I have some PS1 games that I purchased used. Unsurprisingly, 20 years on the resale market hasn't been kind to them. I purchased a cheap disk polisher (monoprice disk repair kit, which is advertised to "clean 99% of all scratches"), but my experience wasn't that great for fixing the PS1 games. I did fix one PS2 DVD that wouldn't play, but mostly it didn't seem to help. So I decided to try other cleaning solutions than provided with the kit, and to run them much longer than the 3 minutes suggested. Here are my results with Plastx, an automotive plastic cleaner advertised primarily for headlights. I tried several PS1 CDs, and none became playable. But perhaps I just wasn't running the polisher long enough. So used a Windows program (nero DiscSpeed) to get a summary of the error rate to see if it was improving at all. PS1 CDs are after all just regular data CDs, so my PC should serve as proxy for the PS1, although I've found the DVD reader in my lapto...
This 720p Plasma TV from 2008 is very unique and quite nice in many ways. It used to retail for around $1300. If you can find one it's a great choice for retro gaming. Overview/Image quality This is a plasma TV, which generally means at least the following: nearly infinite viewing angles, and jaw dropping weight. That's true in this case as well. This 42" model weights 75lbs. At native resolution (720p) this TV crops 20 pixels off the top/bottom and 30 off the sides. 480p/i crops 20 pixels off all sides. Both modes have aliasing, too, though it's not too bad. There's really no excuse for aliasing on a TV this big: you know the panel was designed specifically to be a tv. Why not hit 720p exactly? And as for 480p/i, they could have at least offered a zoomed out mode with black borders and 1:1 pixel mapping. But no such luck. There are zoom/stretch options to crop even more, but none that crop less. While the native resolution supposedly is 1366 x 768 it does accept...
This 1080p Plasma TV from 2008 is very unique and quite nice in many ways. It used to retail for around $2000. If you can find one it's a great choice for retro gaming. Overview/Image quality This is a plasma TV, which generally means at least the following: nearly infinite viewing angles, and jaw dropping weight. That's true in this case as well. This 50" model weights 85lbs. At native resolution (1080p) this TV can be set to zero cropping, and in that mode is pixel perfect, with zero aliasing. 480p/i crops 25 pixels off the side and 15 off the top/bottom; as far as I could tell there was no way to reduce this, and furthermore it was forced 16:9 aspect ratio. If you have the remote it's probably possible to get 4:3, but this isn't exposed in the menus you can get to without the remote. 480p/i looks pretty good, with only a little aliasing or jagged edges. It's much improved relative to the upscaling on the native 720p Panasonic sets from the same era. 720p ...
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