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I've written up a new article discussing aspect ratios and scanlines and other CRT v LCD/plasma things. I'd appreciate any feedback, as I do worry that it's not entirely coherent. Writing late at night after a long week of work tends to make my internal logic a little shaky. =D
It is here, just one click away!
It includes diagrams, like this one!
http://nfgworld.com/grafx/games/ASPECT-stretching.png
Good read but it seems a bit terse. I would appreciate more detail in general.
Maybe you can expand on it to discuss other things which developers did to take advantage of the intended display format, like dithering on games which is intended to be blurred when playing the game on a composite connection.
I'm thinking to add some more photos of some CRT and LCD screens. Sucks my XRGB power supply is dead at the moment, that'd have helped quite a lot. =/Quote:
Originally Posted by dog$
That gets dangerously close to personal opinion and mind-reading, doesn't it? I mean, I love my crystal clear pixels and the dithering revealed by a good RGB monitor. I can't be sure that it reveals anything the designers were trying to hide.Quote:
Originally Posted by dog$
I mean, they were designing games for the only TVs or monitors available to 99% of their customers, right? They weren't making a conscious choice to utilize the blur inherent in composite video, they were working with the only way to smooth a colour change with a limited palette.
Thinking about it for a moment, if they were really using the crap-factor of a composite display, why would they bother dithering at all? The TV would do it for them. =)
Someone posted some pictures of Saturn Nights on here a while ago comparing how the game looks on composite compared to S-video or something, making a point to compare how the blending looked worse as the video type improved.
I think I remember reading something similar about Final Fantasy 8.
I was just trying to think of other related topics to go with the general theme of your piece.
I'd be interested in seeing that thread.
You're right, I'm not saying you're not, it's just that there aren't as many facts in a discussion like that. You really need to talk to the designers in question to get any real answers.
This is what I was thinking of.
You should discuss modern solutions to these issues more. Some of the discussions of things like hard scaling and scanlines seem a bit antiquated in light of modern screen fitting and monitor emulation techniques. By combining overlays, prescaling, and filtration in the right order, you can create something that looks pretty nice at any resolution.
For example, here's a raw shot of STUN Runner, a game that uses a wierd resolution (512x240) and then a screenshot of it running in MAME. And another without the scanline stuff. You can see that there is neither blurring nor distortion, and the scanlines line up per-pixel as they would on the real thing, regardless of the fact that my screen resolution isn't proportional to the original resolution (view screenshots full size or you'll get some distortion from the browser's scaling, of course).
The best example of this is in Sega Genesis games. Due to the limited palette a lot of games used the blending that is a natural byproduct of composite displays to simulate blending or more colors. Here's the quintessential example: Duke Nukem 3D. The first shot uses blargg's NTSC filter to simulate what the composite signal looks like and the second shot shows the console's raw/perfect output.Quote:
Originally Posted by dog$
The simple answer is that the signal bleeds between pixels such that each pixel is 50/50 with the one left of it. So if you alternate between two colors (pixel mesh or vertical stripes) you'll get a cheap blending effect at the expense of some detail. S-Video and higher are a sharper signal, so it doesn't do that.
I remember thinking THAT GUY was outright wrong about a lot of things, but now I'm sitting around with two RGB monitors as my preferred way to play low res games. :/
THAT GUY was wrong by thinking interlaced black lines somehow made his screenshots more accurate. It was a cheap, shitty effect that made his shots dark and painful to look at.
A lot of people prefer real low-res modes and monitors. That's a whole different issue.