You're talking about significantly older consoles, back when RF (or composite if you were lucky) were the only options. In those days, of the Atari 2600 and the Apple II and CGA-equipped IBM PCs, composite color tricks were definitely a thing. And yes, I've seen demos like 8088 MPH and studied the techniques they used, very cool stuff to get over a thousand colors from normally 4-color CGA: http://8088mph.blogspot.com/20...
What's actually happening is that if you send a signal that changes color too fast, the colors get smeared together because the signal bandwidth is too low to keep up. By sending specific patterns of specific colors, you can generate more colors. It's basic analog signal theory, something I've actually studied;-)
(BTW the NES didn't have artifact colors, because the resolution lined up perfectly with NTSC, so you couldn't send an image that was too high-res for the bandwidth, in order to create artifact colors. It's simply not technically possible due to hardware limitations.)
But artifact colors and related trickery mostly stopped (at least for commercially released games) when consoles started offering higher quality outputs. From the 16-bit SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive generation on, consoles started offering higher quality video outputs such as s-video and even RGB. Simultaneously, the consoles also started supporting native transparency and larger color palettes, rendering a lot of the "old tricks" obsolete. These tricks would not work on the superior connections that quality-minded players were likely to use, so developers stopped using them.
Some tricks did stay, however. Alternating vertical lines or checkerboard patterns were commonly used for transparency, and that persisted for a while. The SNES could do real transparency, but checkerboarding was much less computationally demanding. And of course the Genesis/Mega Drive didn't have real transparency and also had a rather limited color palette, so game developers made extensive use of alternating vertical lines, checkerboarding and dithering for smoother color transitions. It's very noticeable in games like The Lion King, especially when you compare it with the SNES version. The faked transparency is very noticeable in the waterfalls in Sonic games. Shadows were done in the same way, with checkerboards or vertical lines, but sometimes also by flickering the sprite at half the refresh rate of the TV. On a CRT this produces a reasonably convincing 50% gray shadow, due to phosphor persistence.
Another thing is that you're talking about blowing up old games on HDTVs over HDMI and having razor sharp pixels, but we completely agree that it's not optimal at all. I'm talking about hooking up a good quality CRT SDTV using a high-quality analog connection. Effects such as brightness bleed is not exclusive to composite connections, it's a property of CRTs, especially if you crank up the brightness like on an old arcade machine.
Apart from artifact colors (which were phased out around/before the NES generation), all of this stuff works quite well even on an RGB/component-connected CRT TV, because of the nature of a CRT, not the connection you use.
RGB/component is superior still to s-video, with either the individual red, green(+sync) and blue channels on separate cables for RGB
Small correction to myself, the sync for RGB is carried on the composite video line in a SCART RGB connection, not on the green channel. Sync on green is used for PCs, not TVs.
That's because you're comparing a "fuzzy-by-design" composite connection with razor sharp pixels on an HD display. Neither option is optimal, but you're correct that composite is closest to how most people experienced it back in the day, because they simply didn't know or didn't care that better connections were available. I've done a [b]lot[/b] of tests on various connection types, under very good conditions. RGB and component beat every other connection by a huge margin.
My background is that I used to work at one of the premier TV manufacturers in the world 10 years ago, right around the time when CRTs were being phased out for good. My dad has worked with TVs and electronics since the early 1970s. Between the two of us, I'm pretty goddamn sure we know a thing or two about analog and digital signals;-)
Composite is widely used because it's cheap and only requires one simple coaxial cable for video. But it suffers from dull colors, blurriness, ringing and other artifacts, especially on NTSC systems. The basic reason is that you're jamming all video + sync into a single signal, so the luma, chroma and sync signals play havoc with each other.
S-video splits luma+sync (luminance or brightness) and chroma (color) onto two separate cables, and the quality is vastly improved. I would say the jump from composite to s-video is more noticable than from s-video to RGB/component, and it's the best connection available on many analog TVs, especially in the US.
RGB/component is superior still to s-video, with either the individual red, green(+sync) and blue channels on separate cables for RGB or luma+sync, blue minus luma and red minus luma on separate cables for component (YPbPr). By having the different signals on separately shielded wires, interference is significantly reduced, leading to sharper image and better color rendering. Component can even carry HD signals, and is the best analog HD connection available short of VGA (and VGA is basically RGB video with slightly different sync).
I don't dispute that maybe you prefer the reduced color fidelity, blurriness and artifacts of composite video, maybe due to nostalgia. Hell, some people enjoy vinyl records or even cassette tape over any other format. However the fact is that composite video is deeply flawed and inferior in every way to RGB/component, except in widespread availability. And if you had actually tried hooking up a good quality CRT TV with both composite and RGB/component cables and compared them, it would be blindingly obvious.
No, the picture doesn't become "too sharp" or "too good" on RGB/component. It becomes correct, especially on a high-quality CRT TV. The pixel fuzziness on old games should come from the inherent nature of the CRT, not from flawed connections.
That depends heavily on your TV and its processing lag, and which connections it has.
A lot of modern TVs don't have SCART/Component inputs, so you have to convert the signal to HDMI somehow. The XRGB does this with very little lag, unlike a lot of cheap converters/upscalers.
SCART was pretty much exclusively a European thing, dreamed up by the French to protect their own TV manufacturers. Japan has/had the JP21 standard which uses the same connectors with a different pin assignment.
99% of consoles hooked up using SCART connectors output Composite video, RGB was either not available or required an expensive add-on cable. All TVs with SCART plugs support Composite over SCART, some support S-Video, and the best TVs support RGB and sometimes even Component (YPbPr). Some consoles (most notably the N64) only had Composite output, you have to do hardware mods to get anything else. More info here: http://retrorgb.com/systems.ht...
So no, the Master System, SNES, Mega Drive and so on definitely supported Composite, and that's what most people used. NES was Composite-only.
I'd wager most people have never seen a console hooked up with a proper set of SCART RGB or Component cables, and the massive increase in quality it gives.
Well, yes and no. The games were meant to be show on CRTs, which slightly fuzz the pixels by design. But Composite video simply sucks ass, it has color bleed, ringing, ghosting, a whole host of problems.
Try hooking up a console with RGB SCART or Component to a good-quality CRT and be amazed, especially if you've only ever used RF or Composite video. 2D games in particular look absolutely amazing when given the best possible conditions. The CRT itself does all the blurring and fuzz you need, there is no reason to add more by using crappy connections.
People who think old-school games look best over RF or Composite are completely delusional.
For the best quality on a plasma or LCD TV, you need a competent upscaler like an XRGB. You should be able to see the pixels, but they should be slightly fuzzy, not razor sharp.
What's the OPEX of a modern console? Buying new games is CAPEX. Power consumption is negligible. You probably have the internet connection anyway at a fixed monthly rate. Xbox Live/PSN isn't mandatory.
They were also quite popular in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc in general. Some of them worked pretty well, but there were of course some compatibility issues.
Haha wow, I really hit you like a perfectly weighted and broken-in genuine Sanwa button;-)
My point is that this is not a product aimed at the neckbeard grognards who overanalyze every little detail of everything. It's aimed at people who want to relive the NES days easily and with a nice GUI, easy to use savestates, all of that stuff. They don't want to mess around with a Raspberry Pi like the rest of us, they just want to plug and play. Apparently a lot of sadsacks can't accept that normal people don't care about 100% accurate emulation.
And my username "doesn't look familiar"? Fuck right off, who made you the arbiter of who gets to post here and who doesn't? I've been on here longer than you have, kid. Guaranteed.
I'm using an Ipac, it works great with no issues so far. It's simply a USB keyboard to the OS, so there should be no compatibility issues if a normal keyboard works.
If you don't want to go that route, I would recommend getting one of the Buffalo pads and soldering your connections to its PCB. It's as standard a USB gamepad as you can possibly find, I haven't had any issues with that either.
The biggest benefit of the Ipac is that it acts as a keyboard, so it'll work with games that don't have gamepad support built in.
DIY arcade stick for my primary controller, suplemented with the Buffalo SNES clone pad and two Xbox 360 pads that I had already and use on my PC for GTA IV and such. I haven't had to have more than four controllers in use simultaneously yet, but I'll probably end up grabbing a few more Buffalo pads, since they're so inexpensive.
Are you absolutely sure it's not the TV? Most modern TVs have non-trivial input lag due to image processing, so you have to switch it to game mode or something similar for gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
*Speaking as a human being in general, you mean?
It's gonna be Not Very Fun At All to be a minority in the US for the next couple of years.
Well, it was a good run while it lasted. RIP humanity.
Less than 3 million, out of a population of 65+ million.
Do you have any proof that they all vote labour?
No? Thought so.
You're talking about significantly older consoles, back when RF (or composite if you were lucky) were the only options. In those days, of the Atari 2600 and the Apple II and CGA-equipped IBM PCs, composite color tricks were definitely a thing. And yes, I've seen demos like 8088 MPH and studied the techniques they used, very cool stuff to get over a thousand colors from normally 4-color CGA: http://8088mph.blogspot.com/20...
What's actually happening is that if you send a signal that changes color too fast, the colors get smeared together because the signal bandwidth is too low to keep up. By sending specific patterns of specific colors, you can generate more colors. It's basic analog signal theory, something I've actually studied ;-)
(BTW the NES didn't have artifact colors, because the resolution lined up perfectly with NTSC, so you couldn't send an image that was too high-res for the bandwidth, in order to create artifact colors. It's simply not technically possible due to hardware limitations.)
But artifact colors and related trickery mostly stopped (at least for commercially released games) when consoles started offering higher quality outputs. From the 16-bit SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive generation on, consoles started offering higher quality video outputs such as s-video and even RGB. Simultaneously, the consoles also started supporting native transparency and larger color palettes, rendering a lot of the "old tricks" obsolete. These tricks would not work on the superior connections that quality-minded players were likely to use, so developers stopped using them.
Some tricks did stay, however. Alternating vertical lines or checkerboard patterns were commonly used for transparency, and that persisted for a while. The SNES could do real transparency, but checkerboarding was much less computationally demanding. And of course the Genesis/Mega Drive didn't have real transparency and also had a rather limited color palette, so game developers made extensive use of alternating vertical lines, checkerboarding and dithering for smoother color transitions. It's very noticeable in games like The Lion King, especially when you compare it with the SNES version. The faked transparency is very noticeable in the waterfalls in Sonic games. Shadows were done in the same way, with checkerboards or vertical lines, but sometimes also by flickering the sprite at half the refresh rate of the TV. On a CRT this produces a reasonably convincing 50% gray shadow, due to phosphor persistence.
Another thing is that you're talking about blowing up old games on HDTVs over HDMI and having razor sharp pixels, but we completely agree that it's not optimal at all. I'm talking about hooking up a good quality CRT SDTV using a high-quality analog connection. Effects such as brightness bleed is not exclusive to composite connections, it's a property of CRTs, especially if you crank up the brightness like on an old arcade machine.
Apart from artifact colors (which were phased out around/before the NES generation), all of this stuff works quite well even on an RGB/component-connected CRT TV, because of the nature of a CRT, not the connection you use.
Here's a video showing the horrible artifacts inherent to composite video compared to s-video: https://youtu.be/vGF4PRlIZSo?t...
Most of them aren't obvious on still pictures, but it's painfully obvious in motion that composite is just crap.
That's really interesting stuff, I didn't know that about SECAM :-)
I would assume not all console had native RGB output, so a lot of them probably used internal composite to RGB converters.
RGB/component is superior still to s-video, with either the individual red, green(+sync) and blue channels on separate cables for RGB
Small correction to myself, the sync for RGB is carried on the composite video line in a SCART RGB connection, not on the green channel. Sync on green is used for PCs, not TVs.
That's because you're comparing a "fuzzy-by-design" composite connection with razor sharp pixels on an HD display. Neither option is optimal, but you're correct that composite is closest to how most people experienced it back in the day, because they simply didn't know or didn't care that better connections were available. I've done a [b]lot[/b] of tests on various connection types, under very good conditions. RGB and component beat every other connection by a huge margin.
My background is that I used to work at one of the premier TV manufacturers in the world 10 years ago, right around the time when CRTs were being phased out for good. My dad has worked with TVs and electronics since the early 1970s. Between the two of us, I'm pretty goddamn sure we know a thing or two about analog and digital signals ;-)
Composite is widely used because it's cheap and only requires one simple coaxial cable for video. But it suffers from dull colors, blurriness, ringing and other artifacts, especially on NTSC systems. The basic reason is that you're jamming all video + sync into a single signal, so the luma, chroma and sync signals play havoc with each other.
S-video splits luma+sync (luminance or brightness) and chroma (color) onto two separate cables, and the quality is vastly improved. I would say the jump from composite to s-video is more noticable than from s-video to RGB/component, and it's the best connection available on many analog TVs, especially in the US.
RGB/component is superior still to s-video, with either the individual red, green(+sync) and blue channels on separate cables for RGB or luma+sync, blue minus luma and red minus luma on separate cables for component (YPbPr). By having the different signals on separately shielded wires, interference is significantly reduced, leading to sharper image and better color rendering. Component can even carry HD signals, and is the best analog HD connection available short of VGA (and VGA is basically RGB video with slightly different sync).
I don't dispute that maybe you prefer the reduced color fidelity, blurriness and artifacts of composite video, maybe due to nostalgia. Hell, some people enjoy vinyl records or even cassette tape over any other format. However the fact is that composite video is deeply flawed and inferior in every way to RGB/component, except in widespread availability. And if you had actually tried hooking up a good quality CRT TV with both composite and RGB/component cables and compared them, it would be blindingly obvious.
No, the picture doesn't become "too sharp" or "too good" on RGB/component. It becomes correct, especially on a high-quality CRT TV. The pixel fuzziness on old games should come from the inherent nature of the CRT, not from flawed connections.
That depends heavily on your TV and its processing lag, and which connections it has.
A lot of modern TVs don't have SCART/Component inputs, so you have to convert the signal to HDMI somehow. The XRGB does this with very little lag, unlike a lot of cheap converters/upscalers.
Badly flickering sprites, mostly. The original hardware didn't do that.
SCART was pretty much exclusively a European thing, dreamed up by the French to protect their own TV manufacturers. Japan has/had the JP21 standard which uses the same connectors with a different pin assignment.
99% of consoles hooked up using SCART connectors output Composite video, RGB was either not available or required an expensive add-on cable. All TVs with SCART plugs support Composite over SCART, some support S-Video, and the best TVs support RGB and sometimes even Component (YPbPr). Some consoles (most notably the N64) only had Composite output, you have to do hardware mods to get anything else. More info here: http://retrorgb.com/systems.ht...
So no, the Master System, SNES, Mega Drive and so on definitely supported Composite, and that's what most people used. NES was Composite-only.
I'd wager most people have never seen a console hooked up with a proper set of SCART RGB or Component cables, and the massive increase in quality it gives.
It's the lowest common denominator. I have yet to see TV without Composite video input, no matter how high-end and expensive.
Adding an RGB output should have been possible, it's actually on less processing step compared to Composite output.
Well, yes and no. The games were meant to be show on CRTs, which slightly fuzz the pixels by design. But Composite video simply sucks ass, it has color bleed, ringing, ghosting, a whole host of problems.
Try hooking up a console with RGB SCART or Component to a good-quality CRT and be amazed, especially if you've only ever used RF or Composite video. 2D games in particular look absolutely amazing when given the best possible conditions. The CRT itself does all the blurring and fuzz you need, there is no reason to add more by using crappy connections.
People who think old-school games look best over RF or Composite are completely delusional.
For the best quality on a plasma or LCD TV, you need a competent upscaler like an XRGB. You should be able to see the pixels, but they should be slightly fuzzy, not razor sharp.
What's the OPEX of a modern console? Buying new games is CAPEX. Power consumption is negligible. You probably have the internet connection anyway at a fixed monthly rate. Xbox Live/PSN isn't mandatory.
Muslims account for 4.4% of the population in the UK.
Shut the fuck up with your bullshit conspiracy theories, dumbass.
South India and Bengal, there's a lot of IT outsourcing industry in the Kolkata area.
Maybe that's because Gamergaters and MRAs are all completely abhorrent pieces of shit?
They were also quite popular in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc in general. Some of them worked pretty well, but there were of course some compatibility issues.
Please don't use margarine, ever ;-)
A 50/50 mix of real butter and canola oil is much better for frying.
You could call it The Diamond Age.
How the hell is using a macro keyboard or painting a target circle on your monitor the same as cheating?
Turbo function controllers have existed for consoles for decades, and what's stopping you from putting a target circle on your TV?
It sounds to me like you just can't compete, and thus you resort to calling everyone else cheaters.
Haha wow, I really hit you like a perfectly weighted and broken-in genuine Sanwa button ;-)
My point is that this is not a product aimed at the neckbeard grognards who overanalyze every little detail of everything. It's aimed at people who want to relive the NES days easily and with a nice GUI, easy to use savestates, all of that stuff. They don't want to mess around with a Raspberry Pi like the rest of us, they just want to plug and play. Apparently a lot of sadsacks can't accept that normal people don't care about 100% accurate emulation.
And my username "doesn't look familiar"? Fuck right off, who made you the arbiter of who gets to post here and who doesn't? I've been on here longer than you have, kid. Guaranteed.
I'm using an Ipac, it works great with no issues so far. It's simply a USB keyboard to the OS, so there should be no compatibility issues if a normal keyboard works.
If you don't want to go that route, I would recommend getting one of the Buffalo pads and soldering your connections to its PCB. It's as standard a USB gamepad as you can possibly find, I haven't had any issues with that either.
The biggest benefit of the Ipac is that it acts as a keyboard, so it'll work with games that don't have gamepad support built in.
DIY arcade stick for my primary controller, suplemented with the Buffalo SNES clone pad and two Xbox 360 pads that I had already and use on my PC for GTA IV and such. I haven't had to have more than four controllers in use simultaneously yet, but I'll probably end up grabbing a few more Buffalo pads, since they're so inexpensive.
Are you absolutely sure it's not the TV? Most modern TVs have non-trivial input lag due to image processing, so you have to switch it to game mode or something similar for gaming.