I never said anything about a 480p signal. Where did you get that?
I was making a comparison between the interlacing done on a 240p signal (each frame's 240 lines are simply sent as a 480i field, which is 240 lines of actual information) vs a 480p image interlaced to 480i, which looses information.
But for all intents and purposes, 240p sent as 480i looks much blockier than regular 240p, since the space between the scanlines is filled with the lines directly above it.
This does not apply to equipment such as a PC running DScaler in Old Game mode or a standalone deinterlacer that can properly create a 240p frame from a 480i field.
And that's why it's called 240p. The 'p' is for 'progressive'. And yes, that means progressive scan on just about any regular SDTV in the entire world.
I didn't know that TVs could recognize a 240p signal without confusing it for an 480i one (except maybe in Europe, but I don't know much about their situation), but I'll take your word for it. You have the RGB signal transcoded to YPbPr component, right? What transcoder do you use? What's the model of your TV?
On many of the the Sega Ages collections in Japan, there is even a 240p option to play the games in the original resolution.
Which one? I was thinking about getting some of them eventually, I can pick it up in Akihabara on the way home from work someday.
Why would this be there along with a 480i option if 240p was alwasy sent as an interlaced signal?
I never said that it was. However, the resolution lines when it's sent as 480i are exactly the same as 240p, because a 480i field has 240 active lines and they can be easily combined to make a 240p image, such as when using DScaler. This software takes very little CPU processing in Old Game mode, and in addition has no detectable lag (unless introduced by the capture card), unlike many standalone deinterlacers and scalers in HDTVs. I can perform moves in fighting games with exact precision. I'm sure your setup has no lag either though.
It's not about "how many" colors NTSC can produce, it's about how well it produces those colors. I could go into a long discussion about NTSC color bandwidth, and how it doesn't have much space. But instead I'll just say that the luma (B&W) portion of the signal gets a lot more space than the combined red, green blue, etc get. PAL has much better color space than NTSC and therefore the color looks much better. Component video is free from all of this nonsense, but it has goofiness of it's own. It does not transmit the color green. But fortunately the way component video works, there is no theoretical loss from raw RGB.
Yes, RGB and component cables will give you slightly better color quality than S-Video, but it's not a huge improvement like the kind you get going from composite to S-Video (or better), especially since the human eye is much more sensitive to light/dark differences in video than color.