old pixel art on tvs, Composite and RGB comparisons

[Helm]

check out this thread

http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/gotRGB/screenshots.html

and discuss

[tocky]

i never got the same buzz playing yoshi's island on an emulator, but i never realised it's because yoshi isn't supposed to look like a pixel game, it's supposed to look like magic.

are there any emulators simulate this sort of effect well?

[9_6]

->
Woah I had no clue that's how they did 'transparency' on the genesis.

[Jad]

Have read it before but let's discussion


I've recently started to realize that I'm in love with composite shit side effects and blurriness. It adds a layer of chaos to the normally so 'perfect' pixel art, it blurs and distorts and engages my brain, makes it see things beyond what I'm actually seeing.

It fucks up my brain in a good way and gives more feedback than what is needed, and thus makes me see things beyond what I'm actually seeing. I think it's part of the 'video game magic' I could clearly experience as a kid.

I mean like the author of the article complains about how the 'green dots' in the phantasy star screenshot almost disappear in the composite version - oh no! It looks like grass now instead of precious green squares! What a loss

I like precious pixels both super clear and somewhat obscured. Anyways still look at that sonic waterfall. Isn't it beautiful? ;  U  ; so smooth and yet so clear. No I dunno I'm just a raving nostalgic. Nevermind : D

[Photocopier]

I particularly loved the effect in the batman game, I think it makes it alot more atmospheric.

[Arachne]

It fucks up my brain in a good way and gives more feedback than what is needed, and thus makes me see things beyond what I'm actually seeing. I think it's part of the 'video game magic' I could clearly experience as a kid.

Yeah, it's not quite the same on an emulator. I used to think the blue dragons in Super Mario World were carrying suitcases, so clearly they were on their way to work!

[Helm]

I love clean pixel art, I don't like *approximative* methods of conveying what was drawn in a crisp way to begin with, but it's difficult to suggest that the whole composite/rgb output was not aesthetically interesting. I wonder if some sort of medium point between the two can be reached, and I think it is in the c64 flicker modes that it's mostly achieved in that two widepixel images are rapidly flickering between them, one offset by a horisontal pixel. Where edges meet, the image is crisp, where two pixels are overlaid, there is a transparency effect.

Perhaps we should play around with this mode, only without the flickering (flickering is bad for the eyes). Just by putting two layers on top of each other with opacity screen mode or something. Ptoing has made some art like this:

http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/38890.htm

[ptoing]

My Asslace stuff really should be watched on a real C64, but I guess most people here don't have that opportunity.

That said, I do like how blurred pixel stuff looks like when it was obviously done to be viewed like that, like the Sonic waterfalls, or most old console games really.
On the bottom line old console stuff was made mainly with composite in mind which is what most people used back then and Arcade stuff was and still is made for RGB monitors because cabs use those.

It's the same when you look at old CRT monitors which make new colours from 50% dither which does not work on more modern CRTs or flatscreens.
On the C64 and other systems which were big in the PAL regions you also have to think about PAL-blending which was utilised to get new colours. This is mainly something that works nice on the C64 with it's limited colours and pairs of colours which have the same brightness.

So at the end of the day it depends what the graphics were made for and not what we use today to view it. In pretty much 100% of all cases the stuff you play on emulators for systems before the mid 90s you will not see it how it is supposed to look. Another thing that has to be taken into account it the refresh rate. Since the games in the Arcades and homecomputers and consoles were made for TVs and monitors where you knew you had a certain refresh rate you could do stuff like transparency by flickering stuff and in general this looks rather nice. The refresh rate thing is also the reason you always get tearing on PCs unless you use vertical sync which does fuck with the timing. So in any case you do not get the perfect refresh rate unless your monitor can do 60 or 50 hertz and you change it on an as needed basis. Many arcade games have way odd refresh rates like 57.5hz and stuff like that which you will NEVER get on a PC monitor.

[Crow]

are there any emulators simulate this sort of effect well?

ZSNES. It has an NTSC filter in the video options. If you have an nVidia card, though, chances are it will crash upon activating the filter. If that's the case, edit the zsnesw.cfg file manually and change "NTSCFilter=0" to "NTSCFilter=1". Also, it only seems to work in fullscreen mode. But it's awesome

[Jorund]

are there any emulators simulate this sort of effect well?

You could try using the tv out of the video card on an old tv. At least when I do that with a normal windows desktop pixels go all crazy and it looks pretty weird.

I agree with ptoing.
Ok, maybe they don't look sharp, but they were made for that kind of monitors, so they were ment to look like that. The only games that were more pixel accurate were the ones with tiny lcd screens, like Gameboy. (Maybe Sonic in a Nomad looks sharper, don't know, never had one, so I don't remember how the screen was).