Nice. I’m happy everything turned out good. I don’t see any other issues so far with any of the 3 types of presets so far, I think they all ended up getting a nice revamp over time. With this update I think I can just chill out and do some gaming now
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Quick update:
I went and tweaked my svideo presets, I noticed the vertical line dithering blending was too sharp almost giving it a rgb like look because I set the sgenpt-mix blending level setting down to 0 when I should have put it to 50.
Sgenpt-mix Blending level at 0:
Sgenpt-mix Blending level at 50:
New link posted at the same post.
@thingsiplay I know you just finished putting up your amazing article but that same article is where I noticed that dithering blending in those s-video pics, I should have noticed it earlier please forgive me lol. Promise that’s the last update for a while.
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s-video related images are now updated in the post. If I am honest, I found the previous version a little bit too sharp. But thought it is meant to look like that as a preference of you. In short, the new updated version looks better. s-video is my preferred option for most systems, so this is good for myself too. Before I forget on a related note: Also clarified some information in the Conclusion section.
And don’t hesitate doing changes in the future, if you think something can be improved. Such a blog post should not hinder progress. Overall a nice set of presets.
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Man you work fast, I notice the difference in those svideo shots right away. One thing I notice about svideo presets on RetroArch (mainly the two popular ones crt royale s video and guest advanced ntsc version in svideo mode) is that they come preloaded with a certain amount of blurriness. I could have took that route and duplicated that exact amount of blurriness but I chose to sharpen the overall image up a bit to give it a different twist, not to mention it just looks clearer. Might not be “accurate”, but I like it that way.
At the same time I also don’t want it as sharp as the rgb presets so there is a slight amount of blur to the svideo presets if you load both that and the rgb ones back to back to see the difference most likely due to the fact I used some deconvergence on those svideo sets.
In any case if I ever do need to update my sets I will definitely do that for sure but as of right now, I’m completely satisfied with how everything looks at this point so I see no need to update this pack for a good while unless guest himself brings in a new update to his shader that has some new feature that I must have. Right now I just want everyone to enjoy their gaming with this latest pack. Once again I thank you for the support.
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Another quick update as of 10/06:
I had to make one more update to the svideo presets, I turned off the linear gamma setting in the sgenpt-mix and raised the blend level to 80 as well, the previous settings was causing extra blurriness on the pixels that I wasn’t liking, here’s an example of how I had it before:
Here’s how it looks after:
Notice Mario’s eyes in the before pic, you can hardly see the black dot eyeballs and it was like that for a lot of games I tested.
With that gamma setting now turned off it also made dithering in the Sonic waterfall more transparent as well.
Before:
After:
I also added in new pal presets to the set bringing the total number of presets to choose from 24 instead of 18 in each folder
Grab the new link in the same post.
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Hi, sonkun. Did you tested it only in stills or in movement during gaming?
I ask this because when in movement, some of these things can’t be seen so clearly as in stills. So, it’s important to do a final test in movement to see if maybe relaxing some params wouldn’t hurt picture quality. I’m not saying stills aren’t important, on the contrary, they’re a very important to tunning params, but it’s important to do a final test in movement to see if that’s the ideal set.
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Yes I tested it out in motion as well and let me tell you that it looks way better than it did before, Mario literally looked like he was blinded by pixel “skin” over his eyes. Guess I wasn’t quite used to settings on sgenpt-mix since I just added it in. I don’t know if I can tweak it to look any better going below blend mode 80, if I go to 70 or below I start to get the jail bar lines in the Sonic waterfall.
How does it look from your end? I’m always down to hear critical feedback.
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Well, dunno if using s-video you should see a bit of the jailbars (never saw a real genesis through s-video). Using composite, yes, it should all be blended.
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I’ve never seen a real genesis through s-video myself. My inspiration comes from the two most popular shaders here which aim for accuracy which is crt-guest-advanced-ntsc and CRT-royale-ntsc-svideo so I look at them as my “televisions” lol.
But for comparison’s sake here’s a pic of guest advanced ntsc with svideo mode turned on:
Here’s my svideo preset:
The vanilla pic is definitely more blended than mines, I turned the blend levels down in sgenpt-mix from 100 to 80 so that the dithering looks a little more loose and less blended. It’s not “accurate” per say but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to accept to have a somewhat sharper image. Same goes for my composite presets, they should look way more blurry by nature than what I’ve put out but that was also by choice to make them slightly more sharper than your average composite game image.
Another thing I noticed with sgenpt-mix is that it has this somewhat ghost trail while in motion (load up Super Mario 3 for nes, get a mushroom and simply jump up and look at Mario’s eyes to see what I mean), none of the settings I tweaked can get ride of it except by turning the Blend levels down more (which will ruin the sonic dithering waterfall effect and have it looking sharp like rgb vertical jailbars) or turning the whole sgenpt-mix shader off, so that’s another sacrifice right there if I want to keep the vertical line dithering setting in the mix. A few users here mentioned that sgenpt-mix isn’t perfect and I see some of the reasons but it still gets the job done for a few trade offs here and there
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As I recall S-Video actually shouldn’t blend…I’ve found a couple of links which seems to validate this:
For what it’s worth, that’s why I use composite on all my presets.
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Hmm interesting footage. That genesis is modded though, and if we compare that to guest’s advanced ntsc shader in svideo mode and crt royale’s ntsc svideo shader which both are pretty much blended and more blurry by default, what does that say about those shaders? That they have the wrong look?
svideo and RGB are very close in quality. On a decent-to-poor-quality TV, the only real giveaway is some chroma smearing.
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If that’s the case then I had the look right on my previous pack before I went and changed my svideo presets to look more blended. Oh well I don’t feel like updating them anymore. Interesting information here though
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yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Just go with something you like. There’s enough variation among individual displays and console outputs that no single preset is going to look “right” to everyone.
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The modding shouldn’t be a thing. Genesis natively supports S-Video, modding is just because the connector isn’t physically there. Like RGB on SNES. You’re not changing/adding anything, it’s already there, if you know what I mean.
On your question about shaders. I think they “understimate” S-Video. Ideally, s-video has no artifacts, no fringing (composite has both) and chroma resolution is higher. So, way less blending. I know it’s a different function, but by raising NTSC resolution on guest’s shaders you should remove both artifacts and fringing. And, by doing that, you achieve something which is close to the examples above.
For a reference about the different characteristics of the different cables, there’s a handy image at this link: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_filters
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I see. And if I compare your pic here to my latest pic a few posts up my waterfall definitely looks more blended than your pic but like I told hunterk, I don’t feel like updating anymore lol. At least I still retain a good amount of sharpness on those svideo presets I guess.
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Did SNES do real RGB? I am from Germany/PAL where we had the SCART connection. SCART itself does support RGB. According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART
The signals carried by SCART include both composite and RGB (with composite synchronisation) video, stereo audio input/output and digital signalling. The standard was extended at the end of the 1980s to support the new S-Video signals.
Because that would mean I played with true RGB on the SNES all the time. I thought it would output S-Video signal only. It really becomes muddy with statements like “The intention of the pixel artist…”.
most models of SNES had native RGB over SCART/JP21, yes. It also supports svideo. The only difference is which pins the cable exposes from the multi-port.
The SNES Jr/Mini that came later does not have RGB by default and has to have it modded back in. It topped out at svideo.
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It did, but it needed a RGB cable. In Europe (I’m from Italy), SNES came with the RF cable in the box. I don’t remember if you could find the composite cable in the stores, but surely there was no RGB cable. What you most probably did was play with a composite cable connected to a SCART adapter, and then plugged in the SCART connection of the TV. So it was no RGB.
First official Nintendo RGB cable was GameCube’s. The console came with a composite cable and a SCART adapter in the box. The RGB cable was something like 30€.
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