Or rather, internal rendering resolution question.
So out of curiosity and just for fun, I hooked the Wii U up to this old CRT using the Wii's composite cables and played some games. Wii U was of course set to 480i, it has to be when using composite cables.
But I had unexpected results for games. First of all, the Wii U menu and many games only "support" 4:3 insofar as they letterbox the 16:9 widescreen images with black bars on top and bottom. That's not that weird, some Wii games did the same thing. But it really seemed like things were being... I don't know, downscaled maybe? Like the output resolution was lower than the rendering resolution. Especially since games I tried didn't seem to perform better at 480i than they did at 1080p.
Also, and this may be a separate thing, but I really expected N64 virtual console games to fill the TV screen. Strangely, instead they had huge black borders around them. This is odd because N64 games are 320x240, and thus should scale perfectly to 640x480. CRTs also do this thing where they can perfectly scale basically anything below their resolution, so clearly the virtual console emulation is adding black borders to the TV output for some reason -- maybe it's not capable of sending resolutions below 480i? You'd think 240p would be supported though, since 480i TVs can display 240p images.
So like. what's going on here? I don't know anything about this, I just wanna know what the deal is. For Wii virtual console, even on vWii, the N64 games filled the screen...
EDIT: I guess I can try the app to swap gamepad and TV images to see if the gamepad image on the TV looks better? Since the gamepad is 480p. Although, that's 854x480, so on a 4:3 TV it'd have to be downscaled... wait is that what the deal is?
So out of curiosity and just for fun, I hooked the Wii U up to this old CRT using the Wii's composite cables and played some games. Wii U was of course set to 480i, it has to be when using composite cables.
But I had unexpected results for games. First of all, the Wii U menu and many games only "support" 4:3 insofar as they letterbox the 16:9 widescreen images with black bars on top and bottom. That's not that weird, some Wii games did the same thing. But it really seemed like things were being... I don't know, downscaled maybe? Like the output resolution was lower than the rendering resolution. Especially since games I tried didn't seem to perform better at 480i than they did at 1080p.
Also, and this may be a separate thing, but I really expected N64 virtual console games to fill the TV screen. Strangely, instead they had huge black borders around them. This is odd because N64 games are 320x240, and thus should scale perfectly to 640x480. CRTs also do this thing where they can perfectly scale basically anything below their resolution, so clearly the virtual console emulation is adding black borders to the TV output for some reason -- maybe it's not capable of sending resolutions below 480i? You'd think 240p would be supported though, since 480i TVs can display 240p images.
So like. what's going on here? I don't know anything about this, I just wanna know what the deal is. For Wii virtual console, even on vWii, the N64 games filled the screen...
EDIT: I guess I can try the app to swap gamepad and TV images to see if the gamepad image on the TV looks better? Since the gamepad is 480p. Although, that's 854x480, so on a 4:3 TV it'd have to be downscaled... wait is that what the deal is?
