Slashdot Mirror
Old Doesn't Have To Mean Ugly: Squeezing Better Graphics From Classic Consoles
MojoKid writes If you're a classic gamer, you've probably had the unhappy experience of firing up a beloved older title you haven't played in a decade or two, squinting at the screen, and thinking: "Wow. I didn't realize it looked this bad." The reasons why games can wind up looking dramatically worse than you remember isn't just the influence of rose-colored glasses — everything from subtle differences in third-party hardware to poor ports to bad integrated TV upscalers can ruin the experience. One solution is an expensive upscaling unit called the Framemeister but while its cost may make you blanch, this sucker delivers. Unfortunately, taking full advantage of a Framemeister also may mean modding your console for RGB output. That's the second part of the upscaler equation. Most every old-school console could technically use RGB, which has one cable for the Red, Green, and Blue signals, but many of them weren't wired for it externally unless you used a rare SCART cable (SCART was more common in other parts of the world). Modding kits or consoles cost money, but if you're willing to pay it, you can experience classic games with much better fidelity.
Seriously, just buy a good CRT. Stop fooling around with all this line doubler crap
Seriously, this warrants a front page posting? It's clearly an ad for a product with a niche audience.
Pretty interesting idea and a nice slashvertisement. How about instead, using an emulator,pushing a resolution that looks good onyour panel, and even possibly applying AA and other filters till it looks how YOU like, You have far more options for less cash that way. This reeks of monster cableitis to me.
Silence is a state of mime.
... for super Nintendo and retro gaming.
The image of these little monitors were the best one could get for a reasonable price.
Pretty neat if you can afford it plus the cost of modding your console for RGB-out, which by itself is at least $100 for just the parts, and there are a limited number of those - the ones I've seen were stripped from old PlayChoice 10 cabinets. For us common trolls, a good emulator + a warezed ROM collection does the job.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Classic consoles, notably the NES, purposefully used the blur of the CRT for shading and other effects that the console couldn't do. The graphics simply aren't meant to be seen in super clarity. You see all of the pixels, and the colors are overly bright and flat. It's just... wrong.
That's only for the NES. Pretty much all other consoles newer than the NES output RGB natively - you just need to build a cable. And for the few that don't (NES/N64), the mods are not impossible.
but, we were 10, then...and she was 29.
Other than what? The USA part of the world that assumes the entire internet is only written by and read by themselves?
Was anxious to use all those cracked programs from the 90s. Rigged up a Win98 machine and what a blast from the past! Sure the drivers can be a pain to hunt down but everything works like it used to. Simple Fast and Free with all the stuff I kept on file. Audio editors MIDI editors, wav recorders etc. The hardest part was finding equip (CPUs and chipsets) that work in the 98 realm.
obviously this person has never heard of Ebay
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
I've done this with all my classic consoles, and the results are worth it. Most consoles can support RGB without any mods, but a few require building an amp or a special board (the NES is the hardest to mod). I'm using RGB for my Genesis, SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, Neo Geo, NES, PSX, TurboGrafx, and SMS. On systems that could already support S-Video (Saturn, PSX, SNES, N64, DC) RGB isn't a huge step up but it is noticeable, but on systems that were stuck with composite (NES, Genesis, Neo Geo, TurboGrafx, SMS) it's a night and day difference.
I have all my consoles using Euro style SCART cables (these are fairly cheap and easy to find on ebay). The biggest issue is finding a nice CRT that supports RGB as most end user monitors do not. This is where the Sony PVM comes in. It's a high end CRT display that was mostly used by video production and television companies. These monitors support RGB along with S-Video and composite (although why you'd want to use composite after you have RGB is a mystery). They used to be pretty cheap, but now that more people are getting into RGB modding they've shot up in price over the past year or two. 20" models can still be found for $100 or so, but the larger models (27" tubes) can run $300 or more. If you're resourceful enough you can find them locally or on Craigslist as many local companies are finally starting to junk them. I have some friends who use the Frame Meister, but I think the PVM looks better. These systems were meant to be played on CRTs (not to mention you can use light guns).
In the end it's really not that hard to do, but there is an upfront cost involved. Still, if you're into classic gaming on original systems you should really look into it. This site has a lot of good info: http://www.chrismcovell.com/go...
When I used to have a Nintendo (NES), I would hook it up to my cheap TV and the picture was fuzzy, edges were clipped, etc. Then I connected it to an Amiga 1080 (?) NTSC video monitor. The improvement was dramatic. Same (theoretical) resolution, but much sharper and better color.
My modern card turns on the high gear fans when I play... Asheron's Call 1. I just got it because it is my favorite MMORPG and there are no monthly fees anymore, just a one time fee of 10$. I don't know how to play with my driver software because I'd assume you could frame cap it. If anyone still remembers when Starcraft 2 came out, lots of people's cards fried because they were doing way over 60 FPS, and Blizzard needed to patch.
There's no reasons modern cards should engage into all out maximized FPS mode on old games. I also don't like the extra heat in the summer. I'm thinking of playing some AC1 in a few months when it gets colder. There's no reason AC1 should crank much heat at all, but I guess I just don't know how to turn my graphics card from going all out on an older game.
God spoke to me
SCART was more common in other parts of the world
What other parts? Where are you from? If you include a relative reference, at least mention what it's relative TO. You know, the internet is worldwide, FFS.
And here I thought the article was going to be about indie game development on older consoles and clever hacks to squeeze more juice out of the hardware. Oh well, I guess I'll have to keep waiting for OpenGL on Super Nintendo.
Very bad typo in the article. Composite is what's bad. Component is excellent. People get the two mixed up.
My HDTV is one of the few picture tube HDTVs ever made, and it does not have HDMI at all. Component is what I use for video, and even though the television doesn't do 1080p, the picture for games for example like Grand Theft Auto V which has to run in 780p is amazing.
Add on a decent bluetooth joystick to them, you're pretty much there.
I just got the ''A Moga Pro" joystick a few weeks ago, and it makes all the difference when I revisiting older games like 'Defender', 'Joust', 'Ms. Pac Man', 'Tetris', 'Contra', 'Elevator Action', 'Galaga', 'Qix', 'Q-Bert', 'Rolling Thunder', 'Punch-Out' (et al ad nauseum).
Graphics look plenty crisp on my C64 emulator. Need to check out a console emulator or two (my old C64 got as much play as a console)
Upscalers have been around for over a decade, including the series this advertisement mentions.
This isn't news, and it's not even a new product. It's and advertisement for something old.
More pothead logic at Slashdot...
I don't know why the hell they omitted 240p/line doubling mode from HDTVs. It's truly a pain in the ass. I wish I knew what I was doing, I'd try and implement it in the SamyGo firmware. As it is now, game systems that are supposed to display in a line doubling mode instead display as interlaced, so you get a ton of ugly artifacts. I even bought a few HDMI-outputting VHS/DVD players hoping that it would recognize the mode and display correctly, but nope. Now I'm trying to outfit my consoles with SCART cables and convert to component YbPbR, but the NES doesn't support RGB 15khz mode. This is why we need an RGB board, replacement PPU that supports RGB from a VS DuckHunt arcade board for example, or FPGA-based PPU solution such as Universal PPU.
Twinstiq, game news
This is not a slashvert, these solutions have been around for a long time, and as for the NES RGB board it's constantly sold out so they don't need our help on that. Actually this was posted on Kotaku a day ago and someone probably found it geekworthy, and it is. Getting 240p to display properly on HDTVs is a huge pain for retro gaming enthusiasts.
Use an emulator?! No thanks, that's like telling vinyl enthusiasts to get MP3s. Accuracy is important, and emulators are a mixed bag, and to ask someone who wants the original feel and the convenience of a console to fuck around with emulators is missing the point. Also try finsing a good legal Saturn emulator that works on Linux. Besides, there's nothing like using the original hardware, control pads, and media.
Twinstiq, game news
That solution will only last as long as there are used CRTs, so it's not really a solution, sorry.
There are a number of titles on NES that I can think of such as Empire Strikes Back which only look correct on CRT or anything that does proper NTSC color artifact emulation. (and actually sonic games on genesis too!) I've written a game editor for Apple // graphics which uses NTSC artifacts as part of the editing experience -- and also part of the image dithering/conversion algorithms -- and believe me: It makes a huge difference when you are designing graphics with a 6-color palette where you actually get an extra handful of extra "fringe" colors when using some combinations. If you are still unsure, use an emulator with NTSC emulation (Blargg's is great) and then switch over to plain RGB. There is a huge difference.
Also, a final note on this (Caveat: I am an emulation author and this information is in a very well written wikipedia article on Y'UV if you want to fact check me...) You will NOT EVER get the same colors from RGB than you get from a CRT. The color spaces are different. Emulators can simulate (and in some cases very well) what an analog display does, but it only goes so far. In the NTSC-to-RGB conversion process you wind up having to transform from one color system (Y'UV) to another (RGB) using some rather simple math but then you also have to alias the results to fit the values (which are often outside the 0-255 range). There are colors in the Y'UV spectrum (I'm talking about the Apple colors but there are some on Atari and NES too) that are so saturated that they look completely neon, and those colors actually don't exist in the RGB spectrum at all so you wind up with a rather muted look compared to the real thing.
A scan doubler is okay I suppose for this, but really if you want it to look old school nothing beats the real warm glow of a CRT. If you want to play retro games on an RGB screen, just use an emulator. They're cheaper, and if done correctly you're lucky to ever really notice a difference. :-) I think that you can take a Raspberry Pi and make a dedicated emulator solution for 20% the cost of this scan doubler solution and be just as happy if not happier.
Old games were designed with the expectation they would be played on a CRT. They look best played on a CRT. Nobody wants pixel perfect retro games, and if they do, they aren't emulating what people actually played. They are emulating something that nobody saw. Nobody ever played a pixel perfect version of retro games, simply because they weren't designed to be played that way.
"Component video is absolutely terrible." Incorrect.
It's important to distinguish between these legacy modes. Composite merges chroma and luma information in a single signal. Component video (s-video) that keeps them separate and is a big quality improvement. If you want little rectangles as pixels, well, it's not clear that was ever the design intent of these games. A pixel is not a little square.
When I use a SNES emulator, I jump through hoops to make it look like it did when I was growing up, simulating a CRT television and the artifacts of composite video. Why would I want to take my SNES and try to make it look like an unmodified emulator? That's the exact opposite of what I want. These games were never meant to be hyper-sharp and pixelated. In fact, some games rely on composite artifacting to make certain effects work.
In fact, I want an upscaler that I can plug my SNES into that will simulate a CRT. When I emulate, I combine a CRT simulation filter (which gives me a simulation of CRT scanlines and subpixel geometry while simulating the curve of a CRT) with a composite video simulator (which simulates the artifacts of composite video), and the results is very pleasing, looking much like I remember things from back in the day. With a real SNES, I don't need the composite simulator, because I can just use the real SNES composite output, but having a hardware device that does the CRT simulation (perhaps doing the CRT simulation shaders on an FPGA?) would make it look much better on an LCD or projector.
I realize that you can get partway there by running the SNES signal through a scaler to get to 480p and then running it through a scanline generator, but that's not simulating the physical properties of a CRT (like how a bright scanline appears thicker than a thin one), you're only getting partway there.
NESRGB: http://etim.net.au/nesrgb/
Megadrive (the Genesis in EU and Japan) supported RGB out-of-the box (all the signals are there on the DIN / miniDIN cable), no need to mod the console, just buy the appropriate cable (SCART in EU, or the Japanese equivalent).
(I have no first-hand experience, but I might guess that the situation is similar with Super Famicom vs US' SNES)
That the US market had a crappier output possibility, combined with a worst Video standard (nicknamed Never The Same Color :-P ) doesn't change the fact that everybody else around the world had better quality, including the developers back in japan.
(Dithered pattern on anything but NTSC over composite appear as separate pixels).
(The situation is completely different from the first home computer doing "composite synthesis" and achieving more colours on the screen than supported in the GFX hardware. i.e.: a normally 320x200 4-colours or 640x200 monochrome CGA card in a PC outputing 160x200 16 colours on a composite monitor.
That *indeed* was using composite output artifact. But usually that is software that has a distinct separate "composite" video mode. And it only works on NTSC).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Monster cables aren't always more expensive. When I first bought my Wii console, I wanted a component cable to go with it. At Best Buy, I could get the Nintendo cable for $35 or the Monster Game cable for only $25.
Proper Zapper support relies on the 15.7 kHz flicker of the horizontal retrace. To play Duck Hunt, Operation Wolf, To the Earth, or ZapPing without an emulator, you will need either a CRT or another display that can flicker individual lines at that rate.
That is anywhere outside the backwards North America and their rubbish NTSC colour television system and all that component rubbish. It ends up as an RGB on the screen cut the crap and send the RGB to the display device.
I'm sorry but anyone who thinks that classic SNES games should be displayed this way, doesn't deserve to play them at all. Making the pixels look like sharp stacked blocks utterly ruins the art.
That the US market had a crappier output possibility, combined with a worst Video standard (nicknamed Never The Same Color :-P ) doesn't change the fact that everybody else around the world had better quality, including the developers back in japan.
The analog TV standard in Japan was NTSC with a different black level. This is why the Famicom and NTSC NES use the same 2C02 PPU, while PAL regions need a different 2C07 PPU.
The situation is completely different from the first home computer doing "composite synthesis" and achieving more colours on the screen than supported in the GFX hardware.
You're referring to the 7.16 MHz pixel clock of several early game consoles and home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, Atari 7800, IBM CGA, etc.), which was exactly twice the NTSC color burst frequency. This let the program synthesize the exact waveform going out the wire. The Genesis's pixel clock, on the other hand, was 15/8 times color burst. At that rate, patterns of thin vertical lines resulted in semi-transparent rainbow effects, which weren't quite as predictable as the but still fooled the TV into making more colors. The NES pixel clock of 3/2 color burst was coarser but had a diagonal bias, allowing games like Blaster Master to create more apparent colors than the four per 16x16 pixel area that an NES game usually has by using small dots of different colors adjacent to each other and to black.
a big ass-free CRT is desirable, while a big ass-CRT would be undesirable
That depends on whether or not you're playing an H game. For an H game, you want ass on your CRT.
I was really excited to see that new builds of ffmpeg (which is FOSS) implement the hqx family of filters, but I've also read that these filters are pretty outdated at this point. So I was hoping that this article would be a comparison of upscaling algorithms, both free and proprietary. But alas...
Game play trumps "realistic graphics" any day.
If the game sucks, all the graphics in the world won't save it.
John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) tweeted at 5:26am - 28 Oct 13:
Disappointed with the Framemeister upscaler, I dug out an old real CRT. Son commented "GFX are much better!" pic.twitter.com/ChfMjVRyvx (https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/394530440528162816)
It looks to me like they intentionally darkened the image of the WiiU output. I have the Mario Classics collection (basically Mario All Stars) on my Wii, it looks beautiful on my 36" CRT, and I put the virtual console version of the original Super Mario Brothers on my parents Wii, again, looks great on their 60" LCD, other than some aspect ratio induced bad feelings.
Of course advertising materials have a reason to push for their product instead of virtual console.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
uhmm, component video is not same as s-video (or correctly should be called Y/C). Component has three cables (Y, Pb, Pr), Y/C has two cables (Y, C). What drives me nuts is Y/C has some improvement over composite but uses crummy cheap connectors. Composite lives on because works great in an industrial environment with a single coax and locking BNC connector. Of course it also has the RCA connector which is more rugged than that crummy DIN connector used by Y/C.
mfwright@batnet.com
Another essential thing if you want to do classics OR modern games on your TV:
Press "menu" and start digging and turn off all of the options that ought to be replaced with a single "try and make crappy, overcompressed MPEG streams look a little better." They assume the presence of MPEG artifacts and will actively harm bitmap video streams (i.e. computer/console output). I've had the opportunity to edit some pictures on 4K screens - until we turned that crap off, sharp contrast lines looked awful and as a whole we were wondering "Wuh? This is really 4K?"
Amiga is used a co-processor to display cool stuff on the screen. But its displaying things that it has an actual internal representation. And work on any display connected to the machine (or even emulator, if the emulator can handle the internal copper chip).
CGA/composite is a hack abusing the way NTSC singal work. The machine is ouputing a monochrome signal, but the software abuses the way an NTSC display work and it appears as a coloured picture. (But these colours don't exist in the display buffer. It doesn't work on any other display. It doesn't work in an emulator unless the emulator not only emulates the chips of the machine, but also emulates the problems inside an actual screen).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The analog TV standard in Japan was NTSC with a different black level. This is why the Famicom and NTSC NES use the same 2C02 PPU, while PAL regions need a different 2C07 PPU.
Except that, in the eighties, virtually any TV sold in Europe had a Scart connector (Mandatory on any TV sold after 1980. I don't remember having seen a TV without it), and TV sold in Japan had a RGB-21 connector (technically similar. physically, the connectors have the same shape but use slightly different pin-outs). That was simply the standard interconnect to plug *any* consumer electronics on a TV outside of the US.
So starting with MasterSystem and Megadrive (again that's my first hand experience. I'm not sure but from what I read around that it's also the case with Super Famicom) everybody else in the world got an easy way to have nice graphics.
Only you, the consumer in the US, were stuck with no RGB on your TV set combined with a video standard that completely breaks colours. Everybody else got to play the games without any composite artifact.
The Genesis's pixel clock, on the other hand, was 15/8 times color burst. At that rate, patterns of thin vertical lines resulted in semi-transparent rainbow effects, which weren't quite as predictable as the but still fooled the TV into making more colors.
But were only visible on TV in the US. The other big markets (Japan, EU) got the actual colours directly fed into the screen over the local's default video interconnect (Scart or RGB-21).
Given that most of the games were produced in Japan, it's very likely that very few of the game developers have designed their games specially with US' NTSC composite artifacts in mind.
So to go back to the begin of this thread discussion:
The graphics simply aren't meant to be seen in super clarity. You see all of the pixels, and the colors are overly bright and flat. It's just... wrong.
Nope. That's what you saw as child because you grew up in the US and your local display standard was bad (only RF or composite available, and an NTSC standard that's bad for colours).
The rest of the users elsewhere actually mostly got the same image as emulators display. It was just a tiny bit more blurry, but we had the same colours (thanks to RGB available in nearly everywhere in the other major markets outside of US).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[Emulation problems] may all have solutions, but none are as simple or practical as plugging the actual hardware into a CRT SDTV that just works and looks great.
Sourcing a CRT SDTV with A/V inputs in good condition and making a place for it in your home might not necessarily be practical. Many CRT SDTVs that I see at garage sales and charity shops have only an RF input, introducing noise and requiring an RF modulator at additional cost for fifth-generation and later consoles.
I'm just a pedantic fool nitpicking between:
- a in-hardware solution: the platform can be asked to generate a different signal creating a different output.
yeah, there are also hardware limitation (RAM is expensive, so Video-RAM is in small quantities) and thus tricks required (HAM stores small 'deltas' between adjacent pixels instead of coding full RGB tripplet, so it can cram hi-colour picture inside the limited video-ram ; copper can be used to change palette at each line refresh, so that you get a nice gradient, while only using 1 single colour entry from the limite 32 colours palette)
In term of sound that's similar to playing digital sound on a PC speaker (by programming the driving timer to act as a PWM).
- a solution that cleverly abuse an external piece of hardware:
a CGA in composite mode always outputs the same signal. But the computer happens to be connected to the correct piece of equipment (NTSC monitor, using a composite cable) magic happens and something completely new appears. But it only work if you connect it to this peculiar type of equipment. You get the same picture as usual in any other circumstance (in my case: PAL/PAL60/NTSC monitor, using a RGB scart cable). You're not dependant of the hardware in the computer producing a *new* signal, you're dependent on how some external piece of hardware is going to react to the same signal as usual.
In term of sound that's similar to using the disk drive motion for the percussion track of your music. It's a neat creative trick, but only works when the correct floppy drive is attached. It won't work if you upgrade your computer to a harddrive, it won't work if you plug earphones in the audio-out, etc.
The purpose of this thread is that, because of the second type of hacks, you need to perfectly emulate the bad picture quality of TV-sed to have the on-screen look as developers intended it to be. That every developer though that visuals will look in some particular way.
What I'm saying is that actually the rest of the world got near perfect picture quality, because the rest of the world had RGB output (we had Scart here in europe, Japan had RGB-21) and that includes the home of most developers (Japan). Only US kids remember having a different look in their childhood games, because the poor kids were stuck with a bad TV standard.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]