[92396humphrey]

I have owned a Nintendo 64 for a few years now and I was wondering how to get the best quality on a 1080p projector. Is there a cable or something to help improve quality?

 

[rcohen]

Either composite or s-video will give you the best quality. On the N64, both of those are equivalent.

 

[92396humphrey]

Either composite or s-video will give you the best quality. On the N64, both of those are equivalent.

Thank you! Very helpful! I'm going to install it now!

 

[rcohen]

Thank you! Very helpful! I'm going to install it now!

Oops...I meant component or s-video.
Composite is fine, but component or s-video will be a bit better.

 

[nilisco]

I have owned a Nintendo 64 for a few years now and I was wondering how to get the best quality on a 1080p projector. Is there a cable or something to help improve quality?

While this is a bit of an extreme use case, you could legally emulate the cartridges you own using a PC. This would allow for up-scaling, better filtering, etc. Should look a lot better on higher resolutions, but is going to take far more fiddling around with settings and hardware investment if you want to use your N64 controllers. Just another options.

 

[Chase Payne]

While this is a bit of an extreme use case, you could legally emulate the cartridges you own using a PC. This would allow for up-scaling, better filtering, etc. Should look a lot better on higher resolutions, but is going to take far more fiddling around with settings and hardware investment if you want to use your N64 controllers. Just another options.

But if you have bluetooth and a PS4 controller, you can set that up for virtually all emulators and not need to worry about that. It's just N64 is a little bit more complicated because of the C keys, but you can bind those to the right joystick.

And I would argue an extreme use would be physically projecting a real N64 on a screen rather than emulating it, there's no purpose of doing that anymore with emulators now.

 

[DooberKnob]

While this is a bit of an extreme use case, you could legally emulate the cartridges you own using a PC. This would allow for up-scaling, better filtering, etc. Should look a lot better on higher resolutions, but is going to take far more fiddling around with settings and hardware investment if you want to use your N64 controllers. Just another options.

N64 for emulation is still kind of dodgy for many games though, but when it does work it looks great.

 

[kitcher2020]

Solution #1 : Cheaper
There are Composite / S-Video to HDMI exclusive scalers. Search ebay and look for reviews.

Solution #2 : More expensive, more labor intensive, but better quality
You could also look into an RGB solution here http://retrorgb.com/n64.html
That only gets you a nice RGB signal. You will have to get a scaler with HDMI output after that to get the signal up to 1080p.

Try the first solution. Do some research on those composite / s-video scalers. You can usually find a bargain. However, some of these Hong Kong devices really suck so you have to do the research. If you don't like the quality, you're out at most $50 and maybe you can recover that by selling it on ebay to someone who cares less.

 

[sage11x]

Necro thread but watch this:

 

[stufio]

Unless you feel confident modding your N64 to output RGB SCART (which is the best quality that the N64 can output), the next best thing is S-Video. Composite sucks, obviously, and S-Video is not going to magically make your N64 HD or anything, but it is the best you can do without modding the console.

 

[Leo_Ames]

One problem with that RGB/HDMI mod is that I guess it's very title specific. The best output settings for one title can offer a very lackluster picture for the next. So you have to do a lot of tinkering around to get the most out of it as you move from game to game.

Another possible option is this when it releases.

http://www.hdretrovision.com/snes/

You'll still have to do the RGB mod to a compatible N64 (They're not all suitable for such a conversion). But this way, you can hook it up directly to most HDTV's while enjoying RGB quality output.

It won't do any processing of the image though and not every HDTV plays nice with low-res signals sent to it via component (As some PS2 fans discovered with Ico over a decade ago when they couldn't get that title's 240p output, rare by PS2 standards, to display on their shiny new HDTV over component).