• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

NES Classic Edition console

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
Well I finally bought one two weeks ago, and I didn't have to resort to a dirty rotten scalper to get it. I walked into the Walmart after work, asked the guy in Electronics and he stated that one had just come in, he went in the back and got it for me and that was that.

It's cool, but it's not worth more than MSRP. The emulation is hands down better than Nintendo's own garbage Virtual Console on the Wii U by leaps and bounds, but the quality is not as good as what a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie can do. The sound in particular is slightly off on games that are burned into my brain, such as the original Super Mario Bros game. It's worth $60 but not worth any more than that. Hopefully anyone that wants one will be able to get one in the store in a month after the Switch launch is underway but if you can't get one don't sweat it. It's really not that great aside from the nostalgia factor, which itself is where the appeal really is I think.

Mostly I hope stock levels improve so that these greedy scalper dirtbags, who refuse to do trades and only want cash, will be stuck with their inventory and have to sell it at a loss just to get rid of it.
 
The emulation is hands down better than Nintendo's own garbage Virtual Console on the Wii U by leaps and bounds,

Thats too bad to hear , I would hope that a Nintendo product would be up to snuff. Accurate emulation is apparently a real PITA from a coding perspective but can be good enough that only real purists will notice the difference. Ill see if I can dig up the links if anyone is really interested in reading them. Honestly they dont say much more than I did with some examples though. I guess a frame by frame remake is just to taxing even for modern systems. There was some sort of "special sauce" that made things function smoothly IIRC
 
At least now the nes classic has been 'hacked' so you can load other roms into the system via USB.
 
Thats too bad to hear , I would hope that a Nintendo product would be up to snuff. Accurate emulation is apparently a real PITA from a coding perspective but can be good enough that only real purists will notice the difference. Ill see if I can dig up the links if anyone is really interested in reading them. Honestly they dont say much more than I did with some examples though. I guess a frame by frame remake is just to taxing even for modern systems. There was some sort of "special sauce" that made things function smoothly IIRC

Yeah for some reason the emulation of the NES on the Wii U is just terrible. I have Dr. Mario on the Wii U VC and that's one of the games included on the NES Classic and the difference is night and day. The colors are more vibrant and pop much more on the Classic whereas on the Wii U they look washed out and the image looks dull, even over HDMI. Fortunately SNES and GBA games look vibrant and sharp on the Wii U VC, it's just the NES games that look like ***.
 
Yeah for some reason the emulation of the NES on the Wii U is just terrible. I have Dr. Mario on the Wii U VC and that's one of the games included on the NES Classic and the difference is night and day. The colors are more vibrant and pop much more on the Classic whereas on the Wii U they look washed out and the image looks dull, even over HDMI. Fortunately SNES and GBA games look vibrant and sharp on the Wii U VC, it's just the NES games that look like ***.

Any chance of side by side pics? :)

I wonder if they upscale the CLassic or something? seems like the least they could do for $60. Wii is only capable of 480p I think
 
Any chance of side by side pics? :)

I wonder if they upscale the CLassic or something? seems like the least they could do for $60. Wii is only capable of 480p I think

The Classic is upscaled to 720p. Graphically I think it looks beautiful. I swear the sound is off though, but it could just be my memory playing tricks on me. I have an original NES and I tried to test Super Mario Bros in a comparison but alas, the original NES is dead. Doesn't even power on. :(

My iPhone's camera sucks but in the images below the NES Classic and the Wii U are both plugged into the TV directly with HDMI. The receiver is just on for the audio, which I actually didn't need for these screenshots, it's just habit of turning it on. The video for both consoles is carried over HDMI and directly into the TV so the receiver doesn't get a chance to molest it (that Harmon Kardon receiver fudges with any non-1080p signal and ruins it in an upscaling effort to "improve" the image by adding tons of pixelation and jaggedness and sadly it's a feature that can't be disabled but that's an issue for another thread).

Dr. Mario on NES Classic:

IMG_2106.JPG

IMG_2105.JPG

Dr. Mario on Wii U Virtual Console:

IMG_2108.JPG

IMG_2107.JPG
 
My iPhone's camera sucks but in the images below the NES Classic and the Wii U are both plugged into the TV directly with HDMI.

Yuuuuup. Thats a noticeable difference. I had to looks twice, but I can only assume the difference is MUCH more pronounced in person. I can only attribue that to the difference between 480p and 720p, but I am still a bit of a scale/resolution novice. Thanks for taking the time to post up the pics ! :)
 
Yuuuuup. Thats a noticeable difference. I had to looks twice, but I can only assume the difference is MUCH more pronounced in person. I can only attribue that to the difference between 480p and 720p, but I am still a bit of a scale/resolution novice. Thanks for taking the time to post up the pics ! :)

Well the Wii U is 1080p, if anything the NES games should look better on that than the NES Classic but I've read that Nintendo used a garbage NES emulator for the Wii U Virtual Console (and the Wii's NES Virtual Console as well) whereas the NES Classic uses a brand new emulator developed by their European research division. Still, would've been nice if they could apply that updated emulator to the Wii U at least. But they've left the Wii U for dead. The Switch will probably get the NES Classic's new emulator for its Virtual Console games.

No problem about the pics, my apologies for my crappy camera.
 
Back