I'm hooking all my consoles back up after moving a year ago. I now have the option of where to put the Wii. I can either:
1) hook it up to my 32" CRT. this will go well with the 480p image the wii natively outputs, but will my experience be diminished in 4:3!?
2) hook the wii u up to the HDTV and use that. This will give me squished low res wii games but they'll be 16:9, and maybe more games were designed with that in mind?
3) hook the wii up to the 16:9 crt TV I picked up which is in the garage. I have nowhere to put this in the house. So I'd be playing wii games in a dank garage with no seats lol. That's why this is the chaos option and is not on my poll.
But yes, the question is really: am I missing anything with 4:3 wii action or is having an upscale 16:9 image worse than missing some visual info on the sides?
i have my Wii connected to both a crt and an HDTV but i use the crt like 90% of the time. but I‘m also just know realizing that this is easy for me because i’m still using a 2013-ish 1080p tv with component input that does a decent job handling 480p and that most people need a scaler to connect a Wii to their TVs nowadays
@“穴”#p96189 ah yes, I should also be clear that these tvs are in different rooms, and there's no way to get them in the same room without changing my lifestyle (lol)
If you asked me in early November, I’d have said 4:3 CRT no questions asked. However!!! Upon softmodding my Wii and playing some games I’ve been wanting to play for apparently a decade plus, turns out some Wii games are 16:9 only, and will be real scrunched and sad on a 4:3 display. A couple games I’ve noticed this with is Sin and Punishment Star Successor and Arc Rise Fantasia, one of which I played via my original copy so it’s not a case of having to adjust settings in the game loader I use. I’ve resigned to moving mine from TV to TV depending on what games I’m in the mood for, but the default TV I use is 4:3.
What about WiiU on the HDTV? That‘s what I use for Wii games and it looks fine. I’m not a video expert so it might not be the best but it looks good enough for me.
Okay so like it’s late and I’m tired so maybe I’m reading something wrong but like ain’t this an aspect ratio selection? Hope this isn’t coming across as sassy or anything, just genuinely confused what you meant by no aspect ratio selection! Also by scrunched and sad I mean there are black bars at the top and bottom of the screen when playing those games on a 4:3 display, which to me is not appealing. I wanna use the whole dang screen!
@“deadbeat”#p96198 Actually wait I’m wrong sort of. Arc Rise Fantasia displays as I previously described, but Star Successor is a little different. I’m guessing the menus all display in 4:3 but when playing a stage on a 4:3 display the image is again surrounded by smaller black bars, with HUD elements bleeding onto the black bars. So a little different, but again I want to use all that real estate. I can take pictures in the “morning” to show everything I’m talkin about if anyone is interested. I want to do that right now regardless of anyone’s potential interest but my partner is asleep in our bedroom which is where the CRT is shrug emoji
It's hard to find really good info about this (which is part of why I posted here) but in my limited research and understanding:
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wii u doesn‘t do any proper upres work and it’s still the same 480 (or 240?) signal blown up, so same as plugging in your wii. It looks pretty low res (because it is) but if most games were designed artistically around 16:9 that might outweigh the poor resolution. I haven‘t tried games in both aspect ratios which is part of why I’m asking.
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I've also heard that the 16:9 presentation is squashed and stretched - that the games are a "squashed" 4:3 stretched to 16:9 in widescreen, which causes some weirdness sometimes as you lose horizontal resolution. but I don't know this stuff for sure!
These uncertainties are why I'm asking where I should set it up - and I definitely do need to try the garage setup if only to test the actual resolution of the TV
The Wii does look better in 4:3 and most games look best in that mode. @“exodus”#p96200 is correct - the widescreen mode is just a vertically stretched image that resolves to the correct aspect ratio on a widescreen TV at the expense of resolution by being stretched horizontally. It's ugly, even on Wii U.
BUT if you set a Wii U to 480p/i (*not* your Wii U's vWii - they removed the option from its menu), you can choose between 4:3 and 16:9. With the former selected, Wii games that support both aspect ratios display in 4:3 mode, even on an HDTV. It's a pain to do this if you're constantly switching between Wii and Wii U games, but if you're only playing one at a time then it's fine.
@“billy”#p96204 vWii‘s video output isn't as cut and dry as this I’m afraid. Leaving the console in 1080p for some reason gives a more accurate scale than resetting it to 480p every time you launch the Wii Channel (but if you really want and the console is hacked, you can set it up to automatically switch resolutions when booting from the channel), and for some reason many other things about the vWii‘s video output are weird. I’m hopeful one day the community can solve these issues and the Wii U can truly shine, in the meantime I don't let it bother me.
@“connrrr”#p96208 oh I agree that it’s not a pristine, perfectly-scaled image, but it does display in the correct aspect ratio if you do it this way. 4:3 on vWii looks better than 16:9 so it’ll do for me.
I don‘t have a Wii so can’t necessarily comment on the image quality in great detail but playing games on the original hardware on a CRT will tend to lend themselves to displaying a softer image more in line with the technology at the time. I play Wii games via Wii U on my basic HDTV and they look,… fine. I adjust my TV's aspect ratio manually for when games display incorrectly (which is a minor inconvenience at worst). Playing via Wii U does mean that the images are a little blurrier from the output, but also sharper from my TV being LCD over CRT and it does look a bit ugly at times.
However the convenience of having my Wii U set up is really beneficial because those exclusives (or games that have yet to be ported to Switch) are pretty dang good, and having them on tap is rad.
This is strictly anecdotal and it would be improper to make this the basis of any hard claims but I have always thought the IR sensor feels like it‘s “more 1:1” when playing on a CRT. Something about 16:9 TVs, particularly larger more modern ones, makes it feel like you’re using a mouse with improperly tuned sensitivity to point at things.
I have this screen @"deadbeat"#p96198 too and, speaking for myself, I usually set the machine to 16:9 even when playing on a CRT/4:3 display. I guess it slightly compresses the image horizontally and might look too thin to some people, but one of my earliest memories of playing the Wii (we only had a 4:3 CRT at the time) is changing the system aspect ratio to 4:3 and thinking _Hmm, Link looks like a pancake now._ If your Wii's AR needs to be set manually @exodus just see which one you like more.
1. Can properly output 240p for Virtual Console and it has a very good composite blend
2. 480i content looks very crisp since the Wii is basically an overclocked GameCube. The graphics architecture was basically designed around CRTs
3. Max resolution is 640x480 (or maybe 720x480) which are 4:3 resolutions, so the "16:9" mode is actually just a stretched 4:3 image which can reduce image definition. They just compensate by making everything skinny and therefore smaller, and then that gets stretched to almost double the width, which creates a blurry image.
4. Better range of motion with the Wii Remote in a 4:3 space
5. Reduced input latency
6. Better motion clarity
Unless you have a rare progressive scan 4:3 consumer CRT TV from that era, or you want to pump the Wii though a YPbPr to RGB converter to a PC CRT (or use an OSSC to convert to HDMI then to VGA), a traditional CRT with S-Video or Component would be best.
