Were composite video colors that bad, in practice?

[ynnad4]

Thank you for sharing.

It’s incredible how far emulation have gone at 2025.

A casual guy couldn’t see the difference from that video VS overlays and e.g darius or Guest presets from Retroarch.

At this point to be honest, I was confused if it was Real console or not, except the TV reflections once it was dark and I could see whole living room.

Even reflections look so good nowadays on a couple of presets like mega bezel or koko aio’s stuff.

---

Question: Is possible to get this type of Yellowish tone to your preset @DariusG ? It can be seen on Palm trees. It’s not the usual Green.

Long ago, I saw another Sonic real console recording and this was the type of Yellowish filter I tried to mimic with LUT. I had no success, unfortunately to mix this shader with yours or from other guys around.

Its on that video from Nesguy. Maybe this faint yellow tone is part from 80s TVs ? I feel it gives a vibe from Old experience on that TVs.

I remember that give this faint yellowish effect is Blargg’s composite filter.

[DariusG]

That’s a stronger red to green hue there, some shaders that offer hue controls like crt-cyclon can do that sort of thing easily. Forget about the crap border reflection, i should fix that some day.

[ynnad4]

Sonic the Hedgehog played on a 1980s RCA console television

Not even close. With that Hue feature, the whole image gets Reddish tint. Still, i appreciate the help.

Anything else from your NTSC XL preset looks extremally accurate to me.

Sky gets intense blue and starting label is light blue

I’ve seen this old TV effect in other Real console recordings. But they’re not abundant.

Maybe you know @Cyber ?

Console recording VS CRT-cyclon VS Blargg composite filter

I’ve seen another time where NESguy posted a screenshot from Mario bros 1 NES with title game screen and this same effect from intense blue color on sky.

It’s not always show up but have seen it on some composite video recordings. It’s not like just the TV got some color saturation. It’s just some specific colors get this look.

[DariusG]

That color scheme looks interesting, probably different phosphor primaries, rotated I/Q axis or something. Not all TVs have the same primaries just because there is an “ntsc” standard or whatever, it could be that brand used slightly different primaries, color temperature etc. In general all CRTs have way better colors than a common LCD. You never know what mods he could have done to the console too, that could be affecting colors.

[DariusG]

/*
RED,          RED TO GREEN,    RED TO BLUE,
GREEN TO RED,    GREEN,      GREEN TO BLUE,
BLUE TO RED,  BLUE TO GREEN,       BLUE
*/

rca_colors.zip

[ynnad4]

@DariusG showing up why RetroArch is the king for Retro experience.

THANK YOU a lot for your help and work !

A new little shader i did (glsl)

raw [Castlevania BloodLines-251105-170436] Real early Genesis model 1 Composite screen capture [castlevania2x] crt-consumer-1w-ntsc-XL after reducing Luma bandwidth a bit (and increase comb filter) [Screenshot_2025-11-05_16-50-23] [Screenshot_2025-11-05_16-50-44]

with rca

[ynnad4]

for someone who truly enjoy the Composite video experience in these 90s games, just cant express in words how much I thank you for all your help and contributions.

All of these little details combined for composite video are what truly make unique the experience for games from that agetime.

Once again, thank you so much.

[ynnad4]

At this level of accuracy it just look so good. I played Genecyst since 2001 and never would have imagined that emulation came this far and accurate, thanks to so many brilliant guys. There’s no point of comparison to how it used to be around 25 years ago

thank you once again @DariusG

[DariusG]

Well yes, it looks like Megadrive composite was a lot blurrier than other consoles, need to lower that luma bandwidth around 2.0 to match real Megadrive screen captures.

[DariusG]

I believe that RCA TV must be mixing ntsc1953 primaries with smpte-c primaries or some internal circuit altering hue. To tell the truth, Sonic colors look much more “correct” this way, they look more playful and cartoon-like, compared to the default dull sRGB greenish cast all over the place.

[anikom15]

I mean, enough people did for them to continue selling the S-Video cable for N64 and Gamecube.

[anikom15]

These strong opinions break down when you consider things like the default PS3 cable being composite and the fact that things like fighting games didn’t come with the arcade stick.

Just because an accessory isn’t included doesn’t mean it was never intended to be used. That’s ridiculous.

[DariusG]

@anikom15

the default PS3 cable being composite

@anikom15

That’s ridiculous.

Relax buddy, this is not the PS3 i am talking about here nor it’s 2014 era, it’s the 1991 and SNES. There is no internet, no bombarding information all around the place, no downloading PDFs, no cheap arcade sticks from internet e-shops.

“Intended” translates to what devs and the market assume 95% of users will use. The other word you all looking for is “optimal”.

[anikom15]

Claude Sonnet gave me a pretty interesting chart about analog and early digital filtering working in gamma space vs. modern video processes today. Video processing working in gamma space results in both desaturation and overblown colors.

Composite Aspect	Gamma Space	Linear Space
Bright saturation	Oversaturated, blown-out	More controlled, linear clipping
Dark saturation	Desaturated, muddy	Better preserved, but darker overall
Dot crawl	Prominent, “rainbow” edges	Reduced, but still present due to frequency overlap
Luma/chroma separation	Poor (nonlinear cross-talk)	Better (linear superposition holds)

[PU786]

Composite was optimal for a whole host of systems. NES, PCE, Sega, Super NES, Sega again, PSX, N64. Arguably even Dreamcast.

Dithering being blended, free AA, MvC2 being less incongruent…composite was sharp and saturated on brand new CRTs that were being cranked out of factories left and right. Center even. Stage right. Stage left even!

Who wants the checkerboard overlay of S-video when you can have clarity and pop of composite? Once PS2/Xbox/GameCube get here it’s component all day. Especially given the rise of progressive CRTs. But on interlaced sets, it’s not like you’re kneecapping yourself to use composite there either.

Comb filters and various other improvements froze dot crawl in place and prevented flickering artifacts. Composite felt like a huge upgrade over RF switches and spade lugs.

The Genesis 2 and 32X even removed the rainbows from the waterfalls.

[Jobima]

@PU786

progressive CRTs

in fact in PS2 era many if not most games will be worst in progressive than interlaced, since they optimize for interlaced because its the vast majority, Of course, I’m talking about the original hardware; it’s different with emulators. And on modern monitors, you’ll often get a better picture if you use progressive signal because you’ll bypass deinterlace

[PU786]

Just remembered PS2 still used heavy dithering in almost every game.

Xbox and GameCube were just about all dither free though iirc.

[Jobima]

@PU786

Just remembered PS2 still used heavy dithering in almost every game.

video games consoles start using new type of dithering which is Temporal dithering (that depends on the nature of the interlaced in CRT) since they start doing 480i, in PS1 era the bios and some PS1 games like tekken 3 has Temporal dithering

dont know about Xbox, but I think GameCube also use some dithering (I think it’s lighter than ps2)

[DariusG]

Composite was the choice for a number of reasons

• 98% of TVs support it, except some very old/junk ones that support RF only
• Dithering blend while still being sharp as a knife (except Sega junk encoders)
• Pretty good quality on a decent TV
• Massive upgrade compared to RF

Even Saturn used fake dither transparencies, waiting for Composite to solve the problem.

[Jobima]

@PU786

Xbox and GameCube were just about all dither free though iirc.

GameCube has dither here and there

and that vertical strip like is most likely Temporal dithering

and from what I saw after google search xbox has dither too

in fact dither (Spatio or Temporal) still used even in nowadays pc games (thank to UE5 and taa (and it sisters like dlss) “optimization”)