, even in progressive scan mode. VC games look really nice on it, as long as I change the aspect ratio to 4:3, otherwise everything not only looks stretched, but also overly pixelated. It basically looks just like it did when I played them on old CRTs, except with the added color depth and clarity benefits of component video. Unfortunately EDTVs are a rarity these days and very few people even know they exist, but if you want the best from your Wii console, they really are the only way to go.

The video output on the Wii (HD with a component cable) looks so much more clear than the old systems. I compared Mario Gold side by side with the original one on N64 (S-video) and it looks so much better on the Wii.

Hmmm, you may need to do the magic reset handshake a post mentioned in another thread:

Open the Operations Guide for the game and then (with the Nunchuk attached) press Z + A + 2 simultaneously.

Standard TV all the way. But regular Wii games look great in 480p and widescreen on my 22" LCD TV.

I play my Wii exclusively on a 26" 720p LCD, and it works great! It's really just a matter of getting your visual settings right...something that's taken me MONTHS to work out. And of course, you have to set your TV to fullscreen instead of widescreen so the classic games don't strech (my TV calls it Standard and Fill when using Component Cables).

I agree with the small Paper Mario problem Raptor78 mentioned, but that was pretty much contained to the Pre-Toad Town Goomba area for me, so it's not too bad. For the most part, the games look better on an HDTV than an SDTV.

The important thing is to not get too BIG a TV. The classic games weren't designed for massive screens, y'know. Seems to me that any bigger than my 26" would've been TOO big. Actually, most modern games look better if you don't go TOO big on screen size, too.

I recently put my older 20" CRT back in my room along with my 22" LCD. Component cables are plugged into the LCD while composite is plugged into the CRT. When I play regular Wii games I plug in the component cables and change to 480p. The games look great. But when playing VC games I switch back to 480i/240p and plug in the composite cables. Every VC game except for TG16 and N64 are rendered in true low resolution. Looks just like I'm playing on the older systems. So when it comes to the VC, standard TV is the way to go.

That's a good idea, but for pure convenience's sake (and the lack of two TVs lying around) I just play my VC games on the LCD, which you get used to quickly if you don't care a whole lot about graphics. Of course, considering that I play more VC games than Wii games, maybe I have the wrong idea.

I have a Panasonic 1080p plasma and it doesn't have much lag, and 480p mode seems to work just fine. Most VC games (except N64) render in 480i and play EXACTLY the same as they did before. Panasonic plasma doesn't stretch 480i content too much so I just leave it be, and it's pretty close to the aspect ratio my old CRT's had back in the day. Now N64 games look slightly better than before.. it looks like some edge anti-aliasing is being applied and the screen is rendering in higher resolution!

I don't mind having 2 TVs laying around. I just like the 240p resolution of VC games better.

I just use my 42" plasma (finally my childhood fantasies of video games on the big screen realised!) and change the aspect for pillarboxing the image to 4:3; pixel shape is still wrong so some games look a little more blocky than they probably should, but I can still enjoy them!