Reviving my Nintendo 64

While I have a collection of older Nintendo consoles and games, I'm not much of a retro gamer. I still have my Wii U hooked up to my TV, where this is as "retro" as it gets at the moment and I mostly stick to my Nintendo Switch and the PC for gaming. My older systems rest somewhere in boxes, but from time to time I feel the need to check everything out to see if it still works.

Now, there is the problem that I don't have a tube TV any longer, not even a TV with a SCART input. So, I did get an adapter from Kaico (from my own money, so I'm not sponsored or anything), which gets put into the Nintendo 64 directly, converts the signal to HDMI, and even upscales it to 1080p. I already had the same item for my old Xbox, where I was quite happy with it and now decided to get one for my remaining consoles without HDMI.

There are also a variety of SCART to HDMI adapters available, but such a native adapter felt more natural to me and it also doesn't need an extra power source, you just plug it into your console and then use any HDMI cable. It's very simple. Of course a SCART adapter can be used on pretty much all the old consoles, but this thing also works with your Super Nintendo and GameCube, since they have the same output port. So, this really covers the rest of my old consoles, which were the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube. But I've only tested my Nintendo 64 so far and the result was quite satisfying...

My first test was with Turok: Rage Wars, because that's my only Nintendo 64 game that didn't make make it on PC or a later Nintendo system. This was also my first Arena Shooter and is therefore still quite dear to me, where I was immediately happy to see that the 100% save game on my Controller Pack is still alive. It won't be that way forever, since everything for Nintendo 64 relied on batteries, where I probably should make a back-up soon, as long as it's still possible...

Both my save files for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are also still there, which is quite incredible, given how it's been over 20 years. Most of my Game Boy cartridges have dead batteries by now, however, where it's only a matter of time for the Nintendo 64 stuff to meet the same terrible fate. But since I have all of these games on later systems it's not really critical... Only the above save from Turok: Rage Wars would be a bit of a loss.

The two Nintendo 64 Zelda games don't look as good, where the graphics appear a lot more pixelated and the picture is a bit too bright. The Temple of Time now really looks like it was supposed to be the Temple of Light:

Well, it looks much better on the photo, because this is making things darker as well, but in reality I can hardly read the "500" in the bottom left corner, because the backdrop is simply too bright. Of course it stops to be a problem once you leave the Temple of Time...

It probably helps that Turok: Rage Wars was quite dark by default and got also made for split-screen multiplayer, where they kept the graphics clean and simple to keep the performance up. But for whatever reason the image doesn't fill the screen, while it does for the two Zelda games. So, it's not perfect by any means and I can't 100% recommend it, but for my purposes this adapter turned out to be a good and simple choice.