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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Here's a possibly silly question. Is upscaling old games possible? In the past I have seen papers on upscaling algorithms that do amazing things to old pixel art and 8 bit sprites. Is it possible to run these in real time on something like a pi?

I ask because the suggestion of using 1080p resolution or higher for this sounded silly. But then I realized maybe it's not.

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It's definitely possible to run something like hq3x in real time, and many emulators support that, though I'm not sure if RetroPie specifically makes it easy to configure that stuff. Though I'd argue that algorithmically smoothing out low res art frequently makes it look worse than the source material.

The various hqxx algorithms are still there, personally I don't like the look of them, but what's advanced a lot in recent times is TV emulation. A programmer called blargg has released several NTSC filters which really make games look how they did when you first played them, how they were intended to. They've been integrated into many emulators.

Have a look at the screenshots, to me they look way more attractive than traditional hq-style upscaling filters.

http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html

On the other hand, for anyone who grew up in a PAL region, these screenshots look appalling. They look nothing at all like my SNES (which I still keep connected to an old CRT TV.)

Yes, some emulators even allow for swapping in higher res assets. I know Dolphin in particular can do this.

Also an option in famous N64 games, they have fan produced higher res texture sets.

There are a lot of CRT emulation modes available, I am not sure if the fancy "enhanced detail" pixel up scaling modes are supported but I would be surprised if they are not at least for the more popular Nintendo emulators.

It says here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx used in nestopia which is included in RetroPie, so I am thinking yes.

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