But can an SDTV display 480p content? This is most important for my Gamecube. And lets say I plug in a Genesis via component, the 240p signal gets treated as 480i on an SD set right? So what difference would happen if I plugged it into an HD set? It somehow gets treated as 480p? And this is bad because its not natively outputting that signal unlike the GC correct? Sorry still trying to get my shit straight about this stuff. Ive watched all those "my life in gaming" videos on the matter but they just confuse me more than help. Actually talking to someone greatly helps lol
SDTV cannot display 480p content. May want to hunt down a VGA monitor and use a YPbPr->RGB encoder if 480p RGB is unavailable. Or get a BVM, 20L5, XM29, from whichever fountain that spews them out. If I cared more about 480p I'd probably get a low lag LCD and pair with OSSC, as long as you're under 1 frame of total lag (OSSC's is minuscule) you're running in realtime as the next frame does not exist anyway.
240p on a SDTV will be actual 240p, non-interlacing and scanlines and all. You're thinking of HDTV I think, many of them don't handle non-interlaced 15khz video differently, so your Genesis would be treated like it's a DVD player.
Dunno exactly what you mean by not natively outputting. If you're thinking something like a console that COULD output 480p (say a GameCube) outputting 480i (ie no Component cables) is bad, that is incorrect, the scaler on the console isn't some "internal Framemeister" type of device but instead something on or close to bare metal which generates whichever video output signal from the console's GPU.