What’s going on here is that Samurai Showdown V is running in low-res native mode (~240p/Double-Strike) while Samurai Showdown VI is running in hi-res native mode (480p/VGA).
If you look at the image in Samurai Showdown VI you’ll see that there are in fact scanlines but there are many more, probably about double and the gaps between the scanlines are very fine.
It is these gaps which help reduce the jagged appearance of sprites which were designed with 240p resolution in mind or just low res graphics in general.
Compounding the issue is Scale FX/Super-XBR Smoothing seems to be active in those presets and they have less of an effect on hi-res graphics compared to low-res graphics.
So even though the sprites are low-res, the smooth algorithms are seeing them as hi-res and they’re not being smoothed. There’s a post somewhere on these forums by @Hyllian I believe, which explains and illustrates this phenomenon beautifully.
Based on my observation of the Samurai Showdown VI screenshot as well as other similar Dreamcast gamed.
The background seem to be rendered and upscaled differently from the character printed which seemingly remain untouched so probably some Bilinear or Nearest Neighbour upscaling was used for those for whatever reason. @hunterk had described this in the past as the sprites being “chunks or pixels” of was it “hunks of pixels”, whatever he said, the result is the smoothing algorithms missing them when it comes to filtering.
So you have a few options. The first is to force the game to run in low res mode using the core options. The result of that is that your sprites will look like the ones in Samurai Showdown V but all the pretty hi-res assets like fonts and the HUD are going to have a downgraded look.
The second option is to render internally at native res then use a D-Rez preset to downsample then output that to a lower resolution but that would also downsample your hi-res assets.
The third option is to use fake scanlines so you can apply the 240p scanlines to the 480p image.
Last, but not least is my favorite option, use a preset with (or adjust the preset so that it uses) a strong low to mid TVL CRT mask. The texture which the mask pattern adds to the image will also have the effect of taking away some of the harshness of the relatively unfiltered scanlines only image. Similar to the halftone effect used in magazines back in the day.
I have several examples of these in my preset packs. I’ll see if I can dig up some screenshots to add some illustration to my example.
This is an old example using a 1080p Optimized Preset at 1080p desktop resolution. If I find some newer ones I’ll update the post.