8- and 16-bit Emulation on widescreen? Avoiding distortion?

[timewarpgamer]

I recently built a PC specifically for the purpose of playing movies and video games on my 42-inch HD TV. Having grown up with Apple computers, I'll admit that I'm not the most PC-savvy person, and while I've been delighted to discover all sorts of sweet emulators that are not available for OS X, I've had a hard time optimizing them for my HD TV. Am I unaware of an awesome HD-friendly 8/16-bit emulator? Or is it just a challenge of configuration? How would you set up the following consoles for emulation to take advantage of HD displays?

NES
SNES
Sega Master System
Genesis
Turbografx-16

By the way, given the problem I described above, so far my favorite emulator is Magic Engine for the TG-16. Granted, I've always had a special affinity for TurboGrafx games, but the fact that you can easily go to full screen (i.e. widescreen) without any proportional distortion is a big selling point, too.

[Citizin]

Not quite sure what you mean by an HD friendly emulator, but I'm pretty sure that there is no emulator that will upconvert your game to your monitors resolution without getting large pixelation and stretching. Old games full screen on an LCD will always look poor compared to them being in there native resolution(which would be really small on a 42").

Unless of course you are okay with that. How do your games look right now at fullscreen? I know Magic Engine had this option to make the graphics look more detailed with a loss of performance, but I'm not sure of any other emulators that do this.

[timewarpgamer]

I probably should have been more clear in my original post. I don't mind graphics looking pixilated, but what bothers me is the stretching and distortion of images. I'm not sure how Magic Engine does it, but the full screen mode seems undistorted on my widescreen. With other emulators, like Nestopia (which I was playing around with last night), there are 2x, 3x, and fullscreen options, but the fullscreen one definitely stretches everything, making all the sprites noticably wider, and even if I resize the window manually under the proper proportions I still get stuck with my desktop left over on the edges in the background when I'd prefer just a black background.

[fox099]

I really enjoy playing emulated games on wide screen, but you have to remember that there will be some stretching. Additionally, while there is no true means of upconverting content, you can apply a series of filters to smooth out sprites and backgrounds, and turn 8 and 16 bit games into what look like really smooth flash games. Also, there are so many texture packs for emulation, that it is really not a bad loss to play it wide. You can also choose to play it back in a 4:3 format, and was some screen space, but it should still be pretty large.

[Citizin]

You can also choose to play it back in a 4:3 format, and was some screen space, but it should still be pretty large.

You should definately keep the game's aspect ratio, and just forget about widescreen for retro games. It will look much better and you will just lose a bit of space on the sides which shouldn't be too bad considering you're on a 42" TV in the first place.

btw, What game are you playing on Magic Engine that looks fine on widescreen in fullscreen mode? Some Turbografx games have a 4:3 aspect ratio unlike most others that use 1:1(I think), which is what NES games use(again, not all the way sure). So you could be stretching the 4:3 image yet you don't realise it since it dosen't look as bad as 1:1 would look stretched.

[timewarpgamer]

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Seems that there isn't really any solution for viewing retro games in widescreen, so at least now I can stop going crazy trying to configure the video settings to do something that's apparently impossible.

As for playing TG-16 games on fullscreen via Magic Engine, I guess it must have been that the distortion was just less obvious and I didn't notice.

[Flak Beard]

Can't you just set your TV to display a 4:3 image centered with black bars on the left and right? Try this in conjunction with a non-widescreen resolution outputting from your PC.

Also, many of the emulators I use display nicely when upscaled, much better than hooking up an old console to an HDTV. Nestopia, SNES9x, Gens and ESPSXE all seem to scale nicely.