PC Engine AV mod

[FM-77]

But can't you just turn the colour dial up on your TV to compensate for loss of colour?   

Actually that'll only make it worse. Composite blurs the picture and a phenomenon known as "color bleeding" is very noticable. Increasing the color value will only make matters worse. Much worse, the color bleeding will ruin the picture entirely.

RGB is video in its purest form, there's no "compression" or any any cheap techiques used, it's just that - pure, beautiful video.

Let's say we have three buckets of paint. One red, one green and one blue. By mixing these colors we can make a wide variety of hues and it will look really good, as the buckets of paint are seperate and clean from the very beginning.

Composite, on the other hand, is cheap. Someone poured all the color (red, green and blue) into one bucket and then tries to seperate them, and mix them to make all the other hues but it looks like crap since he's already mixed all the colors in the same bucket. Get my point?

[ccovell]

Yeah, that Forgotten Worlds comparison is a little bit misleading.  On a real TV, the dithering pattern through composite generates a bit of noise and interference (kinda like the flickering hair in Ys) that is more detailed than a capture card can grab.  He should at least capture two fields (1/60th of a second) at a high resolution (720x480 or so) and merge those together to give a more accurate representation of what our eyes see on the TV screen.

Regarding which has brighter colours, RGB or composite, it really depends on the display device.  RGB definitely has purer colours, but composite has "hotter" reds and blues on my TV.  The gamma levels of TVs and video monitors are also different.  So everyone's mileage may vary.

[Black Tiger]

I take it the screen caps are done via capture card. Im kinda curious as to what card because some cap cards do a horrible job of capping composite signal because they have zero comb filter power to speak of.

And even so,the Bomber Man comparison looks no where near as bad as Deans fudged lowered color pics. Im not saying composite is better then s-video,cause its not,but I had Forgotten Worlds back when I saw that Deans page there,back around when I first joined,and compared his pics to my Tvs image and mine looked much better,more along his s-video pics color wise. His pics looked like the color was lowered on purpose and the tint was played with. Seemed like a ploy to sell mods. I think I will have my friend,who still has the game for Pc-Engine,run it in composite on his Sony Wega when he gets back home next week,and take pics for me to post here.

I've noticed the same thing with various screenshots. Although I previously used ATI AIW video cards, my latest PC has a Hauppaugge PVR 350(?), which is an actual capture card. I know that the dvd video it captures is much better than the video cards I had before, but I didn't take enough screenshots or have the S-Video mod before.

The difference between composite and the S-Video mod I have varies between games. Forgotten Worlds is a good example of a nice looking game that suffers the most through composite. I used Bomberman '93 as the example on the Wii page, because it's a VC title which shows the best looking/most solid Turbo composite and is nice and colorful.

Were the sceenshots on D-Lite's page taken with a digital camera? Because that throws all kinds of variables into it.

The one thing I did with my screenshots was capture them at the lowest 2 resolutions my card allows and didn't resize them.

Yeah, that Forgotten Worlds comparison is a little bit misleading.  On a real TV, the dithering pattern through composite generates a bit of noise and interference (kinda like the flickering hair in Ys) that is more detailed than a capture card can grab.  He should at least capture two fields (1/60th of a second) at a high resolution (720x480 or so) and merge those together to give a more accurate representation of what our eyes see on the TV screen.

Regarding which has brighter colours, RGB or composite, it really depends on the display device.  RGB definitely has purer colours, but composite has "hotter" reds and blues on my TV.  The gamma levels of TVs and video monitors are also different.  So everyone's mileage may vary.

Yeah, that was just a quick page I threw together back when I first got my PCE modded. I still plan on doing a real composite vs S-Video mod page, but am concentrating on the Virtual Console stuff right now.

The reason I used Forgotten Worlds as an example in the first place, is because the difference on a few real TV's was most noticible with that game, even if still screenshots don't tell the whole story.

Although I've always planned to use various videos as a comparison, I don't think that my card captures fps higher than ntsc dvd.

But like you said, every TV set is also different and it depends on the combination.

From my personal experience, playing Turbo/PCE games with the S-Video mod looks like I'm running Magic Engine from my PC to a TV.

[Joe Redifer]

Capturing 2 fields in fun!  I can't make the GIF animate as fast as it does on a TV screen in real life, but the picture below shows the shimmering effect that quite a lot of Turbo games have in composite.  NES games, too.  They must use a similar composite encoder (and sound chip).



Black_Tiger, does anything like this happen on your system with S-video?

[Black Tiger]

Capturing 2 fields in fun!  I can't make the GIF animate as fast as it does on a TV screen in real life, but the picture below shows the shimmering effect that quite a lot of Turbo games have in composite.  NES games, too.  They must use a similar composite encoder (and sound chip).



Black_Tiger, does anything like this happen on your system with S-video?

There isn't any shimmering with the S-Video mod that I have.

Last night I captured a captured a couple Forgotten Worlds videos to see the difference in motion again.

On the one TV I have at my computer, the blonde soldier's portrait didn't have that green effect, instead it shimmered, which looks better.

But, whenever the game scrolled(all the time), all the fine detail and dithering had that same ugly effect(blue stripes in the middle of brown shading).

So the blonde soldier screenshot was a good example of what Turbo/PCE composite looks like 90% of the time.

I don't care if developers planned for the shading in PC Engine games to be ruined or not, that stuff is not cool.

[Keranu]

Capturing 2 fields in fun!  I can't make the GIF animate as fast as it does on a TV screen in real life, but the picture below shows the shimmering effect that quite a lot of Turbo games have in composite.  NES games, too.  They must use a similar composite encoder (and sound chip).



Black_Tiger, does anything like this happen on your system with S-video?

I'm aware of the shimmering effect, but it certainly doesn't look that bad on any TVs I have used . Besides, the shimmering doesn't bother me at all, I think people just like to be nit-picky.

[Spector]

I like a bit of shimmering myself; a perfectly clean picture can appear a bit lifeless to me. It's almost like the old vinyl/Cd argument again. I prefer vinyl for old music, and composite/rf for old consoles.
Maybe I'm just an old fart 

[Joe Redifer]

We all must justify what we have or don't have, I guess.

Just keep in mind that if you like arcade screens, you like RGB. 

[Black Tiger]

I tried capturing some video of Forgotten Worlds the other night to see how it would turn out.

It's not the best example of all the differences between composite and S-Video and the demos aren't the best visual examples to use... but if you still want to take a look-


This is a HD split screen-

http://www.superpcenginegrafx.com/pcevideo.avi


This one cross fades between the two, and just happened to line up so that the cross fading in the second half is pretty much useless 

http://www.superpcenginegrafx.com/pcevideo2.avi

[Michael Helgeson]

All that tells me is your cap card may not like capping composite signal so much.Pretty much all the color looks sucked completely out which isn't natural even for composite. Like I said,Ill have my friend take some pics of it running on his Sony Wega.

[Black Tiger]

All that tells me is your cap card may not like capping composite signal so much.Pretty much all the color looks sucked completely out which isn't natural even for composite. Like I said,Ill have my friend take some pics of it running on his Sony Wega.

The difference actually looks worse on all my real TV's, including my Sony that's the model that was replaced by the Wega, but looks the same, and couple friends Wega's.

Honestly, I don't think that composite looks so bad on it's own, because the graphics are still there. Its only when you compare it to S-Video that it doesn't look as good.

If you want to take a look at my Wii vs TG-16 video page again, you'll see that the Wii's composite looks identical to the Wii's S-Video, and both have nice vibrant colors.

So unless my cap card's prejudgiced against Turbo/PCE composite, it should be a fairly accurate portrayel of the difference in general. Except that some of the artifacts from the Turbo composite got lost in the video conversion.

[Michael Helgeson]

The Wii is a completely different system with a res output much higher. Even the emus on the Wii output at 640x480. Maybe your tv has sucky composite quality too,like my Samsung.....Everything looks like ass on the Samsung composite wise except newer systems.
Anyway,like I said,Ill have my friend take some pics later this week after he gets back home and I will post them here for more comparisons

[Black Tiger]

The Wii is a completely different system with a res output much higher. Even the emus on the Wii output at 640x480. Maybe your tv has sucky composite quality too,like my Samsung.....Everything looks like ass on the Samsung composite wise except newer systems.
Anyway,like I said,Ill have my friend take some pics later this week after he gets back home and I will post them here for more comparisons

Since the Wii is different, shouldn't it still look less than perfect if my cap card is no good with composite? My Duo's S-Video is still low res.

Like I said, the composite on about a half dozen TV's I tried looks like that compared to the S-Video.

I just tried it out on my brother's Sony Wega and it was the same deal. The composite looks like it has a grey transparency over it. However, his larger (32" - 36") screen seemed to reduce much of the flickery dithering effects.

[Michael Helgeson]

I believe Keranu had a problem capping composite from one of his systems,but the others were fine on his cap card.
Not only that,your comparing composite out from the Wii,a system that produces a higher res and was built in 2006,with higher grade components for composite output,running a game in emulation on a 256 bit graphics chip.

That and this is like saying every composite signal should be at the same strength and interpreted the exact same on any and every product,and in a perfect world it would be,but its not a perfect world,and every tv model uses different chips for its comb filters for composite input,and cap cards are very much like this also,some of them having very weak comb filters because they are mainly designed to cap s-video quality and are designed to be compatible with composite.  You can take a composite signal and use it on 2 different tvs,one that is built to do very good composite,and one thats just made to be compatible with it. Ones built to be compatible tend to do really well with newer electronics like Dreamcast,PS 2 and Gamecube on up,and dvd players,and tend to look average with older electronics like VCRs,composite laserdisc players and older game systems.

These days it is getting harder to find  a tv that produces good picture quality off of a composite signal of a older system. So you saying composite looks like ass on all your tvs just tells me your tvs suck at composite,and are prob best left doing s-video work. It seems like your trying to turn this into a debate like your experience dictates everyone else's with composite,which it doesn't,and every ones set up is different and their milage will vary picture wise. What would be cool is for everyone to post pics of their system running a game to show their pic quality. I know this is kinda hard compared to using a cap card,but were not supposed to be talking about cap cards here,not everyone plays their game systems on cap cards,as most use Tvs.

[Black Tiger]

I believe Keranu had a problem capping composite from one of his systems,but the others were fine on his cap card.
Not only that,your comparing composite out from the Wii,a system that produces a higher res and was built in 2006,with higher grade components for composite output,running a game in emulation on a 256 bit graphics chip.

That and this is like saying every composite signal should be at the same strength and interpreted the exact same on any and every product,and in a perfect world it would be,but its not a perfect world,and every tv model uses different chips for its comb filters for composite input,and cap cards are very much like this also,some of them having very weak comb filters because they are mainly designed to cap s-video quality and are designed to be compatible with composite.  You can take a composite signal and use it on 2 different tvs,one that is built to do very good composite,and one thats just made to be compatible with it. Ones built to be compatible tend to do really well with newer electronics like Dreamcast,PS 2 and Gamecube on up,and dvd players,and tend to look average with older electronics like VCRs,composite laserdisc players and older game systems.

These days it is getting harder to find  a tv that produces good picture quality off of a composite signal of a older system. So you saying composite looks like ass on all your tvs just tells me your tvs suck at composite,and are prob best left doing s-video work. It seems like your trying to turn this into a debate like your experience dictates everyone else's with composite,which it doesn't,and every ones set up is different and their milage will vary picture wise. What would be cool is for everyone to post pics of their system running a game to show their pic quality. I know this is kinda hard compared to using a cap card,but were not supposed to be talking about cap cards here,not everyone plays their game systems on cap cards,as most use Tvs.

Most of the TV's I've played Duo's on don't have S-Video.

But if most TV's can't do the Duo composite justice, then shouldn't most people expect the washed out picture anyway?

The whole point of the Wii vs TG-16 video composite comparison was to illustrate the difference between the two systems. As you said, the Wii is moderner and more hi-tech.

The Duo composite still looks nice and I wouldn't have thought that it could get much better until I got the S-Video mod.