Recently, I’ve found myself playing many older video game titles, particularly around the 5th generation (PS1, N64, DreamCast) and 6th generation of gaming consoles (PS2, GameCube, Xbox). The hardest part about playing many of these older games, aside from the weird controller schemes that some games may have, is that there is a general lack of graphical fidelity. This doesn’t come to me as a surprise, as I’m well aware that the development of the games in this era were made with the CRT television in mind, which does a lot of favors when it comes to displaying low resolutions.
The CRT fixes most of the pixelation and smooths out the image, while also appearing to add more detail in some cases. This is common knowledge to most in the retro gaming field and gaming community in general, especially with the dominance of retro gaming in the past decade. Anyways, when I went to do a playthrough of 1996’s Resident Evil for the PS1, a game I have always wanted to pick up, I had a few issues with the appearance of the game. I noticed that when I played it on my computer, the resolution was so high compared to the native low resolution of the game on PS1 hardware. Because the game was designed to be played on a lower resolution screen like a CRT, where it can take advantage of the display and smooth out the jagged appearance, this poses many problems.
You can see here that the pre-rendered background of this game sharply contrasts the 3D rendered characters, leading to a little bit of an unenjoyable experience, at least for me. The reason I find it a problem is that so much of this game uses these pre-rendered backgrounds, almost the entire game does, and it can become really jarring to look at constantly. So, I started looking for solutions. What I found was that fans of these old titles have been taking these older games with low-resolution textures and pre-rendered backgrounds, and completely renewing them by using AI upscalers. The results from doing this are truly incredible, and completely revitalize the games to be played on modern displays.
You can see just how much sharper the image becomes. My favorite part about this upscale is that it remains very faithful to the original game, and looks essentially just like what the original would look like if it were remastered for modern display technology.
These texture upscales can actually do a better job than video game publishers re-releasing these titles as “remasters”. A great example of this is Final Fantasy VIII, where the fan texture project blows the remaster published by Square-Enix out of the water.
It goes to show how the communities for these older games will always do a better job at ensuring younger generations can play them than major corporations, as the communities will always have a passionate team behind them and fully understand the original game’s design and feeling. So many times have companies, especially Nintendo, re-release titles from the 5th generation of consoles that are arguably the worst way to play these games than if you were to play them with fan projects such as this one.
Not all texture upscales are perfect, and many problems can arise when using HD textures. This is because video games are almost always made with the technology of the time in mind, so the creative vision can end up being lost entirely with older titles, as there was never any intention for these games to run at higher resolutions. Many are committed to buying the original hardware and a CRT just to play these games as intended, but I find it too much of a hassle and not worth the time or money. I will gladly play an upscaled version of a game, even if some creative liberties are lost in the process. And with the recent development of CRT shaders, a way to replicate the look and feel or a CRT on modern displays, there are many more options than ever to play older video games without spending money on old consoles.
I’ve been familiar with this technique of upscaling older games for a while now as it’s been a common thing for nearly 6 years at this point, but I did not know just how much of an improvement it makes with the overall experience until I tried it for myself, and I highly recommend anyone to check them out if you plan on playing any older video games that can utilize them.