Has anyone used the m cable to improve Wii game visuals on wiiu?

[Angst]

I've been really into playing Wii games on my wiiu lately but man they do look pretty rough. I've read that Wii games look better on an actual Wii but free TV ports are limited and I'd rather just improve the wiiu experience as much as I can. I've read some reviews that say the m cable has made some mild but noticeable improvements in older consoles, but nothing wiiu specific.

Anyone have any first hand experience doing this?

 

[Teenage Fansub]

I think a big problem is how the WiiU upscales the Wii graphics internally, so that's baked into the output no matter what you do.

edit: Maybe if you homebrew the WiiU there are better display options like native 480P for Wii? No idea.

 

[Afrikan]

From what I know...

mClassic/M Cable for stuff 720p and lower to be upscaled to 1080p

4K Gamer Pro for 1080p content to be upscaled to 4K

Some folks link them together.

 

[RivalGT]

Wii games look best on original Wii vs Wii u, either due to how the scaling is done or the filtering of the output. Neither of the 2 would be a good fit for the mcable/classic. If you can feed the mclassic a clean 480p picture then it will look decently upscaled, xbox and PS2 both look improved with it, it makes a good difference on 720p consoles as well.

Original wii with deflicker filter via HDMI to mclassic would likely provide the best picture.


This video can explain it better than me. The issues with Wii U.

View: https://youtu.be/eIINayYXO00?t=232

 

[Leo-Tyrant]

I've been really into playing Wii games on my wiiu lately but man they do look pretty rough. I've read that Wii games look better on an actual Wii but free TV ports are limited and I'd rather just improve the wiiu experience as much as I can. I've read some reviews that say the m cable has made some mild but noticeable improvements in older consoles, but nothing wiiu specific.

Anyone have any first hand experience doing this?

Click to shrink...

I never managed to make it look good for the Wii stuff on the Wii U. Switch looks amazing with it though.

 

[Pargon]

It can help a little, but the problem is that the Wii U's output for Wii games is terrible.
And the mClassic has undefeatable sharpening on its output, which is most-severe at low resolutions.
The anti-aliasing can help with native Wii U/Switch games - though I haven't compared it to my C1 OLED's built-in image smoothing feature (sharpness set to 10 does this).

The thing is, the Wii rendered games natively in YCbCr with 4:2:2 subsampling.
But the Wii U (and the original firmware release of the Wii Dual HDMI mod) does not use the correct sample position.
If I recall correctly, in SD the sample position was at the upper-left corner of a pixel, while in HD it was moved to the center of a pixel, or something like that.
The Wii U uses the wrong offset, resulting in the color signal being misaligned - adding color fringing on bright edges (almost like chromatic aberration).

On top of that, I don't think the Wii U disables the Wii's deflicker filter, so the output is very blurry.
It seems that there are now mods to force the deflicker filter off - at least in Wii mode (rather than Wii VC mode) - which might help clean up the image a lot.

Here are some captures I took back when I got the mClassic:
Endless Ocean 2, 480p output, mClassic off/on:

Another Code: R
480p output, mClassic off/on:

1080p output, mClassic off/on:

Metroid Prime 2, 480p, mClassic off/on:

Unfortunately the view is constantly swimming about in Prime 2 so I wasn't able to get a 1:1 comparison.

Skyward Sword, 480p, mClassic off/on:

And Luigi's Mansion 3 on the Switch, just for an example of it working well:

Please ignore the heavy aliasing on red, though. That was my capture card's limited chroma resolution - not the mClassic.