I thought it was funny how many people moaned and complained about seeing the garbage on the Wii Virtual Console version. That minimizes the appearance of strange glitchy effects in games like Super Mario Bros 3. Some NES emulators let you set a mask of however many pixels you want on the sides. You might see some garbage in those areas. I'm not sure if this is an issue on Playstation, but some old games assume you can't see the areas around the edge of the screen (due to overscan on CRT TVs). If the display has any kind of smooth motion 120hz interpolation feature, that's going to have strange artifacts and undesirable side-effects, so you should definitely turn-off any of that stuff. Those algorithms really don't enhance games very much. You'd also want to disable any image processing and use game mode (if available) to minimize image processing delays. That way, each scanline in the original signal maps directly to rows of pixels on the screen. You'd want to disable the simulated overscan that most HDTVs have enabled by default (a slight zoom that crops the garbage in some broadcasts). However, most TVs would still process the image.
It would look very sharp with that kind of integer scaling, but you'd need simultaneous letterboxing + pillarboxing to fit 1280x960 on a 1920x1080 display. Dont argue about which emulator is better because pSX/Xebra are not PSEmu PRO plugin based and dont allow video/audio upscaling, ePSXe is the only one. If you quadruple each pixel (double each pixel horizontally, then double each line vertically), you end up with a 320x240 native framebuffer, rendered and output at 640x480, integer scaled to 1280x960. To fill the screen vertically without integer scaling, there will always be a blur effect. When scaling a 640x480 signal for a 1920x1080 display, multiplying each line by a factor of 2 (1280x960) doesn't quite fill the screen vertically, and multiplying by a factor of 3 (1920x1440) wouldn't fit.
The blurring problem comes in scaling algorithms that do not multiply lines evenly so that the vertical space is filled completely.
Sure, the pixels are more obvious, but they're much sharper and clearer than running everything through a normal scaling algorithm that blurs everything. Click to expand.On a 1920x1200 display, I prefer integer scaling without simulated scanlines.