PICTURE PERFECT

Let’s not kid ourselves – as far as most of the world is concerned, the humble cathode-ray tube television is obsolete. They’re heavy, they’re often as deep as they are tall and they aren’t particularly energy efficient. The vast majority of them were only intended to show standard-definition TV signals, too. Modern TVs can be large enough to display a life-size human diagonally yet still hang on your wall, they have more pixels than your family has had hot dinners, and you don’t even have to plug anything into them to watch YouTube. But they have one nasty little flaw – they’re terrible for nostalgia. Hook up a classic console or computer to your LCD TV and you may well be left wondering if your old games really looked that bad. What’s more, you probably won’t be able to escape the nagging feeling that games just don’t feel right.

The good news is that you’re not imagining things – modern TVs really do make old games look and feel worse, at least on original hardware. “At first I was somewhat blind to what other small pieces of the classic console experience were being eroded away as I bought newer and newer displays,” says Marc Duddleson of the YouTube channel My Life In Gaming. “It wasn’t until I learned about RGB video, upscalers and PVMs that I realised that yes, input lag is real; yes, the consoles are treated very differently on proper 15kHz CRTs; and no, TV manufacturers don’t care about optimising the gaming experience, especially for outdated analogue