Artifacts and scanlines...

[SignOfZeta]

See, that's what I mean. I think your standards are just different than mine. Even with the absolutely best line doublers in the world, Faroudja, DVDO, Micomsoft, whatever, the PCE composite will always look like ass when digitized, incorrectly upscaled, and inflated 8x. Its just impossible to make a signal that bad look good when blown up twice as big as anyone ever saw anything SD in 1987. It doesn't matter what the hardware is, composite looks bad when huge, worse when made huge with 21st century stuff. It has to be RGB.

Composite looks fine on a 1702, almost as good on my big Samsung CRT, but total shit on a 50" flat panel.

If you tap and amplify the RGB signal and run it through...at least a GBS 8220, if not an XRGB, it will look vastly superior. Not just because RGB looks better than composite by nature, but also because a) the things that make composite naturally sucky also reek havoc with the upscaling process and b) every modern TV I've ever seen treats 240p signals as if they were 480i signals, which is the cause of the missing/interlaced transparencies. There are also always two frames of lag with anything except a XRGB.

Honestly I couldn't even play a PCE on a 50" plasma without getting sick unless I sat so far away from the screen that there would be no point is using a display that big in the first place!

[SignOfZeta]

Every time someone says that the SNES or whatever looks great on their display, I go to look at it and it looks like utter shite. Half the time they even have it in wide mode, which is unforgivable.

This is the part that gets me the most. How can people do this? And when you point it out to them, they just give you this blank mouth-breathing stare like you just said something to them in another language.

Yeah. In addition to the whole LCD-murder, the stretching blurs and distorts the image one more step. Its revolting. "Why is the moon oval shaped!?"

But wait, there is something even worse than this which I have encountered recently.

Remember back in the 90s when dumb-asses would complain about letterbox movies? I used to work at a video store and...holy shit. People would actually return a movie saying it was unwatchable because it was letterboxed. I tried to explain the whole "square peg, round hole, something's got to give" thing but they just never got it.

Well, now that's fixed right? All TVs are wide, matting is usually very minimal on movies, so this bullshit fixed itself and we don't have that idiocy anymore, right?

Hah! Wrong. Now people are complaining that re-releases of 4:3 games aren't wide enough.

When Third Strike came out on PSN there were actually people complaining that Capcom didn't somehow make the game wide. These are people that...you'd think, would understand that if you were to make all the levels wider the entire balance of the game would be massively affected so...WTF? Are they just really bad at geometry or...what?

I almost never do this, but I have to:

 

There. An emoticon. That's how much these people drive me crazy.

[thesteve]

i still need to rgb mod a turbo.
240p isnt that cga
composite is 400i always has been always will be, its a fixed number of lines for compatibility.
I should have some composite VS component pics up soon for comparison (both on my plasma) using a modified genesis.

[Ji-L87]

Good to see the thread is active : D

...what it sounds like is an issue with playing older games on a newer hdtv. My guess is that in the screens where you have issues, the games are trying to produce a sort of transparent look, with a tv or monitor with scanlines, the image would appear to flicker or look transparent.

Yeah, that's what I started thinking too. I'm in the process of getting a few more games for my collection, maybe some more games will utilize a similar effect. I'm going to hook up the unit to my CRT one more time, to see what problems persist and what goes away but that beast is heavy and even on a stand on wheels, it's cumbersome to get it where I want to (too much stuff in the way). And as a result of that, I'm also looking into getting a good 4:3-sized CRT for occasions such as this. People here DO sell a lot of old tubes where I live, but they don't specify what model it is and what inputs it has, making it hard to find something good. My dream TV would of course have S-video and component, alongside with the usual composite and scarts, and no bigger than maybe 28'' or so.

Speaking of old games on LCD/Plasma though, aside from slight motion blur and a certain softness caused by upscaling, I think mine does a pretty good job. The artefacts in Yuna 2 was the first real problem I've encountered playing old games on my LCD. I was mostly afraid of the input lag I've heard about but I didn't really notice it on this set.
Not to mention, I enjoy the look of sprites without interlacing and what not. Just like on an emulator, clean, sharp sprites <3

/offtopic

[thesteve]

heres a great comparison of composite VS component video.
note how the composite used dithering for shading, but when viewed as component all is revealed.
http://sites.google.com/site/foreverjoye/home/videocompair

now in this case the blending is done properly on the composite, however most new tech displays wont

[incrediblehark]

what drives me crazy is when i try to show people how much better a video or game looks in rgb compared to composite and they look at me blankly and say "i don't see any difference" BAH! 

[thesteve]

you can see it in that pic for sure.

but im zoomed in pretty close

[DragonmasterDan]

There is a possible third solution. When I was at Galloping Ghost arcade I noticed that they had a great number of those drop-in replacement LCD screens in their machines. Many looked like aaaasssssss, but some looked great. Whatever they have in their Ms Pac Man cocktail is f*cking amazing. Of course, they are RGB-only devices (if they have other inputs you certainly won't get these kind of results.

Did you see what they did to the U.N. Squadron machine?

[SignOfZeta]

Maybe, I don't recall. That was several months ago.

[DragonmasterDan]

Maybe, I don't recall. That was several months ago.

If it's daylight there is no good viewing angle, it's an LCD wedged in to the cabinet and the machine is right by the window, so sunlight just blinds out any possible viewing angle to see the whole screen.

[Bonknuts]

heres a great comparison of composite VS component video.
note how the composite used dithering for shading, but when viewed as component all is revealed.
http://sites.google.com/site/foreverjoye/home/videocompair

now in this case the blending is done properly on the composite, however most new tech displays wont

 Composite signal itself isn't using dithering, the output hardware is. And Genesis outputs really poor composite video, video game artists just took more advantage of this on the Genesis which is why you see it more on the system. I don't just mean 'blurry', I mean there's no alternating chroma dot pattern like the PCE and SNES that actually good TVs with good composite decoders can pull the additional detail out of the signal (which is why PCE and SNES look much sharper than Genesis over composite). 240p is a legal mode for composite specifications, it just wasn't legal for over the air broad cast signals. Though only game devices used it. Newer TVs only decode incoming composite signal as 480i, treating 240p frames as interlaced fields. This gets interpreted in different ways depending on the different/custom deinterlacing algorithms. Ji-L87, this is exactly what you're seeing. For a normal SD TV, you should most definite NOT see this effect. I've never seen a SD set turn a 240p signal into a 480i output, but I have seen it done with capture cards. And I have seen some old SD sets that don't like certain 240p composite signals of some game consoles (had one that wouldn't display SNES correctly, but Genesis and Duo just fine).

[Ji-L87]

Allright, having hooked up the unit to my CRT again I can confirm that, as suspected, all artefacts seems to have disappeared (at least I think so, Yuna 2 is not the most practical game for these things, getting trough the game takes time as there is no skip-text function). The game really likes to use quickly flashing images to create some kind of transparency effect and in motion this caused my LCD to flip out. The thing is, these "effects" seems to stop when a scene ends, or just before it ends, which is what I meant by "interlaced objects suddenly becoming solid". It just looked really funky on my LCD.

Anyway...so...case closed? : )

[BigusSchmuck]

Curious, I wonder if a RF-modulator would solve the problem?

[Ji-L87]

I was under the impression that composite/scart was a step up above RF as far as these thing go? Or rather, I'm sure that is the case. I know that colors tend to leak on my Mega Drive when run through RF...

[thesteve]

yes composite will look better than RF, just do to less processing.