240p

[nathanddrews]

I've been watching a few videos courtesy of My Life in Gaming, the RGB Masterclass series on YouTube. Anyway, it got me thinking about the rendering resolution of games and scanlines, specifically 240p games (NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.). Technically speaking, these games only have 240 lines of resolution, so why do all emulators fill the lines in between with additional colors, whether via linear or nearest neighbor processing? People spend a lot of effort and money putting scanlines back in via shaders, but wouldn't it be simpler to not artificially add lines in the first place? Are there any emulators that do this?

[SentaiBrad]

They're not adding anything back in necessarily, just putting the image back together. The scanlines have to be added back in because it was a product of the TV's not the consoles. Different shader's have differing effects and some are better then others. The emulator is just trying to emulate the console as best as possible, not necessarily the TV. If you wanted real scanlines with an emulator you could always convert a VGA signal from a PC to composite cables and plug it in to an old TV. :P I also love that series myself. I've always loved crisp pixel art in anything I use and that gives me hope that If I ever had enough money I could get it on real consoles too. Edit: Oh and I've never heard of anyone spending money on shader's... if so... they got tricked.

[Lordmonkus]

If you simply ran the game in its native 240 resolution on a modern 1080 display without scanline shaders or adding lines through upscaling your would end up with a very tiny picture on your screen. So to answer your question about any emulators doing this and the answer is yes. Retroarch will do it by setting the integer scaling to on and reducing it to 1x but you will be playing on a tiny screen. Most every other emulator out there will stretch the image to fill a display whether it is a full 16:9 or top to bottom only with the proper aspect ratio. What settings and shaders people choose to use is all about personal preference and vary a lot which is why Retroarch has so many choices when you look in the shaders folder. Some people like the full stretched look to fill their full 16:9 ration screen, this distorts the image though. Some people prefer to keep the same aspect ration but fill the screen top to bottom with the downside of extra line being added in because 240 does not fit evenly into 1080 so the emulator will add line in there that do not belong and you will get some stretched looking pixels. Other people will use the integer scaling option which will eliminate the unnecessary stretching but does leave you with bars across the top and bottom. What I said above doesn't get into the shaders at all. When you get into the shaders now you get into the silly amount of options. Some people like to use the "smoothing" shaders such as the xBR shaders. The first time I saw this effect I thought it looked really cool but it got annoying to me really fast. While it looks very cool on extremely cartoonish looking games such as Mario and Zelda it looks really bad on more complex pixel art games such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. Then you move into the CRT shaders which is where my personal preference lies. These shaders do their best to emulate the look of a proper CRT by breaking up the upscaling with artificial scanlines (and other effects depending on the shader itself). When you simply upscale an image on a modern display you are left with a very harsh picture which is not how the old school games looked on an old CRT TV. Some people like that look but many people like myself find it very distracting and not how the game was intended to look. When the artists on these old games designed the art they took into account the scanlines and the way the art would actually look on a TV and in essence used these scanlines and shadow masks to hide imperfections and give the appearance of more complicated art work. The one big downside to CRT shaders right now however is that most of them are designed to be on higher than 1080 resolution screens. 1080 just is not quite enough pixels to do the job the way it should be done. It can still look very good on a 1080 screen but it needs to have the integer scaling option turned on in Retroarch if you are using RA. If you don't have integer scaling on because of the uneven math of 1080 / 240 it can cause weirdness in the final output. If you have a 1440 display of better yet a 4k then the higher end CRT shaders such as CRT-Royale really starts to shine and look phenomenal. I recently upgraded to a 1440 monitor and 240 divides better into 1440 than 1080 and the pixel density is much better at showing off the effect of the shader. Supposedly it looks even better at 4k. I have done a lot of reading up on this subject over the last few months and even the hardcore purists are starting to come around on the modern displays. There is a lot of good reading over on the shmups forum boards about this stuff and they even agree that the newer high end gaming 4k low latency displays are pretty darn close to being equal to a good CRT. The pixel density is high enough to replicate the effect of a CRT and the response time and input latency are getting low enough to be imperceptible when compared to a CRT. Good quality CRTs are getting more difficult to find as they break down and are thrown away though some can be found still they will break down eventually. And the high quality PVM and BVMs are getting extremely difficult to find and expensive if you do find one but then you also have the added expense of putting out an image to that display through a specialized card for your PC or getting your original console modded for RGB. Bottom line is you either spend the money on real hardware and CRTs and console modding or buy a nice high end gaming monitor. I chose the high end gaming monitor ($1000 Canadian) and it was well worth the investment. Wow, this ended up being longer than planned lol.

[SentaiBrad]

I also want to point out that these consoles have the ability to display a full digital signal, meaning the console natively outputs a clean sharp image. The video is passed through a scaler for real TV's, it was a necessity of the times. All of the TV's were analog with tubes and nothing was a digital signal. Now day's that's less of a big deal and why you see the old consoles being modded or given ways to create the sharp look that they can natively output like the RGB series points out. Personally when it comes to emulation, I scale the emulator to x2 - x5 (depends on the internal resolution), then on 2D games I use RetroArch's Pixellate Shader. It gives me bold lines and I can see the beautiful Pixel Art. It's the equivalent of turning up the internal resolution on PCSX2 or PPSSPP.

[Lordmonkus]

SentaiBrad said then on 2D games I use RetroArch's Pixellate Shader. It gives me bold lines and I can see the beautiful Pixel Art. It's the equivalent of turning up the internal resolution on PCSX2 or PPSSPP.

You're one of "those" people :P I know it's all about personal preference and if that is what you like that is fine but I just cannot tolerate that pixellate shader at all. To me it doesn't look anything like cranking up the internal resolution on a 3D game and looks more like blowing up a jpg picture in photoshop and seeing all the giant pixels in all their jagged glory. I suppose it could worse though, you could be one of those people that try and emulate the look of an old 70s or 80s TV with RF hookup and all the fuzziness and crap.

[SentaiBrad]

Pixellate is the closest Shader that exists. I love the function on DosBox Daum, it's essentially just a "x5" option. That's all Pixellate is doing. You've seen the options x5xbr, x5hq, then just x5. It's just a clean upscale, Pixellate is the closest possible. I don't use it for 3D games though, that is a lot trickier and some Cores in RA have an internal resolution option like Mupen.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah it's a clean upscale if that's your preference and it does that job excellent. But like I said up in my long winded post the original art work was done with the CRT characteristics taken into account as part of how the final look of the sprites was supposed to look. The scanlines and shadowmasks were meant to give the illusion of smoothness and blending of colours that weren't actually in the sprites themselves. The problem with a lot of scanline filters and shaders though is that they are either just simple basic scanlines which are just simple black lines which don't do anything but the black lines or they are a crappily done shader and darken the overall image which is bad too. The best CRT shaders are Hyllian which is good on lower end systems and Royale which is very hardware dependent and requires a higher resolution monitor and properly colour calibrated otherwise it looks terrible.

[SentaiBrad]

Oh im not disputing you on the Scanlines, the hardware and games were created with that in mind, but If you had to have me choose all 3 I would choose a clean upscale any day of the week.

[Lordmonkus]

Like I said one of those people :P Just teasing lol.

[SentaiBrad]

Don't make me ban you. ;)

[nathanddrews]

It's my fault for not being clear. I'm already playing on a CRT, so I'm not concerned about scanlines - fake or real. When I was talking about spending money to get them, I was referring to the many HDMI and RGB mods to physical consoles as well the external HDMI processors that people buy. Not paid software shaders or anything like that. If I can summarize better: I use BigBox --> RetroArch for all my emulation needs on a Sony CRT running 1080p. I don't want to simulate scan lines or have any blended pixels. So ultimately it sounds like my solution is to run 4x integer scaling, correct? 1:1 = 240p 2:1 = 480p 3:1 = 720p 4:1 = 960p (letterboxed on 1080p) Sounds like it. Thanks!

[Lordmonkus]

You may want to take a look at this forum post over on the Retroarch forums. http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5488 Hopefully this can give you some insight on what you are doing. Unfortunately that's about all the information I can point you to since I have zero experience running Retroarch on a real CRT but I did remember reading about others doing this. Edit: Here is another thread which may or may not have some more information for what you want http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4228&highlight=real

[nathanddrews]

Some very interesting posts over there. I'll have to see if my display allows 3840x480, like this: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Display_FAQ#240p.2F480i

[weltall]

nathanddrews said Some very interesting posts over there. I'll have to see if my display allows 3840x480, like this: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Display_FAQ#240p.2F480i

@.@ What a resolution, although as I am reading it, it seems more like that this will be the internal resolution, not your monitors. Might be wrong though. Talk about magic!

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I saw all of that stuff and I understood the general idea of all of what was being said but not having a CRT and the need to actually do any of this stuff I never put in the effort to truly comprehend all of the details. I just spent 1000 bucks on a kick ass gaming monitor and called it a day, lol. The input lag is insanely low and with the CRT-Royale shader those old school games never looked so good.