Hi to all and I hope you are well, despite it all.
I've mainly been a lurker on this wonderful thread but I'm breaking cover to report on my own recent finding in regard of retro PES.
I've been playing PES5 and, more recently, PES 2008 on PS2 hooked up to a budget-quailty HDTV using one of the cheap HDMI converters you can pick up online. The picture quality is actually pretty good and I've been revelling in session-after-session of retro footy (especially since the whistle was blown on real footy). Then something happened to make me question if I was really playing the games we all first fell in love with back in the day.
My son is a bit of a whizz with techy stuff and he managed to get PES 2008 running on my PS Vita. I hate the controls on the PSP so this seemed like a great upgrade. It was to a point but the one thing that surprised me was just how different this PES 2008 was to my PS2 version - waaaay slower and more refined for a start.
To cut the chase, I ended up looking into my PS2 set up and ended up - after much trial and error with various plugs, wires and settings - buying a £20 Scart lead from Retro Gaming Cables UK. I first hooked it up to my HDTV - not much different to how I had been playing it via HDTV converter. Then I hooked it up to an old CRT portable telly. Oh my god, the difference!
PES 2008, any PES pre PS3, comes fully alive on this old tech. The graphics pop, the gameplay is slower and more refined, the player individuality is even more pronounced...
Basically, I'm really just posting this to answer a question I think I may have asked on this very thread the last time I was compelled to comment: What is the best set up for retro PES? The answer is most definitely, and perhaps not surprisingly, exactly how the majority of us played it all those years ago - on a console via a trusty old CRT. No doubt PC gamers will have alternative views but that's not my thing.
Finally, thanks to
@miguelfcp for that riveting review of PES5 - the greatest footy game of all time lives on (although, you're right, shame about that slightly powerder-puff attacking AI).