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Post by ccovell on Jan 28, 2019 13:46:22 GMT
Hi, folks. I wanted to continue doing a bit of experimentation into getting detailed, colourful graphics on the PCE/SGX using NTSC composite artifacts. You may know that the PCE's 7.16Mhz medium resolution screen mode creates particularly unavoidable composite artifacts. The good news about this resolution is that a dithered pattern of a single colour will blend/multiply smoothly into the colours of graphics below it, making pseudo-transparency effects possible. This is the same technique that I used for my Old is Beautiful demo ( www.chrismcovell.com/creations.html ), having the PCE background layer provide graphics for the blue and green channels, and sprites provide the dithered red channel. Of course the limitation is that the graphics can only be up to 256 pixels across. So, I moved some tests over to the SuperGrafx for a nice, wide 368 pixels. The pic on the left (composite video capture) looks rather nice, despite less saturated colours. A picture like this simply fed into img2PCE makes the whole thing blocky and/or lacking in definition.
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Post by ccovell on Jan 28, 2019 13:49:54 GMT
Some more pics to post:
3rd pic is a close-up showing blockiness from simple picture remapping.
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Post by ccovell on Jan 28, 2019 13:55:27 GMT
And lastly a diagram showing how the process comes together. RGB and emulators will only show a dithered blend of colour channels, but NTSC composite on most TVs will show solid colours, as the artifacts are created by the TV's decoding circuitry.
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Post by soop on Jan 28, 2019 13:55:42 GMT
Some more pics to post:
3rd pic is a close-up showing blockiness from simple picture remapping.
This one in particular is an excellent subject to choose. Always fascinated by your work Chris!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Jan 28, 2019 17:12:13 GMT
This is undoubtedly awesome but I'd not use a trick like that nowadays outside of demos considering how many people play in LCDs and/or RGB outputs, which is a shame.
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samiam
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 100
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Post by samiam on Jan 29, 2019 6:42:04 GMT
I can't find the exact video just this moment, but Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales, the developer that made Sonic 3D Blast and Toy Story for the Genesis, made a demo similarly utilizing NTSC artifacting back in 1993 and talked about it on his excellent Youtube channel. The reason why this never made it into anything public was that it relied on extremely specific timing from the console's master clock, and there was actually enough variation from system to system to throw it off. He even had some kind of in-game tuning system set up for the user to compensate for the variation, but ultimately decided it was too cumbersome.
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Post by ccovell on Jan 29, 2019 10:57:24 GMT
I can't find the exact video just this moment, but Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales, the developer that made Sonic 3D Blast and Toy Story for the Genesis, made a demo similarly utilizing NTSC artifacting back in 1993 and talked about it on his excellent Youtube channel. The reason why this never made it into anything public was that it relied on extremely specific timing from the console's master clock, and there was actually enough variation from system to system to throw it off. He even had some kind of in-game tuning system set up for the user to compensate for the variation, but ultimately decided it was too cumbersome. Yes, I saw that one too. I forgot that it was using NTSC artifacts, but I guess it did. The Genesis has a similar effect (for all its graphics in 320-pixel mode) but the timing is just off enough to introduce really unwanted rainbows across all its dithered graphics.
Oh, and on the Genesis, the dithering worked vertically only. On the PCE, the dithering needs to be in a checkerboard pattern.
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