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Either way, the difference for me when playing Metroid Dread was significant enough to where side-by-side comparisons had to be made. The result was that it was suddenly as if I had installed a new, more powerful graphics card in my Nintendo Switch. It was the Switch experience that many gamers have been crying out for for a few years now, a more powerful Switch that could display Nintendo's awesome selection of games in their best possible light. But it goes beyond consoles. If you want to run games at 1080p on a laptop and out put it to 4K on a TV, the MClassic is great for that. And since the device is only doing post-processing effects, it’s actually great for other kinds of content as well. MClassic improves the look of DVDs and text And almost unbelievably, the benefits are clear from the Wii menu itself. The device was never meant to display this menu on a 4K screen, and it's all too easy to spot the small issues. Essentially, in places, the menu looks like a low-resolution image, which it most likely is, complete with small image artifacts. The rounded icons on the Wii settings menu and the main icon look aliased on a large screen at a low resolution, but when passed through the mClassic they are round, and all of the tiny artifacts are cleaned up instantly. Now, this is definitely where the issues become more obvious - the device obviously can't display more detail than it is given, so icons and logos on the Wii menu still look blurry and soft, but they are absolutely more legible than they ever were when more pixelated.
Now comes the not-so-great news. The mClassic doesn't support HDR, at least in my tests. If you connect it to a PS4, Xbox One X, or PS4 Pro, then you'll have to live without the better colors. While some games on the PS4 are sub-1080p, many support HDR so it'll have to be a personal preference. Do you prefer vibrant colors or a smoother image? I think the MClassic is best when you are trying to connect a lower-powered source to a higher-quality display. The Switch is proof of that, but it goes way beyond that. If you have an HDMI adapter for older consoles — like the GameCube or Dreamcast, you’ll get a big benefit from those as well. The gold standard for the mClassic would be an onscreen interface you can use to see performance metrics and tweak what effects the mClassic applies and how it applies them. A silver medal would go to the mClassic if you could simply connect it to a PC via USB and change its settings in a piece of software. Either way, having control over your image is what I’m after, and even if the mClassic doesn’t get more effects, just the ability to tweak the ones it already comes with would be a massive win.I had a look at the raw 720p video coming from the Switch and then swap over to the 720p mClassic upscaled footage. The difference here is night and day which is great because it proves that the mClassic is in fact upgrading the image significantly. Power Stone also stands out for just how well its aliasing is treated. Dreamcast titles generally had no anti-aliasing at all - a raw 480p image is all we got - and as such it makes it an easy console to design an algorithm like this around. The parameters are easier to predict, more so than modern games with varying resolutions, AA methods and complex shaderwork. In this case most stair-stepping is treated and the game looks much easier on the eye with mClassic enabled. There's a softer appearance but texture clarity isn't affected aggressively - and what's there is amplified overall by the sharpening pass.
But one of the key reasons for testing games on the Wii U was the HDMI port - this retro mode only outputs a 4:3 picture, but this device obviously only works with consoles with an HDMI port. Therefore, if you're looking to add this to your retro gaming set up, then you will likely already own an HDMI converter, such as a Framemeister, or a VGA to HDMI converter for the Dreamcast. If you don't have an HDMI converter for your retro systems already, then that will be the first thing you should look get before the mClassic. The thing that all of these upscalers have in common, however, is that they’re aimed at consoles that don’t already have HDMI video output. The start of the video shows my Nintendo Switch OLED's menu screen. Take a look at the logos for No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again. The lettering when the mClassic is off is noticeably blurrier versus when it's on. But less noticeable does not mean entirely unnoticeable. The mClassic only bumps the resolution to the next output value. This means that a 720p signal can only go up to 1080p. A 1080p signal can only go up to 1440p. The mClassic doesn't magically post-process an image from 720p to 4K. Doing so would likely require much more horsepower and special upscaling algorithms. And I think that’s the story of the MClassic. It can have a huge impact on the image quality for some games, but you may not notice it at all in others.However, the upgrade to visual quality with the mClassic engaged isn’t night and day, either. That isn’t to say it’s not a meaningful, worthwhile upgrade, though. For Animal Crossing, even some relatively light anti-aliasing and upscaling significantly cleans up the image and cuts down on jaggies. Considering the game is generally fairly minimalist aesthetically with lots of clean edges and bright colors, the increase to color vibrancy makes the whole world pop, while sharpening effectively brings out some extra detail from textures. For 4K upscaling though, I would look elsewhere because this is severely limited by only offering 30fps in 4K. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is already a gorgeous looking game. Probably to this day it still has the best graphics I’ve seen in a Switch game, so what can the mClassic do here? The second option turns on a green light and this is called the ‘Processing On’ mode. This is basically the default setting you’re going to want to use in most cases, with it turning on the upscaling and additional features to improve the image coming from your console.
Jagged edges are especially noticeable in the slider below, where Samus is seen examining her suit after the Raven Beak encounter. Pay attention to the round areas of Samus' armor, like her shoulder pads and helmet. The silver lightning bolt-like image on her shoulder pads look noticeably sharper with the mClassic on. Also, the marketing does state that the mClassic can upscale 1080p content to 4K, and while this is true, this is only the case for 30hz content and below. For gaming then this is awkward, as not all consoles offer a 30hz output mode, and this will of course prevent you from playing games at 60FPS. But even without a 4K output, the mClassic does a good job of smoothing over the rough edges, even with a 1080p picture. This review focuses on the gaming experience with the mClassic, but rest assured that 480p DVD and 1080p Blu-ray movies will look much cleaner when fed through the mClassic. This leaves a bit of a gap in the market considering that systems like the PS3, Xbox 360 and even the Nintendo Switch are starting to show their age and could benefit from the same type of upscaling we’re seeing with those retro systems. The effect you get from older systems is going to vary dramatically based on what console you’re using. I tested it with PS1 and PS2 games and there’s literally no difference in the majority of them. sprite work suffers especially. Taking OutRun as an example, the Sega Ages port on Saturn is given the works; sharpening, intelligent focus, and even anti-aliasing is applied to its 2D pixel art. It creates a smudged, rounded effect on some corners, and at points the stair-stepping is evened out to a straight line. It's the mClassic doing its job, but it sadly undoes the aesthetic of the game; those pixels are meant to be shown raw. This is where the passthrough mode comes in handy, but even 3D titles like Panzer Dragoon don't look all that attractive when the mClassic is enabled. The image is filled with noise from the scale to 1080p, while segments are treated with AA for a few frames at a time. It doesn't have the consistency Dreamcast games do, and I suspect feeding it an upscaled 240p signal doesn't help. It's an interesting experiment then, but given the bulk of titles on Saturn gave 2D the spotlight, it's not an ideal fit.If the retro mode here is to your preference, then the mClassic makes for a great accompaniment to any retro gaming set up and makes older games look much more palatable on a large display. But the mClassic is definitely at home with the Nintendo Switch. The fact that it renders many games below 1080p means that games make the most of the mClassic's tech, and the improvements are more noticeable than they would be on a more powerful system running at higher native resolutions and with anti-aliasing on by default. While we've found the mClassic to work great for the Switch and retro Nintendo consoles, your mileage may vary based on which console and TV you're using. That said, regardless of which console you play on, the mClassic will certain help display crisper textures and a clearer picture for retro games, making them highly playable on modern TVs. However, if you play a lot of games in 720p especially on the Switch which is where the mClassic seems to shine, this does legitimately make a difference. Image post-processing is nothing new to gaming, but for a multitude of reasons, it's not commonplace. Good post-processors can be expensive, come with noticeable latency, or just don't make much of a difference. The popular gaming post-processors that are on the market are aimed primarily at the retro crowd right now, such as the Framemeister. But Marseille's mClassic is looking to change all of that. The mClassic promises to be extremely low-latency, with noticeable results on both retro and HD consoles, and at a fairly inexpensive price point. Too good to be true, or the perfect addition to your gaming set-up? The Xbox 360 is obviously very similar to the PS3 graphically, so I went into this with reasonably high expectations.
games also look far cleaner using the retro mode. I couldn't help but test an old classic like Super Mario 64 (the PAL 50hz version, unfortunately), and as with all of the other games mentioned here, it was considerably smoothed over. On these much older 3D games the point about a softer image doesn't really apply - all of the post-processing provided by the mClassic on N64 games makes the image quality look better, there really isn't an argument to be made to the contrary like with 2D games. The mClassic really does work to smooth out the pixelated areas of various video games. Many of the changes I saw on the Nintendo Switch were relatively subtle but did make the images prettier to look at. Just be warned that depending on how close you sit to your screen, the kind of display you have, and the HDMI cable used, you may or may not see much of a difference. But then I tested some 720p games like Halo: Anniversary which to me looks exactly the same, Dead Rising maybe looks ever so slightly darker through the mClassic, but as far as I can tell it looks exactly the same quality-wise and then I did one last test with Halo 3: ODST and again, surprise surprise, it looked almost identical. The bottom line is that any console which outputs an interlaced signal (which is most consoles prior to the Dreamcast) won’t be upscaled by the mClassic without an additional device, whereas any progressive signal (offered by most consoles after the Dreamcast) will receive the effects of the mClassic and typically look much better. Our Verdict On The mClassic HDMI Upscaler Journey was another game which I would probably say looked better with the mClassic. It’s subtle, but it does look a bit sharper and it almost looks a little bit more dynamic with the colours being slightly more vibrant.
Source: Windows Central This is a close-up image of Rage 2 on Xbox One X without the adapter. The image quality is exactly the same as with the adapter. (Image credit: Source: Windows Central) The Dreamcast meanwhile is capable of progressive video output which does work with the mClassic, so in most instances I wouldn’t recommend the mClassic for PS2. There are certain games which output in 480p, but a massive majority of games were incapable of this and instead ran in 480i. On the right, you can see the weird discoloration that sometimes happens when you try to put text on a higher-resolution screen. But the MClassic is able to process that signal into a clean-looking typeface.
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