The ScooterBlog

So I have discovered a minor, but certainly annoying detail of having a High Definition LCD TV … they sometimes don’t play nice with the older non-HDTV equipment. It’s like you can only live in one of the worlds at the same time!

Basically, here’s the scoop … my wonderful, but yet very affordable $379 32-Inch HDTV isn’t so good at upscaling non-HDTV (480i and lower) content easily, so it lags. On my PS2, it lags by about a tenth of a second. This is not much grant you, but enough to mess with your mind when you try and play a game based solely on timing … like Hot Shots Golf or Guitar Hero.

The good news? It appears like the only system this will negatively affect is the PS2. Dreamcast can be High-Def (VGA Cable), the new systems of course are always High-Def to some degree or another, and even XBox games were pretty much required to be 480p with very very few exceptions (just another reason why the XBox was the Dreamcast 2). And heck, the PS3 can backwards play real PS2 games, so the affects are not daunting.

Older systems than that? Well, that’s why they have emulators (and me getting cables to allow me to play with the REAL controllers!), and those can be on the big screen with laptops and VGA and HDMI cables.

Oh .. and that rogue PS2? I’m going to test it tonight with my rear projection HDTV, I assume it will do much better.