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Dick Trauma posted:You guys need to put that effort into making a good controller for Tempest.
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Oct 19, 2016 00:47
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KozmoNaut posted:This is why I think stuff like the GTU-Famicom shader is so neat. You set the NES emulator to "raw" output, and the shader faithfully emulates the NES PPU chip to output the resulting NTSC image. The result is absolutely hideous, and thus very true to the original. This actually brought a rush of memories back - that IS how it looked. I've played mario for many hours in emulators - and it never looked this, um "right"
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Oct 19, 2016 01:04
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Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a loving big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of loving fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the gently caress you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing loving junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, hosed-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got period-accurate Golden Axe?
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Oct 19, 2016 01:14
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Comparing this to audiophile stuff also isn't fair because (at least with emulation) it costs nothing. May a few hundo if you insist on using real hardware with a Framemeister or something. Audiophiles spend tens of thousands on magic rocks and wooden volume knobs.
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Oct 19, 2016 01:24
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I've never seen so many people angry about people choosing to develop or use video filters.
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Oct 19, 2016 01:46
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Last Chance posted:personally I think sharp pixels look better than boiled, blurred poo poo CRT soup
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Oct 19, 2016 02:57
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quote:infinitely sharp vector display, checkmate pixels
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Oct 19, 2016 03:03
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KozmoNaut posted:This is why I think stuff like the GTU-Famicom shader is so neat. You set the NES emulator to "raw" output, and the shader faithfully emulates the NES PPU chip to output the resulting NTSC image. The result is absolutely hideous, and thus very true to the original. I just turned on SMB to check and wow, that's dead on. The scanlines hide some of the artifacts, but the jaggedness of the sprite edges is definitely there.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:59
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I'm still amazed that people put forth the effort to play old rear end video games that were only cool because we didn't have anything better. It's like preferring a dry handjob when someone is perfectly willing to have sex with you.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:05
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KozmoNaut posted:it can enhance the look of low-resolution pixel graphics, similar to how the artists intended it to look on a CRT. Is there any evidence they actually did though? In my expierience from looking at old school games art, more often than not artists were clueless to various technical aspects like that. Like, why do so many PC98 games have terrible pattern dithering on full screen graphics? Because the (admittedly terrible) editors they used had that on by default, while also having better dithering options available. I doubt as well that artists working on old console games obsessively checked how their poo poo looked on various TVs, like how some musicians like to listen to their stuff on boomboxes and car speakers, especially on the megadrive/SNES where the drawing process itself got pretty demanding since sprites were bigger and more detailed. Transparency dithering in Megadrive games, imo, has more in common with cross-hatching and other such techniques, where you wouldn't say that the artist wanted you to unfocus your eyes to make the lines blur together. Even though artists do unfocus their eyes to evaluate the tones, they don't expect you to. And it never fooled me as a kid, dithered transparency on things like shadows looked like a swarm of bees around a character's feet, not like anything approaching solid tone, and we didn't have a super sharp TV. So this has more to do with nostalgia than anything else, and it's a good thing those shaders are mostly easily customizable.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:25
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loga mira posted:Is there any evidence they actually did though? http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/149092824100/the-sega-digitizer-system-a-tool-used-by-graphic Sega's dual screen pixel art stations had one screen showing the art at normal size on a crt so they could see how it would look on a tv as they drew it
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Oct 19, 2016 05:28
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Thanks for that link, that's super neat! And yes, I think it's extremely obvious that most pixel artists back then didn't intend for their sprites to be shown with sharp pixels. The numerous examples I've shown from Contra and Super Metroid should be proud enough that they were meant to be slightly blurred by a CRT. bongwizzard posted:I'm still amazed that people put forth the effort to play old rear end video games that were only cool because we didn't have anything better. It's like preferring a dry handjob when someone is perfectly willing to have sex with you. If you don't think Touch fuzzy, get dizzy motherfucker. E: Made up my mind. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 06:11 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 05:43
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the cool posts kid posted:http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/149092824100/the-sega-digitizer-system-a-tool-used-by-graphic Cool, as far as I can tell it's just a dual screen setup, or was it somehow connected to the system? Original Deluxe Paint also let you preview stuff 1:1, but computer screens aren't the same as TV screens. KozmoNaut posted:And yes, I think it's extremely obvious that most pixel artists back then didn't intend for their sprites to be shown with sharp pixels. Well, it's not like people back then had a choice between blurry CRTs and sharp LCDs, so obviously it's something artists had to deal with. It's a big assumption that they tried en masse to use the fuzziness to their advantage. It's like saying that all bands pre-CD tried to include the vinyl hiss and crackles as part of their sound.
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Oct 19, 2016 06:52
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Last Chance posted:personally I think sharp pixels look better than boiled, blurred poo poo CRT soup  I mean, I can understand wanting to emulate the poo poo better or something, but drat, it's all personal preference, and I think being a big baby over what the ~designers intended~ is the same poo poo as arguing about how ~it's supposed to sound~. Didn't CRT TV's have like, a zillion different phosphor filters and pixel orders too? Like trying to emulate any one of them is just a sample of one of a million? Here; back to what started this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiu0LPeLQPE
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Oct 19, 2016 07:07
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Well yeah, there were many different CRT types, that's why there are so many filters to choose from, and so many options to tweak.loga mira posted:Well, it's not like people back then had a choice between blurry CRTs and sharp LCDs, so obviously it's something artists had to deal with. It's a big assumption that they tried en masse to use the fuzziness to their advantage. It's like saying that all bands pre-CD tried to include the vinyl hiss and crackles as part of their sound. It's more like they worked around the technological limitations of the period, the low resolution sprites and fuzziness of CRT TVs. They did what they could with what they had, and made the most of it. Obviously they would have loved higher resolutions and sharper displays, but it just wasn't possible.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:10
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Video Games have always used hardware to preform tricks, which is very different from a band recording on vinyl. Atari devs increased the number of sprites the system could display by taking advantage of the mechanics of how CRT TVs work. Basically the entire history of C64 and Amiga development is people learning crazy hardware tricks to make games look better. It's a very different background to be coming from.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:19
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I really recommend watching the Commodore 64 video I linked earlier in the thread, it has some awesome stuff in it. Stuff like changing the draw mode halfway through a frame, to have a different color mode on the lower half of the screen, and direct memory access to manipulate registers you originally were not meant to access, let alone change on the fly. And of course demos like 8088 MPH thoroughly exploit the properties of CRTs to drastically improve graphics. Most of it is too resource intensive to be used in a game, but someone did actually manage to mod the 4-color CGA versions of Commander Keen 4 and 5 to have 16 colors when displayed on a CRT in composite mode. Which is pretty crazy when you're used to CGA being cyan and magenta poo poo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL1RcuZsnjg KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 07:37 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 07:27
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If we wanna talk CGA graphics, Sierra actually used both modes "properly" in the King's Quest and similar CGA games. Most people know CGA for it's terrible shades, but if you use the composite mode via composite out it actually looks like color instead of what an RGB monitor spat out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC4hnP7kAlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km7UB9CRMyE
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Oct 19, 2016 07:50
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Video Games have always used hardware to preform tricks, which is very different from a band recording on vinyl. Atari devs increased the number of sprites the system could display by taking advantage of the mechanics of how CRT TVs work. Basically the entire history of C64 and Amiga development is people learning crazy hardware tricks to make games look better. It's a very different background to be coming from. Yeah, but there's a lot of similar sentiments around vinyl, what's the best way to play it, why it sounds special and so on. Like, you have to wait for it to cool down after playback, and the misconceptions regarding quantization. It's still cool though. No one says that about VHS for. some. reason. I got nostalgic feelings about old TVs, audio tapes and stuff, but gently caress VHS. The player we had for a while had an issue where the cassette wouldn't come out sometimes, and you had to press down on it for some mechanism there to activate. And then sometimes it would still have the tape stuck inside the guts, don't remember what was the solution to that. And then if you pulled it out the spring loaded thing on the cassette would snap closed and gently caress the tape up. e: Late 80s and through the 90s there was a plant nearby that made VHS and audio tapes, under the brand ЕСР, I thought they went under when that stuff became obsolete, but turns out the tapes were just a diversion for them and the real product is enriched uranium. loga mira has a new favorite as of 08:27 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 08:07
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loga mira posted:Yeah, but there's a lot of similar sentiments around vinyl, what's the best way to play it, why it sounds special and so on. Like, you have to wait for it to cool down after playback, and the misconceptions regarding quantization. It's still cool though. It is true that mastering technicians had to work around the limitations of the LP format to get the best sound, stuff like accounting for the higher noise level and lessened frequency response as you got close to the center, putting the most important tracks first so they had the best conditions for decent sound quality at the outer edge, that sort of thing. But all of these tricks were meant to work around limitations in the format, there weren't really any possibilities to extract more from the format than it was really intended to do, like there was with the exploits of composite video and CRTs. Quadraphonic sound got sorta close to the same level of wizardry, but it relied on super high frequencies to encode the extra channel information, which unfortunately was extremely finicky and unreliable. It also required a special stylus, extremely careful alignment and cleaning, and of course a 4-channel amplifier with a Quadraphonic decoder. The computer and console tricks worked on the same standard hardware as the basic stuff. Another neat hack were LPs with tracks that split into multiple possible endings, and LPs with content in the locked end groove. Not to mention holographic designs, which are really neat.  But these things are really simple compared to the ridiculous bit wrangling that happened in old-school computers and consoles. quote:No one says that about VHS for. some. reason. I got nostalgic feelings about old TVs, audio tapes and stuff, but gently caress VHS. The player we had for a while had an issue where the cassette wouldn't come out sometimes, and you had to press down on it for some mechanism there to activate. And then sometimes it would still have the tape stuck inside the guts, don't remember what was the solution to that. And then if you pulled it out the spring loaded thing on the cassette would snap closed and gently caress the tape up. I know some people who are nostalgic about VHS, but unlike the vinyl-freak audiophiles, they're 100% aware of its shittiness as a format. Personally, I have a bit of that same feeling, the first time i watched movies like Terminator 2 was on VHS, so there's definitely some nostalgia there for me. I'm not going to try and revisit it though, because gently caress VHS. At least LPs have awesome huge cover art compared to CDs. VHS has no benefits over DVD, other than home recording. And I don't see laserdisc getting the same kind of revival as vinyl, it was too much of a niche format, whereas vinyl absolutely dominated consumer music formats for decades. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 09:00 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 08:46
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Most of the tricks for things like film and audio happen on the recording end independent of what you play them on. Stuff like the lightsabers in Star Wars were predicated on the limitations of film, you'd never be able to replicate that on a HD digital camera without loving with a lot of stuff. Video did start to do stuff in the area of "weird tricks dependent on hardware" but mostly when it came to VCDs which really didn't catch on outside of Asia and some former Warsaw Pact nations so most people aren't familiar with them. They used a number of clever tricks to get higher quality video on a CD, some of them are very effective, many are not. I know one of them was to shave something like four pixels off of every side of the image, barely reducing the image size but over the course of a whole movie it adds up and you can use it to squeeze out a couple more minutes or more importantly a menu. One that's more relevant to the topic was how a lot of anime VCDs and SVCDs were made. They took advantage of the inherent blurryness of CRT TVs (and computer monitors, because nerds) in an interesting way. Most anime episodes are 18 minutes, and so cramming two episodes plus a menu and audio that doesn't sound like a windstorm could be tricky on a SVCD (or more episodes onto a VCD) since the upper limit of SVCD lays just around 35-38 minutes depending on content. So what the people making the VCDs did was pull the framrate down to 23 fps from 29 and use interlaced video. This used the natural blur of a CRT to act as a sort of ghetto blending filter, and if you watch some of those older VCDs on a modern TV with a modern VCD (or CVD/SVCD/etc) player they look like absolute garbage and herky-jerk all around in a slightly odd way. Normal VCD compression (it's MPEG-1) also is heavily assisted by CRT blur since it uses a very dirty method of doing frames and the blur really helps smooth out the choppy quality on images and the general issues with noise. This was done mainly because VCD and SVCD saw widespread distribution in places that were still using CRT TVs up until the late 00's and when you're competing with tons of other bootleg companies all selling a seven disc long version of Transformers or every new episode of Naruto you use every trick in the book to make your product the best one to buy from a shady man selling discs off of a blanket on the street.
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Oct 19, 2016 10:12
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Last Chance posted:personally I think sharp pixels look better than boiled, blurred poo poo CRT soup
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Oct 19, 2016 10:25
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It is kinda interesting to me that I clearly prefer the filtered versions of old console/arcade games, but for early 3D/2.5D games like Doom or Quake, I prefer them raw, gritty, sharp and unfiltered. I do crank up the resolution to something a bit more modern than 320x200, but I disable all texture filtering and force software-style lighting. I think it kinda fits their low-poly nature. I haven't actually tried it at low resolution with a CRT shader though. Not yet, at least  E: For some games, especially ones that use pixel-sized effects, I lower the resolution to something close to what was originally used, and crank up the anti-aliasing. For instance, GTA: Vice City has light streaks from things like tail lights. They're 1 pixel wide and look crappy at 1440p, so I prefer a lower resolution with AA, which makes them wider and more visible. It looks quite good at 480p widescreen with 32xAA 
KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 11:25 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 10:47
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loga mira posted:It's a big assumption that they tried en masse to use the fuzziness to their advantage. It's not like we can't ask them. Also pretty much every tutorial from back in the day I've seen addressed this.
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Oct 19, 2016 10:59
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Not a game developer, but in vfx or motion graphics you absolutely keep in mind how people are going to view your stuff. You'd be crazy not to.
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Oct 19, 2016 11:02
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My wall of X-Files VHS looks badass and I won't hear otherwise.  (When I watch it, it's on DVD though)
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Oct 19, 2016 11:18
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NonzeroCircle posted:My wall of X-Files VHS looks badass and I won't hear otherwise. The only VHS tape I have on display is Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, but only because I'm too lazy to take it out of the rack. 
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Oct 19, 2016 11:23
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Jerry Cotton posted:It's not like we can't ask them. Also pretty much every tutorial from back in the day I've seen addressed this. Go ahead and do that, and post the tutorials as well, I'd be interested. I've done a ton of pixel art but never actually read anything about it. The tools you use, like AZPainter, or especially newer stuff like Aseprite, kind of pull you in the right direction on their own, because they're designed with a specific purpose in mind.
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Oct 19, 2016 12:14
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Jerry Cotton posted:The only VHS tape I have on display is Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, but only because I'm too lazy to take it out of the rack. I'm trying, but I simply cannot imagine that. 
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Oct 19, 2016 12:33
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Pilsner posted:"Columbo with a dash of Jim Carrey!". Yeah my copy doesn't have that on the cover. It's not very true anyway (thank god).
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Oct 19, 2016 12:35
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Pilsner posted:"Columbo with a dash of Jim Carrey!". Just picture Columbos' Oh and one more thing" with Carrey channeling Ace Ventura.
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Oct 19, 2016 15:17
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Johnny Aztec posted:Just picture Columbos' Oh and one more thing" with Carrey channeling Ace Ventura. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF4onbhsgp8
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Oct 19, 2016 15:20
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Pilsner posted:"Columbo with a dash of Jim Carrey!". My copy has Lloyd's autograph on it which is why it's on display.
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Oct 19, 2016 17:10
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Pilsner posted:"Columbo with a dash of Jim Carrey!". TRY HARDER (it's so good; find a VCR and track down a copy) (and then apply scanline filters to it, or don't)
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Oct 19, 2016 18:47
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I'm really enjoying the whole retro shader discussion but I still don't know which one to put on my Retropie 
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Oct 19, 2016 19:18
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm really enjoying the whole retro shader discussion but I still don't know which one to put on my Retropie Same. Except for the  "You guys are exactly the same as audiophiles! No I don't understand nostalgia, why do you ask?" comments.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:01
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm really enjoying the whole retro shader discussion but I still don't know which one to put on my Retropie Try a couple out and pick the one that looks best to you, honestly. KozmoNaut's suggestions a page or 2 back are pretty good.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:05
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I've settled on CRT-Hyllian with the scanlines turned down so they're almost completely invisible on very bright areas and subtle on darker areas. That's what I used for the Super Metroid examples, and it's extremely close to what my CRT TV looks like. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 20:44 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 20:41
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The Super Metroid ones are the one that look most convincing to me. Gonna look into that! Sidenote: I never understood this whole scanline business until I realized, right, back when I was heavily playing SNES games on an emulator, I was using a CRT monitor.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:49
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXHQvJkfy8o I'm the commenters in this video jacking off to the SUPER SEXY CRISP scanlines on this professional broadcast monitor and dont you loving dare tell me that this isn't how the game was meant to look!!!!
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Oct 19, 2016 21:20
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