Is it possible to have my Wii games look better on my HDTV?

Define "better". The Wii is jaggy. Turning up the sharpness will introduce ringing, but will not eliminate jaggies.

The image will appear less jaggy if you choose 4x3. With 16x9, the Wii is rendering the same resolution, but letting the TV stretch them out to fill your screen.

Unless the scaler in your TV is junk, it is very possible that you are seeing the best the Wii can output. Write Nintendo and tell them to get with the times.

nop

No, the problem is that your HDTV is still doing major upscaling to get the 480p image up to 1080p and that won't change. If you want to play Wii games on a HDTV you just have to sort of accept it.

Squint.

A good EDTV CRT is the best for the Wii since there isn't going to be any scaling involved since it's the native resolution for 480p GCN/Wii material.

But there weren't many that weren't junk and they haven't been produced for several years now. And I've never seen one that was widescreen.

Your best bet is to do some research the next time you purchase an HDTV to locate one that handles 480i/p material well.

Whle dinosaur tech at this point, Wiis tend to look good @ 480p w/ component on CRT based displays, both SD & HD.

"A good EDTV CRT is the best for the Wii"

Replace CRT with plasma. An 848x480 plasma gives you the lack of scaling that you would be looking for, but with the perfect geometry that you aren't going to get out of a CRT.

As to the original post, a properly set up display running a well produced Wii title can look damn good. If your display is set up right, then the only thing in Mario Galaxy 2 that should particularly stand out as jaggy is the rim-highlights that you will find on all the characters. The world geometry and texturing should look pretty good, with minimal obvious aliasing.

Common things that help the Wii look poor are too much Sharpness. You said you have it at 6. Try zero, as the preferred setting for sharpness is none. Zero may be artificial blurring on your display though, so be aware of that. Color Saturation being too high also helps accentuate image problems and is something that you find constantly on displays that people say they have calibrated.

Why wouldn't there be any scaling with a plasma with that native resolution. The Wii outputs 640x480 so I would think a plasma would have to do some processing of the image.

I still say a good CRT is superior. I've never had one where with a bit of time in the service menus where I couldn't virtually eliminate any geometry issues the set had out of the box.

Technically there is a way to do this that the mods may not like to be discussed here. But yes, it can be done.

"Why wouldn't there be any scaling with a plasma with that native resolution. The Wii outputs 640x480 so I would think a plasma would have to do some processing of the image."

You are making the common mistake of thinking that an analog signal has an horizontal resolution. While the Wii renders to a horizontal resolution of 720, it then spits that out as 480i/p. The very important concept to grasp here is that analog 480p has no distinct horizontal resolution. A digital display is then going to sample that horizontal stream at whatever rate it is set to sample. In effect, something like a 848x480 plasma with no overscan is going to sample ~720 pixels and scale those across it's 848 horizontal pixels. Luckily, humans are far less sensitive to horizontal information than they are to vertical. The distinct 480 vertical lines are not scaled in this case.

An analog CRT, or even a digital CRT, is going to spray that same horizontal analog stream across it's phosphor dots, but then you run in to Kell issues, where digital dots inside an analog stream don't match up perfectly to phosphor placement in the physical space. This problem exists in both horizontal and vertical resolution on a CRT. In effect, it is a very similar issue to the 720>848 scale on the ED plasma, but in both directions.

As for your claims of fixing CRT geometry. I will just laugh. Heartily, even.

"Technically there is a way to do this that the mods may not like to be discussed here. But yes, it can be done."

Emulating through Dolphin? I'd guess that the original poster wants games that actually work, not just occasionally look great with terrible sound and prone to crash.

Then you never spent any time tinkering in the service menus.

Yeah, sure I haven't. The other way to look at it is that I have spent enough time in there to know that your claim is ridiculous. "Good enough" is about as good as CRT geometry gets, and it never is good enough.

I also like how you just glossed over my indictment of a CRT's capability to even produce individual pixels accurately.

"Would you guys recommend I just use a SD TV?"

What I'd recommend is to sit roughly 5 feet away from the display that you have, play some games, and stop counting pixels.

I asked a question and you answered, I wasn't contesting it. You're clearly more knowledgeable about it then I was and what you said largely went over my head. What did you want me to do other then leave it alone? To argue it would've just been idiotic. I quoted the only portion of your post that I disagreed with, which was your dismissal of the possibility of being able to get pleasing results from a CRT that had major geometry issues out of the box.

I know from first hand experience and from reading post from other individuals at such forums as this one that it's often possible to get pleasing results from CRT sets that had terrible geometry issues out of the box through accessing the service menu and experimenting with different settings. I haven't had a CRT set yet with terrible geometry problems (Noticeable especially with things like scrolling credits, platformers like Super Mario World where the level ground is disformed in places, etc.) where I couldn't all but eliminate the issue with a bit of work in the settings.

I'm sure it isn't always possible to resolve most geometry issues with every single CRT, but most of the time you'll be able to achieve a positive change through adjusting settings which will largely resolve the issues.