Hey y’all, Try from My Life in Gaming here. Yesterday, Bob released his interview with Amine from Marseille, and today I’ve got a full video review of the new mClassic Retro and mClassic Switch HDMI video processors. Alongside the red mClassic that released several years ago (now dubbed mClassic Original), these new ones are colored green and blue respectively, forming what Marseille calls the “RGB Collection”.
I’m extremely sensitive to sharpening artifacts – any noticeable ringing is a video processing no-no for me. So Marseille’s upscaling, which not only smooths over aliased edges but also sharpens the image, has never been to my tastes. However, there are a lot of people who think the mCable and mClassic processing is transformative in a very positive way, especially for 480p content, and I totally respect that. I can appreciate what they’re going for, even if I would never use it for my personal enjoyment.
That said, the new mClassics are perhaps the most profoundly baffling devices I have ever looked at in all my years of evaluating retro gaming hardware. I may not be Marseille’s biggest fan, but I had enough faith in them to believe that they would not intentionally tamper with the colors of the source in such a reckless fashion as they have here. That’s why I spent my first several hours of testing trying to understand why the colors were so wrong when I flipped the switches between the various modes. Marseille’s processing never threw the colors terribly out of whack before, so I thought it must be a problem either with video settings at the source, or in the way the mClassic was being interpreted by my TV and capture card. But no, as evidenced by their own examples on their Indiegogo page, the new modes on each of these units primarily exist to distort the colors in a way that Marseille seems to believe is desirable for retro gamers and Nintendo Switch fans, but I simply cannot agree.
Tons of shadow and highlight detail is lost in some of these modes, alongside increases and decreases in saturation that just make no sense to me. Sure, much like with the “vivid” color mode on your TV, there can be a knee-jerk reaction of “oh wow!” when you see something that’s high contrast and highly saturated, but once you realize you are losing so much detail in the process, you stop using that. Marseille says the “Switch” version is meant to make the games feel like the handheld experience, but I don’t see how this is achieved with the new modes they’ve developed. Are they trying to make them feel like the Switch LCD and OLED model screens? I’m sorry, but crushing details does not make an LCD TV look like an OLED. Likewise, raising video levels and washing out colors is not how you make retro systems look “just like you remember.” Perhaps Marseille’s reference CRTs were of really poor quality and examined in brightly-lit rooms, but back in the day, CRTs would have had beautiful colors, with phenomenal black levels, even with composite cables. Good condition CRTs today still look this way!
I also discovered very early on in my testing that there is a critical and extremely inconvenient bug that exists in both the green and blue mClassics. It’s too bizarre to explain in text here – watch the video to see what it does – but unless Marseille has the ability to fix this on units shipped later, you will be impacted by this bug every single time you use either of the new mClassic models. Note that the red mClassic I used for the review was purchased in 2022, so I cannot guarantee that the newly-sold red units are exactly the same as they used to be. But this bug is not a factor with my 2022 red mClassic.
Seeing dull colors and lost details does not tickle my nostalgia bone. It just makes me ask, “What’s wrong here? How can I fix it?” The answer is to not use the new mClassics at all. If you like the original red mClassic, stick with that. The new ones have no new features worth your time or money. Watch the full video for more details, and stick around to the end to see what happens if you link all three RGB mClassics together!