Well,
There are a few things to take into consideration here. First and formost... no videogame system
you own is going to be able to out put 1080p except a PS3 and a 360. Meaning for a PS2 or dreamcast
or ANY system, it's going to out put at it's native resolution. i.e. 480p for DC and 720p for PS2.
So, you could buy a 230942309402909209p monitor, (if it existed) and it would still only display
at 480p or 720p, or what ever the respective system's native resolution is.
Now that we have that out of the way,
There are things called "up-scanners", the xbox 360 up-scan's old xbox games and dvd movies,
the ps3 does the same for old ps3 games and dvd movies. Since no "last gen" system up-scans anything
you have to buy an external up-scanner.
First, "Kworld HDLCD TV BOX TV1680R" $100
Honistly I can't say it's a piece of shit. I want to, but it's just not. It has worked great as a TV tuner.
I am happy to have a nice tv-tuner for my PC monitor. The issue with this is that on a CRT monitor
you get horrible light bleeding. Now, I've ordered some potentieomiters to make a little box to
tune the signal down a little and see if it works any better. For LCD monitors, it works great
out of the box. This will up-scan your games to 1680x1050 so it will appear 1080p on a 1080p monitor.
Will it look any better? I haven't tested it on enough LCD monitors / HDTV's to judge. Live in
the houston area and want to help, send me a PM.
Second, XRGB-3 $300+ or XRGB-2 pro $150+
I'm going to cover both of these at the same time as there is very little difference. The XRGB up-scanners
are made for "games". This means no "built in" tv-tuner but it also means a lot more "game" oriented features
like "fake" scan lines. Fake scan lines are very important with old game because old games were not made
for "progressive scan", and they were often times made for monitors / tv / arcade screens that had MASSIVE
pixel pitch. The art was "made" to compensate for this pitch, when you remove it... most people will agree
the art looks a bit off as the art was drawn with this offset in mind. The XRGB will give you several levels of
scan line settings. There are also a lot of nifty inputs like SCART, VGA, and on the X-3 D-Terminal and DVI.
Really a great piece of hardware. The base difference between the X-2 pro and X-3 is the X-2 maxes out
at 1024x768 resolution and the X-3 tops out at 1680x1050 and the X-3 has 16:9 resolutions which is nice
for the PS2, XBOX and Wii.
So.. there is a little lesson in monitors tv's resolutions and stuff like that.
