Marseille has launched a crowdfunding page for their upcoming product, the mClassic, which was designed in collaboration with OG Arabian Prince, Founding member of N.W.A.,. For those wondering what this mClassic is, it can be described as an upgraded graphics card for video game consoles. What the mClassic does exactly is smooth and sharpen graphics to give some improvement to the overall picture quality. The mClassic works with modern and retro consoles, and cleans up the images by upscaling, anti-aliasing, adjusting field of depth and sharpening the image. And added benefit it brings to retro consoles is adjusting the output on HD TVs were they are in their native 4:3 ratio compared to the stretched out 16:9. It's an HDMI dongle that plugs into the back of a console or PC along with a USB cable. An extra HDMI dongle is included for systems where the dongle's shape could be problematic.

To sum up the functionality, the mClassic just cleans up the images. The scaler aims to produce higher resolution images from low resolution sources, essentially trying to make SD look like HD and HD look like 4K without making alterations to the color processing. Getting too close to the TV can show the reality of the smoothest curved images, where they are actually made of square pixels. The anti-aliasing helps smooth out everything, getting rid of the dreaded "jaggies" to dig up an archaic gaming term. A visual trick that is employed by photographers is to get the primary subject of a photograph in perfect focus while the background may be blurred. This is common in some games where the details of the background are a bit of focus but the action and character is crystal clear. The depth of field algorithm takes the foreground and background images and renders them both in the best clarity in real time.

Hardcore Gamer did get to test out one of these units. The feature that was most impressive was the field of depth feature, since they out of focus backgrounds tended to show the most noticeable clean up and increased clarity. The best comparison that can be applied here from the standard definition era is going from standard red yellow white input cables to an S-video. Not quite the noticeable jump from SD to HD but it does improve the picture quality. A PlayStation 3 game like God of War III will look as though it's gotten a coat of polish but will not become indistinguishable from its upgraded PlayStation 4 counterpart. The mClassic works with the native artwork and processes in a way that gives it some subtle improvements, no drastic night and day differences. Interested parties can jump on the Indiegogo campaign and get this device at a discount prior to its retail launch.