Artifacts and scanlines...

[Ji-L87]

Hi, new user here (should I go somewhere else to introduce myself, perhaps?)

I recently acquired a Duo-R, and it reads CDs and HuCards just fine. Audio is no problem either.
However, I've noticed weird occurrences of what to me seems like interlaced sprite layers which becomes "solid" or non-interlaced at certain times, as well as strange....artifacts, which probably might be a problem with my LCD TV. But it's weird, none the less.

My library of games is still very small (just 3, ATM) but the only game I have in which these things occur is Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 2. 

Examples of interlacing:





In the last pic, the eyes have suddenly turned solid and these things seems to happen at the end of cutscenes etc.
I tried the game with the trial for Magic Engine and none of these interlacing effects are visible. Now, how accurate this emulator is, I don't know.

Examples of artefacts:



The blue-ish one is how it looked like on my CRT tube and the green-ish one is how it looked on my LCD (no, it's not actually that green, rest assured).
I know that old games just runs better on old TVs but I like having every system connected to one TV, the old one stands in a corner because of space issues.

I have opened up the system once because of another little thing (nothing too serious, just a bit of loose plastic) and I couldn't see anything wrong with caps and the like. So, is this a "real problem" or is it normal?  Game runs fine otherwise, just beaten it, but it is distracting.

[thesteve]

id say its related to your tv's upscaling.

yes ME is quite good

[SignOfZeta]

Its the TV. A PCE couldn't produces artifacts like this if it wanted to.

Get a high-end 90s TV from the Salvation Army store for $80 and be done with it. If you *must* use a modern TV you'll need an RGB mod and a something like a XRGB or Edge (for 5x the price of a decent used CRT).

[Ji-L87]

Thanks for your answers,
I will probably look into getting a good CRT (my current one is simply too big and heavy) and find a place for it. I do think I saw the interlacing-thing on my CRT as well though, might need to try that again.

[Keith Courage]

Yeah my 42inch plasma has  wavy lines that go up the screen if I use it. Bothers the crap out of me so I always use an older sony trinitron CRT instead which looks awesome.

[thesteve]

keith, you have a different issue.

yours is most likely a ground problem between the pce and tv

[BigusSchmuck]

Thought it was strange too when I had seen scanlines on some of the scrolling stuff in Ys books 1 and 2. Guess I have to go dig out my old tele out of storage ^^.

[incrediblehark]

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. Example: If you play Sonic the Hedgehog and get the shield item, it will overlap him but will appear to flicker showing you have the powerup. If displayed on an hdtv monitor (without interlacing / scanlines) You won't see the shield at all.

[SignOfZeta]

What's even more common is seening half the shield, with the other half just dropping out completely. This also happens in fighting games that have a shadow which is drawn every other  frame, alternating between the two fighters. One guy will have a totally opaque shadow, and the other guy will have none.

[thesteve]

thats a frame rate conversion.
using a faster display should eliminate the issue.
i have not had an issue using my 50" nec plasma monitor.

[SignOfZeta]

It's not the display itself that is slow, it's the hardware inside that digitizes SD signals.

SD game machines look like crap on all LCD/plasma. There is no point in wasting more money on another display. Upscaling old game machines simply isn't a priority for companies today. They are concentrating on making PS3s and Apple TVs and stuff like that look good.

The only solution is a quality up scaler, but honestly even those pale in comparison to a good late 90s Sony or JVC CRT. A good old SD TV will have zero lag, no artifacts, and it will run you less than $100. I got a pro Samsung unit from a guy on Craigslist for $20. It does everything from SD composite to 1024x768 VGA, making it basically the ultimate gaming monitor. You litterally can't buy anything this good for OG consoles anymore, and it was only $20. Cons: it weights 112 lbs!

[thesteve]

my plasma is not your average display.
its an industrial use display that supports about any format you could think of, and has an excellent upscaler in it.

it also cost me $100 not working, with a retail list price of $10,000.

[SignOfZeta]

Well, that's awesome, but you can't expect anyone else to get a deal like that so "buy another TV" isn't the best advice, IMO.

Also, no disrespect intended, but I'll believe there is a good flat panel for SD consoles when I see it. There just isn't any incentive for OEMs to build quality line doublers into their sets when nothing SD is even being made anymore, and it shows. If the Turbo looks bad on a 2 year old Samsung 40", its going to look just as bad on a brand new Samsung 40" (possibly worse, since many new ones don't have s-video).

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.

As long as they are happy, that's all that matters, but for anyone who is picky the solutions are:

1) get an old TV

2) buy a super rad box for your new TV that in itself costs 15x as much as a good old TV.

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 fucking amazing. Of course, they are RGB-only devices (if they have other inputs you certainly won't get these kind of results.

[thesteve]

well enough
im not saying finding a good (much less great) flat display for composite inputs is easy.
I just got lucky.
I also got to play with the original 42" philips consumer unit back in the day, and it looked like crap running composite.

[nat]

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.

[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 fucking 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.

[TurboXray]

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.

[SignOfZeta]

RF is as low-end as it gets, quality-wise.

[Chuplayer]

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?

To be fair, they made a decent compromise in Marvel vs. Capcom 2's widescreen mode. They added unplayable space to the sides.

And Super Turbo HD Remix got reworked in widescreen, so I guess people were expecting Third Strike to have that.

[SignOfZeta]

If by "Super Turbo" you mean HD Remix, yeah, they changed all sorts of shit with that release. I appreciate it not at all. I'm very very happy they didn't do that to Third Strike just because some punks whose first system was an N64 can't understand that square pegs don't fit into round holes.

[Chuplayer]

If by "Super Turbo" you mean HD Remix, yeah, they changed all sorts of shit with that release. I appreciate it not at all. I'm very very happy they didn't do that to Third Strike just because some punks whose first system was an N64 can't understand that square pegs don't fit into round holes.

Yeah, HD Remix. I thought the only change they were going to make to that was to give Ryu a feint fireball.

[SignOfZeta]

They spent twice as much time remixing that game as Capcom Japan spent making the original. Try had to do *something*.

Super Turbo, the real one, is basically perfect though. I wouldn't change anything.

[thesteve]

gotta give zeta credit on the 240P thing.
the TG/PCE sync doesnt do field switching, causing a CRT to retrace the same lines at 30fps, rather than alternating scan position.
thats why scan lines are seen running the game, not when watching TV