Slashdot Mirror

The amber glasses used by shooters work by blocking blue light. The lens in your eye is a simple lens, so suffers from chromatic aberration. It does not focus the different colors of light onto the exact same spot. So what you see can be sharpened by blocking one end of the visible spectrum - red or blue. Your eyes are most sensitive to detail in green, less so in red, and suck at resolving blue. So blue light can be filtered out with very little effect on visual acuity (other than color accuracy). With less chromatic aberration, what you see appears slightly sharper.

If you compare subpixel density, the SGS4 is 882 subpixels per inch, my lumia 920 is 1280x768 with a pixel density of 332, comprising three sub pixels and 4.5 inches, therefore the subpixel density is 996 per inch, therefore if it was pentile it would be 498 ppi.

No, because your eyes suck at seeing blue. Your eyes have very poor resolution in blue, moderately better resolution in red, and sharpest resolution in green. The whole point of a pentile display is not to waste subpixels on blue and red that your eyes can't even see. So you put in more green subpixels than red or green.

Put another way, even though the Lumina has 996 subpixels per inch, 67% of them are much higher resolution than your eyes can resolve, while 33% (green) are lower resolution than your eyes can resolve. So you're actually wasting a lot of subpixels. With a pentile RGBG display, the ratio of subpixels better matches your eye's resolving ability. 50% of the pixels are devoted to green, 25% for red, 25% for blue. So pentile can produce a sharper looking picture than RGB while using fewer subpixels. Pentile only looks bad if you unrealistically put your eye right up to the screen or take a magnified photo.

And before anyone starts rebutting that they can see the difference, no you can't. This trick is not new nor did it start with Android pentile displays. It's been used in NTSC TV broadcasts, color film formulation, and JPEG and MPEG compression. All of those store and display red and blue at a lower resolution than green. That you never noticed this before is proof that it works. It's just new to computer displays because until recently we didn't have spare computing power to waste on converting RGB data for a single pixel into a RGBG subpixel array millions of times in real time.

Not much for internals but if you're interested in the I/O ports (Controller, AV, Cart Port, etc) and protocols GameSX is a great site.

This might make a good addition to whatever you can glean from an emulation discussion since emulators don't typically deal with the external connections.

Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe

We all beg to differ.
http://www.gamesx.com/controldata/psxcont/psxcont. htm

It looks awfully digital to me.

Unless you were referring to the old-school DB-15 game port on PCs. But I thought that most people had moved to USB controllers by now.

I haven't looked at to many of them, but they are likely just using either: RGB out, S-Video or Composite from the system. You might just have to crack one open and see what they are using, you should be able to find pinouts for the video game systems. (And If it uses RGB, it is probably using it at 15.75 KHz) (My personal favorite for pinouts is GameSX.)

And they were lying. See here. An NES controller, being a digital controller, gives you 4 signals for direction: UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT. That's it. A PC gameport has two pins for direction: X-AXIS, and Y-AXIS. Both take analog signals, and the strengths of these are what determines which direction you're going in.

Every console pad to gamepad/parallel pad conversion uses diodes for a reason.

Here is one source.

Saturn Controller Pinout

GamesX

I prefer the SNES to LPT converter myself. It worked perfectly until recently, when I installed DirectX 9 :(

Saturn Controller Pinout

GamesX

I prefer the SNES to LPT converter myself. It worked perfectly until recently, when I installed DirectX 9 :(

I still use an ancient (released in 1986 I think) Commodore 1084S because it can sync to 15KHz horizontal refresh. This means that I can connect it to my PS2 (using a LM1881 to extract the horizontal and vertical sync signals from the composite signal). Graphics quality is much higher than with a TV.

I thought Blue was just as bad as red (which is...not all that bad) However, that old link (here, worked a little better. First two images were damn near identical

As linked on the blue-deficiency page, the blue-channel analysis had been done before (at least, I remember seeing it a couple years back... or was it months?).

Personally, I like this newer analysis better: the differences are more obvious with the RGB channels put side-by-side.

The best place I find for hacks and tricks for console mods, and converters (ie. controllers, VGA hacks) is GameSX. The forums are great for new developments, or help in trying to attempt the mods.

I can't see the collection in question (And I'll wager no one else can at the moment either) so here's mine, if anyone cares.

It's big, I'm serious.

It's a serious illness - I love hardware. I love playing with it, tinkering with it, hacking it up and putting what I learn online:

GameSX.com
NFG games

I should also mention other sites that rock:

Play Nintendo games on your Dreamcast - DC Emulation

Add Composite AV to your Nintendo 2 - Here

The Howard and NESter Archive - Here

The Seanbaby NES page (funny, not safe for mere mortals) - Here

Wanking around with s-video and the more expensive component video doesn't make a lot of sense when RGB picture quality on a monitor with 15khz horizontal scan beats them all.
You can either use an old Amiga monitor for this, or find a multimedia presentation monitor like my Viewsonic 29GA. If it has S-Video and VGA in, it will handle 15khz.
You can either hack your own cable for about $10 with instructions from GamesX. Or buy a Redant VGA box for PS2 and use it on any modern monitor.

I almost forgot...

A good quick reference

A good detailed reference

I've Googled and Googled, but have yet to find any resources covering homebrew on the Game Cube. It uses a modded IBM G3 and some interesting SRAM-ish memory. I'd be nice if a resource like Marcus Comstedt's existed. So far the closest I can find are photos of the guts, and some marketing from Metrowerks.

Amonia heat pipe coolers are closed-loop systems that require no pump and are very reliable. We used them on satellites (to even out the "in the sun" side and the "in the darkness of space" side). These are more common in laptops (my inspiron 7000 uses one, and so does the titanium powerbook). If you want to play with one, the (now discontinued and cheap) dreamcast systems have two of them (pictures here), but the heatsink on the end of them probably isn't big enough for a standard desktop cpu.

...as well as what many would consider a superior alternative, for which modchips are not required due to the fact that multi-region modification is trivial.

< tofuhead >

I found instructions for building the DC VGA Box yourself not too long ago. It's a good-looking schematic (located here), but don't bother looking at it unless you are able to:
a) Identify electronic components,
b) Solder those components together, and
c) take a chance that you might fry your poor DC. ;)

Once again, this article looks like an old rerun

Too bad the link is slashdotted already.
Though the inside of the gamecube can be found here (from the other slashdot article)

GameSX - Great site, I've been an active reader for about a year. Lots of information on video game systems.

Arcade Controls.com - Information on building your own arcade controls for emulation and other hobbies.

Sex Pistols Pinball - This guy redid a old pinball machine into a Sex Pistols pinball machine, neat.

The sBox - A Preslashdoted story. Read it here.

CmdrTaco even likes emulation - He made his own MAMEcabinet

Remember these 'wee' discs are not the same as the 8mm mini CD's you find now and then, they are truly weird custom 5mm DVD's which I doubt you'll ever find on the market unless some factory in China does a major haul. They are also double-layered, none of the DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW drives handle double-layered discs of any kind.

I doubt the GC could play games from CDR, given the fact it doesn't read Redbook audio discs this probably indicates it doesn't read CD's at all.

Also... did you see the custom authentication strips on the innerside of the disc, try and get your DVD-R to burn those!

Remember these 'wee' discs are not the same as the 8mm mini CD's you find now and then, they are truly weird custom 5mm DVD's which I doubt you'll ever find on the market unless some factory in China does a major haul. They are also double-layered, none of the DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW drives handle double-layered discs of any kind.

I doubt the GC could play games from CDR, given the fact it doesn't read Redbook audio discs this probably indicates it doesn't read CD's at all.

Also... did you see the custom authentication strips on the innerside of the disc, try and get your DVD-R to burn those!

For those of you who want to see the guts of the GBA, GameSX.com has posted several scans of the GBA and a cartridge. Very cool pics.

Sony did it right and kept the same A/V port from the PSX to the PS2. You just need to change to "RGB" in the display options of the box, and you get a beautiful rock solid picture. Unless...

YOU STICK IN A DVD!

Then it switches to the lame-o "component" video which uses the same leads as the RGB does. However, since my monitor isn't expecting "component" I get a rather ugly green tinted version of the picture. Needless to say, I won't be using my PS2 to watch DVDs until someone hacks this "feature" out of it. I presume they have to go to "component" to offer me the lovely required Macrovision, a 25-year old copy protection that can be broken with a $20 box. Get real Sony and the MPAA. RGB limitations on DVDs do nothing but punish your customers.

ACK! PREVIEW, NOT POST! (where's the delete comment button, dammit?) My apologies for the crappily formatted previous version.

Here's a letter I fired off to the article's writer concerning the errors I noticed and what I consider to be the irresponsibility of the whole article.

[starts here]
Still on the first page of your article and I've already stumbled across some errors and innacuracies.

First off, Video CD was wildy successful (mostly because it was cheap to pirate, I'm sure) in asia. Outside of Japan Sony's Playstation was released with built in VCD capabilities.

Second off, you say "NO noticeable loss in quality" which should quite obviously read either "negligible loss when displayed on a low res regular TV" or "surprisingly little loss" when viewed on a PC monitor. Anyone who says or perceives otherwise is either hopelessly delusional, wants to sell something, or needs to visit their optometrist.

Third, you show one picture in a low-compression format, and the second quite clearly has compression artifacts of its own. Look at the playback controls of the two screen grabs. This was either a feeble attempt to imitate MPG4 or it is someone not paying the kind of attention due this article.

now to read the 2nd page...

"TREATED AS A SPRITE?" This implies the encoder somehow magically cuts out the moving part and overlays it on the background. While concise, its hardly accurate. A better way to say it would have been "Updates only the parts of the picture that change, like the vehicle and its immediate surroundings"

You list "small buffer" under advantages of MPG4. Personally I hate this small buffer - as MS' windows mplayer and their ASF implementation of MPG4 shows, it just slows things down when you're scanning scenes - in my opinion I'd rather suffer once in a while when the CD chokes when I'm skipping around a movie than wait 4 seconds every time. A neutral point, IMO.

last notes: I'm surprised you didn't make any mention of the rampant piracy this allows. Broadband connections make dumping and compressing DVDs onto cheap and easy-to-burn CDs as easy as duping a music CD (a little more time consuming perhaps). Are you really helping the DeCSS situation here? What about the big picture? Isn't this exactly what the music industry bigwigs said we'd be doing with this info?? If it were MY site, I'd have taken this article down - it's not doing any of us any favours IMO.

And aren't you a little late? I've been trading DiVX movies since about January.

Lawrence Wright

http://www.gamesx.com is the internets largest compilation of console game tech.

Here's a letter I fired off to the article's writer concerning the errors I noticed and what I consider to be the irresponsibility of the whole article. [starts here] Still on the first page of your article and I've already stumbled across some errors and innacuracies. First off, Video CD was wildy successful (mostly because it was cheap to pirate, I'm sure) in asia. Outside of Japan Sony's Playstation was released with built in VCD capabilities. Second off, you say "NO noticeable loss in quality" which should quite obviously read either "negligible loss when displayed on a low res regular TV" or "surprisingly little loss" when viewed on a PC monitor. Anyone who says or perceives otherwise is either hopelessly delusional, wants to sell something, or needs to visit their optometrist. Third, you show one picture in a low-compression format, and the second quite clearly has compression artifacts of its own. Look at the playback controls of the two screen grabs. This was either a feeble attempt to imitate MPG4 or it is someone not paying the kind of attention due this article. now to read the 2nd page... "TREATED AS A SPRITE?" This implies the encoder somehow magically cuts out the moving part and overlays it on the background. While concise, its hardly accurate. A better way to say it would have been "Updates only the parts of the picture that change, like the vehicle and its immediate surroundings" You list "small buffer" under advantages of MPG4. Personally I hate this small buffer - as MS' windows mplayer and their ASF implementation of MPG4 shows, it just slows things down when you're scanning scenes - in my opinion I'd rather suffer once in a while when the CD chokes when I'm skipping around a movie than wait 4 seconds every time. A neutral point, IMO. last notes: I'm surprised you didn't make any mention of the rampant piracy this allows. Broadband connections make dumping and compressing DVDs onto cheap and easy-to-burn CDs as easy as duping a music CD (a little more time consuming perhaps). Are you really helping the DeCSS situation here? What about the big picture? Isn't this exactly what the music industry bigwigs said we'd be doing with this info?? If it were MY site, I'd have taken this article down - it's not doing any of us any favours IMO. And aren't you a little late? I've been trading DiVX movies since about January. Lawrence Wright http://www.gamesx.com is the internets largest compilation of console game tech.

It's funny how my site often gets overlooked - perhaps 'cause I don't code it's not as cool.. ;)

www.gamesx.com is the inernet's largest collection of gaming hardware references bar none, as near as I can tell. If you've ever wanted a pinout, it's probably there. I'm an update slacker though, so the last thing I had up was a bit on the neato analogue buttons on the PS2 pads.

There's also a mirror of Joakim Ogren's fantastic Hardware Book.

Here's good page on hacking RGB out of your PSX in case anyone is interested.