PS1 and dithering

[polygonslayer]

Hi folks,

I got a question regarding some PS1 emulation. In particular when it comes to dithering.
I'm one of those weird people who like the look of how old PS1 games feel, not necessarily how they originally look. So what I mean by that is that I want it to feel like I'm playing a PS1 game, not a slightly cheap looking PS2 game (which is what I feel like when I upscale PS1 games too much, add texture filtering etc). Also I don't necessarily like how they originally look like when stretch onto a HDTV, it is not give me a feeling of a PS1 game. So what I tend to do is to double the internal resolution and keep pretty much everything else the same, woobly textures and all  For most games this looks great to me. Got that PS1 feeling without being overly pixelated!
However, there are some games, most notably the original Silent Hill which really benefits from the PS1's dithering. It adds that nice grainy/noise to the game IMO.

However, when running that through most emulators and doubling the internal resolution I feel a lot of the atmosphere just vanishes.

There is a great section here about it http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_emulators
but I thought I'd ask here if anyone has any good tips and have experimented with mednafen and/or PCSX-reARMed to achieve this effect while scaling the internal resolution and how successful they were?

My backup plan would be to just accept the lower resolution and run it through Xebra or something which retains the dithering very well.

Cheers  

Edited March 24, 2017 by polygonslayer

[Zombeaver]

2 hours ago, polygonslayer said:

I'm one of those weird people who like the look of how old PS1 games feel, not necessarily how they originally look. So what I mean by that is that I want it to feel like I'm playing a PS1 game, not a slightly cheap looking PS2 game (which is what I feel like when I upscale PS1 games too much, add texture filtering etc). Also I don't necessarily like how they originally look like when stretch onto a HDTV, it is not give me a feeling of a PS1 game.

A man after my own heart!  I don't even upscale at all. I run them at native resolution, and use CRT shaders.

Honestly if you really want a true "authentic" feeling you should leave it at native resolution, use the software renderer, and have dithering enabled. Alternately you can use a hardware renderer, use 32-bit color depth, and disable dithering to approximate the same thing - hardware renderers can be hit and miss though in terms of accuracy and/or bugs. I use the Mednafen PSX HW core in RA and these settings are specified in the "core options".

There are actually a lot more games that make use of dithering than you probably think - it's just that most of them do so in less obvious ways than Silent Hill. If you use a software renderer at native resolution you will, by and large, want dithering enabled for nearly everything.

Another thread that may be of interest to you is this one, where I've created overrides for about 400 PSX games for AR/cropping and controller type assignment:

 

[polygonslayer]

Cheers man, that looks really interesting, I'll give it a read through. The only thing is whenever I have experimented with RA shaders before to get CRT looks etc, I never really liked them much. I've gotten to used to seeing "every pixel" through years of emulation etc. I feel like I'm stuck in this weird limbo between wanting it authentic and wanting it like it is "in my mind" haha.
But yeah, I'll definitely check your stuff out and have some fiddling around. I have always liked the idea of shaders for this stuff, just as I said, never found one that I feel give me what I want

[Zombeaver]

Well there's nothing saying you have to use shaders - the overrides don't actually have anything to do with shaders; although one is specified in the base core config - it's CRT-Hyllian-Multipass - you can remove it from the config though. The only other shaders that are specified in the overrides are for instances where games are using interlaced 480i content (typically fighting games such as Tekken 3) where I've set them up to use a custom deinterlacing shader that I included. If you don't like CRT shaders you could try something like Xbrz which does some smoothing. Shaders are a totally personal/subjective thing. There's a github repo that shows preview images of most of the shaders here. Just pick a category and then click on a specific shader and it'll show you what it looks like on a test image.

As far as dithering goes though, like I said I'm a Software Renderer + Native Resolution + Dithering Enabled guy. When you actually turn dithering off/on and look for its effect in game - it's actually used in a *lot* of games to create smoother gradients and a wider range of colors. If you really want to upscale the only way to do it and maintain the dithering is to use 32-bit color depth and a hardware renderer - as I said though that has it's own set of issues, namely with bits of weirdness and/or just outright broken visuals depending on the game.

[SentaiBrad]

It was used to create shading when colors and resolution were limited though. It can work in some games, but for me, turning up the amount of colors so gradients actually work and making the game look crisp is how I prefer it myself.

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, SentaiBrad said:

It was used to create shading when colors and resolution were limited though. It can work in some games, but for me, turning up the amount of colors so gradients actually work and making the game look crisp is how I prefer it myself.

I didn't say anything to the contrary. It was a method of displaying a wider range of colors than was ordinarily possible with the hardware due to color limitations. His post didn't ask for it to "look crisp", the entire point of the post was to make it look authentic, which, in this case, requires dithering.

Nothing says anybody has to do this of course, but if you want it to look like the original, 32-bit color depth most assuredly ain't the way. The "nice grainy/noise" look that he's referring to is the direct result of dithering - that's what dithering is doing essentially - adding grain to gradate the colors. And I agree with the sentiment - I actually *like* the way the dithering "artifacts" affect the image. I think it adds a certain amount of (positive) character to the image.

[SentaiBrad]

All right, that wasn't my point either. Was just sharing, but ok.