These Are the Consoles You Should Be Using With a CRT

You may have heard that retro gamers are buying up old-school CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs in order to enjoy retro games the way they were meant to be seen, but is this true for all “retro” games?

Consoles Made During the CRT Era

As a general rule, the consoles that look best on a CRT are those made when CRTs were the only game in town. The developers of the hardware and software expected you to play on a tube TV and so geared everything in the game to that end.

Everything that came before the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation of consoles falls into this category. So, whether we’re talking about an Atari game from the late 70s or a PlayStation 2 from the year 2000, CRT is the way to go.

Of course, within the pantheon of CRT TVs, there’s a spectrum of quality as well. Some TVs had poor picture quality and others were great. Likewise, using the best video connection standard that a given console supports is important. For example, given the choice between composite and S-Video, the latter offers significantly better image quality.

What About the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii?

The consoles that were released during the transition between CRT and flat panel displays are an interesting case. My first PlayStation 3 came with a composite AV cable in the box, since it was reasonable to expect plenty of people using these consoles with a CRT. However, they were designed with HD displays in mind, and that also counts for games.

The 4:3 aspect ratio of typical CRTs had hit-and-miss support in games of this era. The text was often too small or blurry to read on a CRT as well. There’s no particularly good reason to use a PS3 or Xbox 360 with a CRT, unless you want to play older backward compatible games that way from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 eras, or the original Xbox.

I’d say the Wii is the exception here, since it’s a standard definition console, and you don’t gain much if anything on a flat panel. However, the Wii supports progressive scan, which your typical CRT doesn’t. If you find a CRT that supports a 480p signal, that’s a great pairing with the Wii, but really any CRT TV will work well.

HD CRTs Exist (if You Can Find Them)

Towards the end of the CRT TV era, there were a few TVs that also conformed to the HD standard. These TVS were in a 16:9 aspect ratio, and used HDMI or component input to display up to 1080i images. If you somehow find one of these unicorns, then it’s a brilliant way to play PS3 and Xbox 360 games that often were at 720p, which looks amazing on these screens, especially compared to a 4K TV trying to upscale from less than a million pixels to more than eight million.

The only problem with these displays is that some had significant input lag, which can be mitigated in a few ways, and that anything under 480p or 480i wouldn’t look right, making them a poor choice for consoles like the SNES or Genesis.

Scalers Can Work Well Too

Many retro gamers quite rightly don’t want to go down the path of madness that buying an old CRT monitor drags you along. However, unless you’re happy with emulation, you can’t just plug your original hardware into a modern flat panel and expect it to look good.

This is where retro gaming scalers. This is a device that sits between your console and a modern TV and works some magic on the signal so that the picture looks good. Some of them even do a decent job of faking the look of a CRT. Scalers vary wildly in price and performance, and some are better for certain consoles than others. If you look at the high end, especially models that support many different consoles, you’re looking at hundreds of dollars.

With some consoles you also have the option to add an HDMI mod to your original console, if you’re not precious about preserving it in stock form. There’s also the option to use FPGA retro consoles which also cost hundreds of dollars.

Looking at what it can cost to get retro games to look their best on a modern TV, I suddenly don’t feel particularly conflicted about paying $75 for my gigantic Sony Trinitron.