Jorpho wrote:386SX wrote:With a CRT monitor still today it delivers in my opinion one if not the BEST quality ever and smooth experience.
...Are you suggesting it is in some way superior to what a modern PC (or a $50 DVD player) can do?
I couldn't say it was or was not superior technically. Probably there's space for discussing both possibilities. If you try for example a game on a Commodore 64 real console with the bad RF video output on old crt tv, and after that you try on a PC the same game on a software based Commodore 64 emulator on an high res IPS LCD with HDMI octa-core based and OS, which game experience is better?
At first if we immediately compare many would say the second but we need to think it was a dedicated hw solution with its ram, processor, timings, filters (good or bad) running by itself with JUST that task to do.
It maybe had its flaws cause compared to newer solutions, the first thing you felt was that a modern direct hdmi or vga connection (without the passhrough cable) got better output signals cause we could get signal cable noises/excessive smoothness. But with this cards we must consider a real CRT NATIVE resolution (like 800x600) similar to the real dvd resolution and not all the upscaling lcd stuff resulting with an almost pixel-to-pixel ratio, IMHO.
If you can pass over the softness of the vga passthrough cable and some less saturated colors, we could appreciate the really good quality of the video decoding resulting and well hidden mpeg noise. But the thing that for me make it epic is smoothness and frame rate stability you immediately appreciate.