Outlaws? X-Wing vs Tie Fighter? Those are two blatantly throway games, and both are from no earlier than 1996 (I can't remember exactly when they came out). Now, I'm not saying Outlaws was bad, but X-Wing vs Tie Fighter is an insult to the X-Wing series. Tie Fighter is one of my favorite games of all time, but it is definitely not "early lucasarts"
Early LucasArts = Ballblazer and Labrynth, though early GOOD lucasarts = Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and Loom. Later on, they had the Monkey Island and Indiana Jones games which were probably the best stuff to ever come out of the company, not to mention Sam & Max, Full Throttle, and a bunch of other games. I just find it amusing that Outlaws and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter are the two games you think of when you think of "early LucasArts." Its kind of a discredit to all the early games that were absolutely amazing.
I think you need to apply a bit more critical thought before you call somebody a liar. Had the most popular card been a newer generation Nvidia, I would concede that ATI isn't as popular as I thought it was. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The GF4MX is widespread because its a common offering on prebuilt computers. Note that in a close second is the Radeon 9800 series. That isn't quite as common of an offering on cheap prebuilt computers. After all, the 9800 pro still sells for over $150 (closer to $200 actually).
I don't know anybody who would call themself a gamer and use a GF4MX, because that would choke on the newest games. So, I don't think that graph really proves anything.
I can't "prove" it any better than he can, but I tend to buy whatever video card does what I need it to for a reasonable price, and I currently have a Radeon 9800 Pro. Many of my friends have ATI cards. I tend to agree with his hunch that ATI cards at the moment are more popular with gamers, not that that means people aren't buying Nvidia cars anymore.
GBC and GBA have different graphical hardware. When you play GBC games on GBA, it actually uses a "wrong" pallete. If both LCDs were fed the same signal you'd get the same image.
Re:You can't win with the /. crowd sometimes
on
PSP Delayed Into 2005?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I never saw so much whining about the screen when GBC came out.
GBC HAS THE EXACT SAME SCREEN! (Just fewer pixels).
So yeah, its definitely strange that so many people are complaining about it because it didn't really take THAT much light to get a good image. The reflective TFT in that sure beats the crap out of the transmissive TFT in earlier systems like Game Gear.
You may very well be right about the point on people assuming CotM was represenative of the system's contrast on the whole. I found it to be quite enjoyable, but if thats the only game you have you might be inclined to say "jeeze this sucks" and give it to your little brother/cousin/dog.
I've got Mega Man Zero and that game I think has pretty damn good graphics. I don't play GBA much and I don't have a lot of games, but MMZ was very entertaining (and fuckin HARD).
I'd really like to see Ron Gilbert get some recognition, but it won't happen. SCUMM made graphic adventure games FUN and Monkey Island 2 belongs in my top 5 for best game ever on any system. Going on to make Total Annihilation is a definite plus.
Unfortunately, though he was instrumental in starting LucasArt's line of graphic adventure games, he hasn't done anything recently of note and nobody plays adventure games anymore, so he won't be remembered. In a sad way of looking at it, its Carmack's fault that nobody plays adventure games anymore because first person shooters took over the took PC game genre spot from adventure games.
Got a source for this? I seem to recall a LOT of hullabaloo about Episode 1 being shot in a digital format, and then transferred to film for the dvd instead of doing a digital transfer. I could be wrong, but in a quick google search i couldn't find anything that said one way or another.
In light of the massive restoration effort by Lowry Digital, who did an awesome job with Indiana Jones (and other movies) the color quality is messed up beyond belief. To put it simply, theres too much red, and everything on the whole is too saturated. It just doesn't look natural. On the other hand, its quite sharp and clean considering how bad Lowry Digital said the condition was when they got it. It probably wasn't their fault on the color. If I recall correctly, GL wanted it to make it look similiar to the prequels. Since they were shot on HDCam it was probably just naturally saturated. Trying to adjust the film to look the same way however, has just left it looking completely unnatural. Even more interestingly is how when Lucas transffered Phantom Menace to DVD, he went hdcam->film->dvd to make it match the film look of the original trilogy. Now, he's tried to make the original trilogy match up in quality with the prequels by making them look "more digital." Example #346 of GL not being able to make up his mind.
I think all outgoing traffic should be charged for. Beyond some reasonable amount, anyway. I remember when my cable modem was 3 mbits down and 1 mbit up. I could share video clips I'm working on with my friends (on the same ISP) with not too much waiting. But, then everybody started abusing their so called "unlimited" connection, with 5% of the users using 95% of the bandwidth, so now when I want to send the occasional large, legitimate file, without even using any bandwidth outside of RR's internal network, I get the shit end of the stick with a 384kbps upload. Charging for outgoing bandwidth would kill two birds with one stone.
If its capable of transferring uncompressed video to your screen, its conceivable that it should be able to feed that uncompressed video into a software encoder. ATI doesn't say you CAN'T do it so I think it would be a wasted effort to just assume it doesn't and not at least try and see what i can do with it.
And regardless of what ratio you think DV is compressed (which is almost certainly a "generalized approximation that you've heard repeatedly" and not actual math, i figured the compression to be 6:1 by 720*480*16 bits per pixel*30 frames per second, divided by 3.4 megabytes per second), 3.4 megabytes per second (cbr by standard) 4:1:1 DV degrades a lot more per every time you compress it than the same source recorded as 7 megabyte per second AVERAGE vbr 4:2:2 picvideo mjpeg. Picvideo doesn't use a constant compression ratio, its just constant quality, and if you set the luminance and chrominance to 1 and 2 in that exact codec, you get very close to the same results as huffyuv, which is lossless.
Quality wise, it does say it has a 12 bit video encoder, which is more than any other cheap consumer device can handle. Just because some cheap products suck doesn't mean all cheap products do. There was a HUGE gain in color quality when I went from a bt878 card to one of the newer phillips 10 bit ones.
And of COURSE the destination video would be DVD. But every step in the middle that adds mosquito noise means its also going to be more difficult for the mpeg2 encoder to compress, thus confusing it even more and possibly wasting bits on "noise" and adding more noise to the portions of the image that need it.
While its true that the "best" hardware costs a LOT of money, you'd be surprised at how close you can get to the best at a mere fraction of the cost. Its just a matter of finding the right stuff, and sometimes inventing your own ways of working so that you can make a quality finished product without having to spend $25,000. I'd say, aside from the lack of component video in/out and that you're limited to using a completely independent audio capture clock, the video quality on a cheap as hell asus tvfm card is almost as good as the Avid Media Composer Adrenaline system I use at work (I work at Avid's main headquarters).
While its true that you can't polish a turd, people don't realize the kind of loss involved in merely converting an anlaog signal to digital (and how much HARDER it is to capture a turd-like analog signal without mucking up any detail). Noise reduction should be up to specific noise reduction algorithms, and not merely an encoder throwing away data randomly that it proabbly shouldn't. When you make a decision to record a low quality source into a low quality digital format, you aren't "intelligently using less bitrate" but rather getting the WORST of both the analog and digital worlds... which could turn crap into even worse crap. If its that bad to start off with, shouldn't your goal be making sure it doesn't get any worse?
In fact, thats where people like me step in with home made DVDs. Laserdisc players are hardly ubiqutious, but put the right hardware in the right hands and you can get a pretty damn good production.
The problem is, most of the home made DVDs out there are "the right hardware in the wrong hands" so they're not exactly good picture quality. My problem is I know exactly how I'd do it if I had the best hardware (I already did it once with a DV camcorder as the transcoding device, and its ok but not as good as it could be) but I can't afford real stuff. Now that I'm working at Avid (company that makes video editing stuff) I might be able to borrow something for a couple days and get it done right. Until then, its only speculation.
Well, 30 fps, 480 lines per frame and 60 fields per second, 240 lines per field is the same amount of data either way. (Never mind the fact that PAL is 50i. I'm talking NTSC)
While it won't "look" the same when you watch a 60i video as full height 480 line frames, no data is lost. If you actually want to create 60p from a 60i signal (dscaler does this, but won't support a USB 2 external device) it will twice as much bandwidth. Whether this is done in the external device or inside the PC is just about moot, because the raw bandwidth is more of an issue than the processing and either way you need a high end PC to handle it.
A) NTSC is 29.97 FPS, PAL is 25.
B) YUY2 video (essentially, full quality digital component video) is 16 bits per pixel. So take a 720x480 image 30 times per second at 16 bits per pixel and you get about 20 megabytes per second. USB2.0 supports up to 480mbits per second, or 60 megabytes. While it is more CPU dependent than firewire, it DOES have the bandwidth. I work for Avid, and our $25,000 Adrenaline box connects to the PC via firewire and is by no means limited by the fact that the firewire bus is only 50 megabytes per second. It captures uncompressed with impeccable reliability. USB 2 isn't optimal for a true pro video editing setup, but at the very least it DOES support the bitrate full quality NTSC video requires.
Everybody can debate whether they really want to watch TV on the computer or not. Everybody can debate whether usb 2 or firewire is better. But there are more important things that people are ignoring.
I don't care about watching TV, but if this has support for capturing to any AVI format, it should be an amazing cheap video capture device. PCI cards based on the bt878 or phillips chips seem to be flaky at times, and when you use these, the audio and video aren't recorded on the same clock. You've got the video capture card and your sound card running basically completely independent of each other. With this, the signal will be digitized before your PC even sees it. It will eliminate a lot of screwiness as far as audio sync is concerned. This puts it well ahead of most (simpler consumer oriented) PCI based setups.
As far as how it compares to products like the Canopus boxes that take an analog signal and convert it to a standard firewire DV signal, while these boxes offer pro quality analog to digital conversion, and no audio screwiness like the consumer PCI cards, they ONLY support DV. People, DV is not "full quality." 4:1:1 sampled video has VERY noticable artifacts because the color info is only recorded once for every four times the luminance is recorded. This makes scenes with highly saturated color and sharp lines have painful JAGGED (because its digital) edges to the color.
On top of that, 3.4MB per second is just not enough for repeated processing without generational loss. The reason you can edit DV on the computer with no loss is because, in most video editing programs, you're only recompressing the effects, not the stretches of unmodified video. However, if you actually tried compressing a clip to DV a few times, you'll notice the mosquito noise gets noticably worse every time. An external capture device that supports uncompressed video allows you to bypass this completely by recording in formats such as a very lightly compressed mjpeg (I tend to go for about 3:1 compression. DV is 6:1) or better yet, when the quality really has to be perfect, Huffyuv which is lossless. In this way, I can avoid the 4:1:1 sampling artifacts for full color resolution, and no loss in video quality while i'm processing it for noise reduction and whatnot.
Now, whether device actually does what I expect it to is a different story, but I for one will certainly buy one of these to try it out. After all, the worst that can happen is it doesn't support what i'd like it to and I can just return it/sell it on ebay.
I'd have to see it to believe it. Most of the LD->DVD rips, especially the non SEs, are extremely crappy. Thats why I did my own version, which is pretty good as far as sharpness/lack of noise is concerned, but the color ain't the best. I'm redoing them with better video capture equipment and this time it'll be even better.
And no, laserdiscs are NOT anamorphic so they weren't magically increasing the resolution. It'll just be scaled multiple times by the time it gets to your screen instead of just once.
Damn you moderators and your inability to recognize the joke. Mod this one down too, I dare you. That way you won't be able to waste it on somebody else's post that didn't deserve to be modded down.
Well, at least now we can use all the chainsaw gas.
(Zak McKracken)
Re:It's not just the shady companies
on
The Spyware Inferno
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· Score: 2, Informative
Are you removing them using msconfig? That seems to always do the trick for me. Just erasing them from the startup section in the start menu won't necessarily do it.
Contrary to popular belief, 1280x1024 isn't 4x3 ANYWAY. Do the math.
1280x960 is the proper 4:3 resolution. Thus if you're using a 4:3 CRT, and you want something 1280 pixels wide, 1024 pixels tall would give you the wrong pixel ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
"Early days?"
Outlaws? X-Wing vs Tie Fighter? Those are two blatantly throway games, and both are from no earlier than 1996 (I can't remember exactly when they came out). Now, I'm not saying Outlaws was bad, but X-Wing vs Tie Fighter is an insult to the X-Wing series. Tie Fighter is one of my favorite games of all time, but it is definitely not "early lucasarts"
Early LucasArts = Ballblazer and Labrynth, though early GOOD lucasarts = Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and Loom. Later on, they had the Monkey Island and Indiana Jones games which were probably the best stuff to ever come out of the company, not to mention Sam & Max, Full Throttle, and a bunch of other games. I just find it amusing that Outlaws and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter are the two games you think of when you think of "early LucasArts." Its kind of a discredit to all the early games that were absolutely amazing.
I think you need to apply a bit more critical thought before you call somebody a liar. Had the most popular card been a newer generation Nvidia, I would concede that ATI isn't as popular as I thought it was. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The GF4MX is widespread because its a common offering on prebuilt computers. Note that in a close second is the Radeon 9800 series. That isn't quite as common of an offering on cheap prebuilt computers. After all, the 9800 pro still sells for over $150 (closer to $200 actually).
I don't know anybody who would call themself a gamer and use a GF4MX, because that would choke on the newest games. So, I don't think that graph really proves anything.
I can't "prove" it any better than he can, but I tend to buy whatever video card does what I need it to for a reasonable price, and I currently have a Radeon 9800 Pro. Many of my friends have ATI cards. I tend to agree with his hunch that ATI cards at the moment are more popular with gamers, not that that means people aren't buying Nvidia cars anymore.
I'm doing it right now. I just finished recording empire strikes back. See my other posts for how i'm doing it.
GBC and GBA have different graphical hardware. When you play GBC games on GBA, it actually uses a "wrong" pallete. If both LCDs were fed the same signal you'd get the same image.
I never saw so much whining about the screen when GBC came out.
GBC HAS THE EXACT SAME SCREEN! (Just fewer pixels).
So yeah, its definitely strange that so many people are complaining about it because it didn't really take THAT much light to get a good image. The reflective TFT in that sure beats the crap out of the transmissive TFT in earlier systems like Game Gear.
You may very well be right about the point on people assuming CotM was represenative of the system's contrast on the whole. I found it to be quite enjoyable, but if thats the only game you have you might be inclined to say "jeeze this sucks" and give it to your little brother/cousin/dog.
I've got Mega Man Zero and that game I think has pretty damn good graphics. I don't play GBA much and I don't have a lot of games, but MMZ was very entertaining (and fuckin HARD).
I'd really like to see Ron Gilbert get some recognition, but it won't happen. SCUMM made graphic adventure games FUN and Monkey Island 2 belongs in my top 5 for best game ever on any system. Going on to make Total Annihilation is a definite plus.
Unfortunately, though he was instrumental in starting LucasArt's line of graphic adventure games, he hasn't done anything recently of note and nobody plays adventure games anymore, so he won't be remembered. In a sad way of looking at it, its Carmack's fault that nobody plays adventure games anymore because first person shooters took over the took PC game genre spot from adventure games.
It shouldn't "Just plain look wrong" on a properly calibrated CRT set. Your solution doesn't excuse their odd choice of "color correction."
Got a source for this? I seem to recall a LOT of hullabaloo about Episode 1 being shot in a digital format, and then transferred to film for the dvd instead of doing a digital transfer. I could be wrong, but in a quick google search i couldn't find anything that said one way or another.
In light of the massive restoration effort by Lowry Digital, who did an awesome job with Indiana Jones (and other movies) the color quality is messed up beyond belief. To put it simply, theres too much red, and everything on the whole is too saturated. It just doesn't look natural. On the other hand, its quite sharp and clean considering how bad Lowry Digital said the condition was when they got it. It probably wasn't their fault on the color. If I recall correctly, GL wanted it to make it look similiar to the prequels. Since they were shot on HDCam it was probably just naturally saturated. Trying to adjust the film to look the same way however, has just left it looking completely unnatural. Even more interestingly is how when Lucas transffered Phantom Menace to DVD, he went hdcam->film->dvd to make it match the film look of the original trilogy. Now, he's tried to make the original trilogy match up in quality with the prequels by making them look "more digital." Example #346 of GL not being able to make up his mind.
I think all outgoing traffic should be charged for. Beyond some reasonable amount, anyway. I remember when my cable modem was 3 mbits down and 1 mbit up. I could share video clips I'm working on with my friends (on the same ISP) with not too much waiting. But, then everybody started abusing their so called "unlimited" connection, with 5% of the users using 95% of the bandwidth, so now when I want to send the occasional large, legitimate file, without even using any bandwidth outside of RR's internal network, I get the shit end of the stick with a 384kbps upload. Charging for outgoing bandwidth would kill two birds with one stone.
If its capable of transferring uncompressed video to your screen, its conceivable that it should be able to feed that uncompressed video into a software encoder. ATI doesn't say you CAN'T do it so I think it would be a wasted effort to just assume it doesn't and not at least try and see what i can do with it.
And regardless of what ratio you think DV is compressed (which is almost certainly a "generalized approximation that you've heard repeatedly" and not actual math, i figured the compression to be 6:1 by 720*480*16 bits per pixel*30 frames per second, divided by 3.4 megabytes per second), 3.4 megabytes per second (cbr by standard) 4:1:1 DV degrades a lot more per every time you compress it than the same source recorded as 7 megabyte per second AVERAGE vbr 4:2:2 picvideo mjpeg. Picvideo doesn't use a constant compression ratio, its just constant quality, and if you set the luminance and chrominance to 1 and 2 in that exact codec, you get very close to the same results as huffyuv, which is lossless.
Quality wise, it does say it has a 12 bit video encoder, which is more than any other cheap consumer device can handle. Just because some cheap products suck doesn't mean all cheap products do. There was a HUGE gain in color quality when I went from a bt878 card to one of the newer phillips 10 bit ones.
And of COURSE the destination video would be DVD. But every step in the middle that adds mosquito noise means its also going to be more difficult for the mpeg2 encoder to compress, thus confusing it even more and possibly wasting bits on "noise" and adding more noise to the portions of the image that need it.
While its true that the "best" hardware costs a LOT of money, you'd be surprised at how close you can get to the best at a mere fraction of the cost. Its just a matter of finding the right stuff, and sometimes inventing your own ways of working so that you can make a quality finished product without having to spend $25,000. I'd say, aside from the lack of component video in/out and that you're limited to using a completely independent audio capture clock, the video quality on a cheap as hell asus tvfm card is almost as good as the Avid Media Composer Adrenaline system I use at work (I work at Avid's main headquarters).
While its true that you can't polish a turd, people don't realize the kind of loss involved in merely converting an anlaog signal to digital (and how much HARDER it is to capture a turd-like analog signal without mucking up any detail). Noise reduction should be up to specific noise reduction algorithms, and not merely an encoder throwing away data randomly that it proabbly shouldn't. When you make a decision to record a low quality source into a low quality digital format, you aren't "intelligently using less bitrate" but rather getting the WORST of both the analog and digital worlds... which could turn crap into even worse crap. If its that bad to start off with, shouldn't your goal be making sure it doesn't get any worse?
In fact, thats where people like me step in with home made DVDs. Laserdisc players are hardly ubiqutious, but put the right hardware in the right hands and you can get a pretty damn good production. The problem is, most of the home made DVDs out there are "the right hardware in the wrong hands" so they're not exactly good picture quality. My problem is I know exactly how I'd do it if I had the best hardware (I already did it once with a DV camcorder as the transcoding device, and its ok but not as good as it could be) but I can't afford real stuff. Now that I'm working at Avid (company that makes video editing stuff) I might be able to borrow something for a couple days and get it done right. Until then, its only speculation.
Well, 30 fps, 480 lines per frame and 60 fields per second, 240 lines per field is the same amount of data either way. (Never mind the fact that PAL is 50i. I'm talking NTSC)
While it won't "look" the same when you watch a 60i video as full height 480 line frames, no data is lost. If you actually want to create 60p from a 60i signal (dscaler does this, but won't support a USB 2 external device) it will twice as much bandwidth. Whether this is done in the external device or inside the PC is just about moot, because the raw bandwidth is more of an issue than the processing and either way you need a high end PC to handle it.
A) NTSC is 29.97 FPS, PAL is 25. B) YUY2 video (essentially, full quality digital component video) is 16 bits per pixel. So take a 720x480 image 30 times per second at 16 bits per pixel and you get about 20 megabytes per second. USB2.0 supports up to 480mbits per second, or 60 megabytes. While it is more CPU dependent than firewire, it DOES have the bandwidth. I work for Avid, and our $25,000 Adrenaline box connects to the PC via firewire and is by no means limited by the fact that the firewire bus is only 50 megabytes per second. It captures uncompressed with impeccable reliability. USB 2 isn't optimal for a true pro video editing setup, but at the very least it DOES support the bitrate full quality NTSC video requires.
Everybody can debate whether they really want to watch TV on the computer or not. Everybody can debate whether usb 2 or firewire is better. But there are more important things that people are ignoring.
I don't care about watching TV, but if this has support for capturing to any AVI format, it should be an amazing cheap video capture device. PCI cards based on the bt878 or phillips chips seem to be flaky at times, and when you use these, the audio and video aren't recorded on the same clock. You've got the video capture card and your sound card running basically completely independent of each other. With this, the signal will be digitized before your PC even sees it. It will eliminate a lot of screwiness as far as audio sync is concerned. This puts it well ahead of most (simpler consumer oriented) PCI based setups.
As far as how it compares to products like the Canopus boxes that take an analog signal and convert it to a standard firewire DV signal, while these boxes offer pro quality analog to digital conversion, and no audio screwiness like the consumer PCI cards, they ONLY support DV. People, DV is not "full quality." 4:1:1 sampled video has VERY noticable artifacts because the color info is only recorded once for every four times the luminance is recorded. This makes scenes with highly saturated color and sharp lines have painful JAGGED (because its digital) edges to the color.
On top of that, 3.4MB per second is just not enough for repeated processing without generational loss. The reason you can edit DV on the computer with no loss is because, in most video editing programs, you're only recompressing the effects, not the stretches of unmodified video. However, if you actually tried compressing a clip to DV a few times, you'll notice the mosquito noise gets noticably worse every time. An external capture device that supports uncompressed video allows you to bypass this completely by recording in formats such as a very lightly compressed mjpeg (I tend to go for about 3:1 compression. DV is 6:1) or better yet, when the quality really has to be perfect, Huffyuv which is lossless. In this way, I can avoid the 4:1:1 sampling artifacts for full color resolution, and no loss in video quality while i'm processing it for noise reduction and whatnot.
Now, whether device actually does what I expect it to is a different story, but I for one will certainly buy one of these to try it out. After all, the worst that can happen is it doesn't support what i'd like it to and I can just return it/sell it on ebay.
I'd have to see it to believe it. Most of the LD->DVD rips, especially the non SEs, are extremely crappy. Thats why I did my own version, which is pretty good as far as sharpness/lack of noise is concerned, but the color ain't the best. I'm redoing them with better video capture equipment and this time it'll be even better.
And no, laserdiscs are NOT anamorphic so they weren't magically increasing the resolution. It'll just be scaled multiple times by the time it gets to your screen instead of just once.
Damn you moderators and your inability to recognize the joke. Mod this one down too, I dare you. That way you won't be able to waste it on somebody else's post that didn't deserve to be modded down.
Damn you mormons and your polygamy.
Mary Ann. Duh.
Maybe we can use that device to come up with an award, "most screwed up search engine query." Vampire shemale beastiality bondage?
Well, at least now we can use all the chainsaw gas. (Zak McKracken)
Are you removing them using msconfig? That seems to always do the trick for me. Just erasing them from the startup section in the start menu won't necessarily do it.
Contrary to popular belief, 1280x1024 isn't 4x3 ANYWAY. Do the math. 1280x960 is the proper 4:3 resolution. Thus if you're using a 4:3 CRT, and you want something 1280 pixels wide, 1024 pixels tall would give you the wrong pixel ratio.
It looks like I'm going to have to get some IR absorbing coating on myself and my camcorder now.