Silent Hill Heaven

The other day, I managed to get an old 1975 Zenith Chroma-color TV. I got it for a friend who owns a videogame store and is looking for a vintage TV to use for his Atari 2600 display. I was cleaning it up and testing it out, and decided to hook up my ps1 to it and play Silent Hill just for shits and giggles. . Given the age, the tube is starting to go bad (grainy screen, contrast going from high to low on its own, etc), on occasion the vertical hold goes haywire for a second or two, and the speaker (which needs replaced) likes to make noises of its own. This makes for an even creepier and downright scarier experience for me. I've played the original in high def, and oddly enough its actually scarier on an old piece of shit TV. Has anyone else found this to be true?

That sounds very interesting, though I haven't tried this myself.

We want proof!We want a video!

And I guess an old TV would smooth out some of the graphical chunkyness. I remember playing PS1 games on a small portable and it somehow suited it better.

Yeah, same. When I got SH1 in '99 I had a shitty old TV in my room, and the graphics were a lot softer which smoothed things a bit, especially creepy in alt. Midwich and Nowhere.

We want proof!We want a video!

Poor quality and stretched somehow, but this is a [joke] video I made on the PSX/TV rather than using an emulator/computer:
http://alchemillahospital.net/sh1-ambulance-ending/

I totally agree that it suits a smaller 'simpler' screen, the graphics seem not to have to spread so thin so to speak LOL

I love the sound of the old grainy affect with it! I bet it would be a lot creepier! I think you've struck gold there!

nur_ein_tier wrote: Poor quality and stretched somehow, but this is a [joke] video I made on the PSX/TV rather than using an emulator/computer:
http://alchemillahospital.net/sh1-ambulance-ending/

Hahaha, nice one!I'm sure after it, Lisa replace Harry's wife place in the CGs .

Heh, the first TV I had in my bedroom and first played SH on was pretty old- it was a small extra one that my grandparents had. Can't say I remember if that was preferable to playing on my HDTV. I wouldn't mind trying it again, but it suits me fine on my newer one.

The game is creepy enough on it's own, but if you look too closely on an HD TV then you can see each individual pixel. Just don't sit too close to the TV.

That actually sounds like a really fascinating experience. I'd love to give that a try meself sometime, and it wouldn't cost much, either. Just head down to Good Will and grab a cheapo old TV set...hm. Might have to try that.

That is awesome. I wish I had an old TV that still worked that I could play the game on. We have a lot of old TV's in my garage, not sure which ones work. I really want to try that. Maybe I'll go to Good Will lol.

That sounds awesome! I just like a little 13 inch TV in my bedroom and personally I think that most things look better on it than anything else.

I would expect it to be more creepy, to be honest.

A 'disturbed' televsion image suggests the uncertain and unauthorised footage of pre-certification horror VHS videos and perhaps more recently the grainy, handhelp footage of people recording natural (and un-natural) disasters with their mobile phones. You only see such footage nowadays if it's recording something extraordinary, unedited and/or unauthorised - unvetted by any corporation, and so you're really left feeling as if you're all alone with the content.

It suggests tapping into the forbidden!

I think SH1 and 2 would be amazing on an old school TV. They just have the right feel for some of the games. Not to mention you see those shitty old TVs in some of the games. The quality of the TVs would create a pretty awesome atmosphere.

I remember this huge wooden framed, crazy heavy TV I had as a kid. Would've been perfect to play them on.

Too bad my dad took it to our farm dump and we shot it with a bunch of guns for a good hour or so.

I had a progression of old TVs in my youth--the oldest of which was a 9" black and white Sylvania (I think) from the 1960s. I had to use two pairs of medical forceps to make it work: one to tune the TV thanks to the knob being broken, and the other was used as the antenna. To actually get a signal, I had to be very precise with the tuning knob, letting it actually rest between notches.

I hooked my PlayStation up to it a few times for fun using an old TV/Game manual RF modulator (by that time, I had something modern), and I did play Resident Evil on it to see if the effect was different. All I found was that it made things difficult to see.

When you play a PS1 game using a PS3 and a HDTV you can press the PS button and mess with 2 graphic options :
16/9 on/off, graphic filter on/off. The graphic filter is set to off if you' ve never messed with it.
I tried it on Final Fantasy games : with the graphic filter on the 3D elements just look slightly better, but the 2D elements (backgrounds and CGs) are widely improved.
If you leave the graphic filter off then the graphics look awful.

I know that on the PSN version of Silent Hill, if you turn the smoothing off, it looks a little better. The smoothing seems to bring out a lot of artifacting.

It sounds very interesting. Do you images of your TV? Please share here.

i have an old tv in the attic so i might try this lol.... hell i might do this with resi 4 and see what happens

Hmmm...i don't have a tv that's THAT old, but i do have 38" toshiba crt(99-01).....and all of my ps2 games still look great on them....my ps3 is hooked up to it as well...and while the ps3 games may look better on a hd tv set, the games still look amazing on my CRT...

All of the SH games look great and i think the older sets are in a way better for experiencing these types of games since with the newer sets, you can see every pixel....like it was mentioned above, the older sets tend to smooth out those rough edges.....