Wii's Image Quality Is Fixed in 2023

Removing the blur seems to bring up the same problems retro games designed to be displayed on CRTs have where the developer anticipated a certain level of blurriness and so they didn’t add any sort of anti-aliasing to their games.

Hi GVG do you know any way I can make my copy of Twilight Princesss even MORE blurred and stretched? Would love a follow up episode so I can play it at it's most optimal aesthetic!!

The stretch is clearly taken into account for the final image, you can see that circular or square items are elongated once you return them to the original output. Unfortunate as it does look a lot clearer, but it is what it is.

I would also like to mention that you should turn on the 480p pixel patch for even better clarity (mostly in text), especially if you have an earlier model Wii.

In Mario Kart Wii with the framebuffer aspect ratio, it kind of makes stuff look skinnier. Mario looks slimmer than he should be and the item slot gui icon looks noticeably less square. I think you're definitely right and the intent differs from game to game, but personally I'd probably leave the stretch on for this reason.

With this, just as with the SNES, I am in the camp of "the output resolution is more correct than the internal resolution", as devs should have taken the stretch into account and that's what the games were viewed at at the time.

I mean the Wii does have an option to be played in 4:3 as well as 16:9 in the standard menu, it was released at a weird time where CRTs were still in use everywhere but widescreen HD TVs were becoming more popular, I think towards the end of the Wii's life those games were definitely developed with the stretching in mind because widescreen TVs had become more commonplace by then

One thing to keep in mind is that if you own a Retrotink or Ossc you can use them to correct the aspect ratio without making it as blurry as the framebuffer does.

I could tell you literally anything about the Wii and I was not aware of this. Thanks so much, the Wii is my favorite console ever and now it will look even better!

We can see that RE4 take the stretch in consideration, the scope is not a circle anymore, same for the health counter on the HUD, and I kinda think it is too for MK Wii, because the box for items on the top left is now a rectangle with framebuffer, the box is taller, or, thiner depending on how you see your cup half filled or half empty x).

Didn't know there was anything left for the Wii modding community to do, this is an amazing upgrade. Looking forward to booting it up this weekend.

I think that the de-flicker filter being able to be shut off is a massive game-changer for Wii video quality on digital displays, especially with something like a RetroTink5x being able to sharp scale it to either 960p or 1440p. The stretching I could see being more divisive. It reminds me of SNES/Genesis games being either 256p or 320p wide, with circles being squished for those wider games in 4:3 mode. The Wii was a console made during the switch from CRTs to Digital displays, so I've always thought of 16:9 as being the aspect ratio that Nintendo always meant for it. I think it has to be done on a case by case basis if they meant for it to be stretched or not, and even then it's more of a personal preference.

I wouldn't recommend the framebuffer setting personally, because the games were made with that bit of horizontal stretch in mind. Removing the stretching leaves you with an image that appears squashed a bit, and characters and such are noticeably skinnier looking.

I was always a bit miffed on the image quality of Wii games, as I knew it wasn't really completely an issue with the system itself as Gamecube games still looked great on it, so I didn't know what the deal was

These don't really feel like fixes at all to me. It DOES make things sharper, but at the cost of exposing imperfections the Wii had to work with. Both Twilight Princess at 1:10 and RE4 at 3:44 show dithering patterns that are way more ugly to me than being a bit blurry (which honestly looks pretty normal for 480p games if you're used to CRTs). Also RE4 renders in a letterboxed mode in 4:3, while widescreen mode just zooms it in. The game is not meant to be viewed in a full 4:3 screen like that, it's just stretched and not correct proportionally. In fact, most of these examples look like the stretch was taken into account beforehand. Turning these options on just makes the games look dramatically more aged in my opinion, but of course this is still subjective.

I can see one reason, why Nintendo introduce the filter (even I don't agree with that decision). The dithering is strong with this one... Twilight Princess and especially RE4 have really strong dither pattern. And I know, that some people are really allergic to it. Speaking of, is there some option in loader, which is trying to mitigate it like in Swiss on GC?

This is great! I haven't delved much into wii homebrew, just did enough for project plus & CTGP, definitely gonna do this myself

idk. Seems like developers accounted for both. Removing the deflicker looks like artifacts get added but I'd guess developers added them to account for the blur. And the aspect ratio makes stuff look non circular.

This explains so much about the wii's video resolution, not only the components within the analog port made cheap, but also the deflicker or bob deinterlacing that you mentioned in this video.

Man, you really make me wanna hook up my Wii again (truth to be told, I was going to do that anyway) but this is amazing. I have component cables for it so I wonder how it makes difference on my TV.