I think that Tom just had an RGB or component mod with imbalanced color or that scene in SAII is just incidental. I've had a couple modded Duos with imbalanced RGB values.
None of my consoles are modded (I've never modded them). If that was the only example, then sure, but that's not the case.
Here's the pic in question; no modifications - straight linear 9bit RGB.
The top color of the sky is 0/108/252 (R/G/B). The near invisible band is 36/108/252. A single step of that tiny amount carries almost no brightness at that level, which is why you can't see the difference. If anyone
can clearly see it from the pic I posted, on you monitor, then your monitor has a seriously gimped gamma curve (you need to fix that haha).
This isn't purely about composite. A very big factor is about how the PCE takes the 9bit value you give to the VCE color ram, and literally uses it to index a custom table of 512 YUV values. Those values, are 5bits each for Y/U/V. For one, that's not
nearly enough color resolution to represent even 9bit RGB properly. And two, the table appears to have a bias in it.
Just so we understand what's happening here, here is the full 9bit RGB palette but
without the color information:
You can clearly see that each color in the table, has a specific brightness level with
each step.
(For reference, here is the above 9bit RGB with color:
turboxray.com/vce/org_512_Colours-0001.png)Now here's the real hardware:
Just look at those brightness steps. A lot of them don't change for the next color step (a few a three in a row). But look closer, and the opposite happens as well; the next step can't be represent with a value that's in between 5bits, so it gets rounded up instead of kept at the same level. Now that color is brighter than it should be. That means you don't have accurate
uniform brightness as color elements increase in value.
That's JUST Luma (or Y). That doesn't even touch U and Y, which have the same issue but now with mixing of colors.
So just on that digital domain color space as-is, you have discrepancies. The VCE has some other things going on when it gets to the analogue part of Y, R-Y, and B-Y outputs (they're mixed to make composite), that add another layer on top of this. Probably a little too technical, but blue, red, cyan are definitely off on the vector chart (both their degrees and their brightness) - it's not a "composite" thing.. it's unique to the PCE.
Are you serious? The game looks
decent in composite and
trash in RGB. Along with this color choice, you're saying that was all by accident? Given that were as no RGB for the system.. that EVERY system had composite.. that they wouldn't develop their art for the 99.9% of PCE gamers running composite video? Occam's razor
The blue gradient stands out as the easiest to spot, but the game also uses near indistinguishable colors of green in 9bit RGB space, on the grass (look at the over world). On RGB it looks like there's just a bright amber/beige dot.. against green.
Strider looks like garbage in RGB, but actually isn't as insulting on the eyes in composite (especially the desert level!).
Also, those two shots in Dave's post are from my iphone; they weren't meant to be color sampled or anything, but to show the effect.
Honestly, most of the differences are come from the color saturation/tint. The desert level in Lords of thunder, the sand, has ugly yellows in it (in the sand). The colors just look better in composite for that area. In the fire level, when viewed side by side, you can see the colors in RGB has this 'warm yellow' push to them (including the rocks). The colors look much better without it. Other parts of the game, where colors look washed out but also over saturated/faded.. look much better on composite (near the boss areas, the last level as well). Valis 4 first level looks so much better in composite than RGB mods. In magical chase, the level with the green backgroud, it's soo over saturated compressed in brightness range in RGB that you can barely even make out the last parallax layer. It's not just saturation, but in composite it's actually a slightly
different color at the top of the gradient scale. Why would they waste pixel art on colors you can barely even see? Because they didn't. They didn't develop the pixel art with RGB in mind. It's not just that composite output
canonical on the PCE, but that RGB wasn't even an option. It's only an option if you built a mod for it.
RGB mods take away that unique PCE YUV digital conversion table. It adds red push into the
whole specturm of the palette that was
never there before. Oranges are way over saturated, yellows are so saturated that the top end gradient of them are completely useless. Purples that originally leaned toward violets, are over saturated purples, and violets that leaned towards blue, are no longer shifted. The more I play games side by side, the more I'm amazed no one has seen this. A proper RGB mod would be one that samples the RGB dacs, indexes a correction LUT, and outputs back to RGB.
I mean yeah, the composite video on the PCE is less saturated, but it's always been like that. You're playing it on a TV, simple adjust the saturation haha. The RGB mods were to get rid of the composite artifacts like pixel crawl or get sharper image, not change the PCE specific color palette. People have just conditioned themselves to think RGB is the proper way to view PCE games, because good looking options for display composite disappeared and to an over exposure to emulation.
Well, technically they are. I get that some people don't understand the whole RGB in YUV space, and element resolution (in bits) it takes to accurate convert from one space to another, but you can see it for your self. It's both a YUV custom conversion palette, and how the VCE's composite chroma is generated.
Videos on youtube, regardless of emulation or not, hardly worry about standards and proper levels. And some people do make adjustments post-production. Some video encoders can and are known to exaggerate small differences like this. Like I said before, if you can easily see that color in RGB display/emulation, then there's something seriously wrong.
Yeah, but RGB was never in question. Last I checked on the scope, the RGB dacs on the PCE were quite linear. If there's any difference between what you see on a monitor vs a RGB set, then that's simply down to the displays gamma curve or settings. We are figuring out the PCE's YUV conversion table. It'll be decoded soon. If people want to be ignorant about their RGB mods, that's their preference. I'd personally would like some options.
Honestly, the only games I found that look remarkably worse in composite.. is ShaperShifter and Beyond ShadowGate. But that's Icom and European developers, so that doesn't surprise me haha.
Also FYI, those hack PAL TG16s.. this doesn't apply to them (not that they were official anyway).
