Were composite video colors that bad, in practice?

[md2mcb]

Well put. That’s basically what happened to me.

1. I’ve always wanted to play everything I could, although it was only a distant dream… until emulation came around and things got progressively better. I have much gratitude for RetroArch, as it brought that experience together.

2. What bugged me was: why are the maganize pictures pretty and my screen isn’t? That led me to research a bit more about the problem.

3. Talking with knowledgeable people (older or richer kids) showed me better televisions and cables, and I could even see them in person and confirm the improvement with my very own eyes. Although I could afford the cables, I didn’t have the proper TV for that, so I had to wait until early-to-mid 00s to personally own one.

[Jobima]

@DariusG

Composite can look great too on a good CRT like a JVC and a good cable.

RF too, we used to got small old (80s I think) sony TV that only has RF, very similar to

Edit: I think it was this

Made in Japan, the target market was the Middle East (written in Arabic and English, with optional Arabicization for the overlay of channel numbers).

Of course, it supports all systems: PAL, SECAM, and NTSC.

Edit#2: I think the model number was KV-1432ME3

By the way, we used to call NTSC “the American system”

the RF in it was so clean, cleaner than composite in many other brands

Edit: I find this (older?) American cousin KV-1362 and people also said it has superior picture quality

[Superdonkeyjack]

So, to the American gamers in this thread. Did we have RGB or is that Component cables? I get very confuse with this as I’m an American.

[Nesguy]

Technically we had access to RGB through PC monitors, but it was never available on American televisions. Component is pretty much visually identical, but was only available toward the end of the CRT era.

[PlainOldPants]

Consumer TVs in the 2000s (and probably starting in very late 1990s) had YPbPr component cables. I’ve only heard of RGB being on PVMs. PC monitors can have RGB quality, but that won’t work with a game console because it has the wrong sync rates, even if you cut the cord and reconnect the wires.

YPbPr has the exact same quality as RGB, unless the TV takes certain cost-saving shortcuts. The Y component is made to be similar to composite video except without chroma, which makes it possible for the TV to share some of the same hardware for both composite and component. Usually, if a consumer TV has a component input, you can still connect composite through it, and it’ll work.

The problem with this is that some TVs, like my Panasonic CT-36D30B, still process component through much of the same filters as composite (such as a notch+sharpen on Y, and lowpass on Pb and Pr), even though component never needs to have any filtering in the first place. I’ve heard that Toshiba TVs include a delay line here, which means the Y component gets desynced from Pb and Pr. To get actual RGB quality, you need to skip all filtering, which I’ve heard on Reddit that Philips (Magnavox) CRTs can do correctly, while I’ve heard that Sony can leave Y unfiltered but not PbPr. This is just Reddit rumors though, so it might be inaccurate. At least I know my Panasonic CRT has filtered YPbPr which degrades the image quality.

[Superdonkeyjack]

Is VGA the same equivalent? My friend of 20 years used to play his Original Xbox, Dreamcast and X360 on a monitor?

My friend had their first post processing display aka Flat Screen LED TV. We were playing Tenkaichi 3 in like September 2008 on it via Slim PS2 and boy did that shit looks beautiful and clear compare to my RCA CRT from 2006. That TV only had one S-Video and 3 separate composite A/V inputs that I posted earlier. Man, I didn’t this stuff existed (well, S-Video) until recently.

[Jamirus]

Some TVs in the early 80s had digital (TTL) RGB, but this is useless for consoles, it was probably mostly intendend to connect early computers. Early PC monitors (as in specifically for IBM PC compatibles) can’t be used for consoles for that reason also.

Consoles generally require analog RGB monitors with 15 Khz horizontal frequency. Most common consumer monitor was probably the Commodore 1084 which was released for the Amiga computer.

The analog VGA RGB monitors of later PCs (or Mac monitors) mostly require a minimum of 31 Khz horizontal scan rate to display anything, console games could work on those if they support 480p. How you connect with offical methods to such a CRT is another matter (but I guess that’s also an issue for 240p/480i, because there were probably only third party cables in the US).

E.g. the Dreamcast had the VGA Box, allegedly it was sold online in the US. With component you can easily just use a transcoder, I’d guess this was already a thing in the 2000s.

[petran791]

It made text bubbles in games ultra tiny. But I think it had also a scart cable that had much better picture in 90s technology large tvs.

[beforetime]

Man I skimmed through most of the thread, especially the last part. I love playing games how I had them back then, but in general:

I love composite where there were more “colors” if you used it, so this means rainbows and dithering (at least), and for things like the mountain ranges in final fantasy where you get those bits of cyan and magenta.

For SNES, S-Video was it, it looked great, and I remember at one point on my last CRT, I think it was a Sony Trinitron type… I could see it did not dither the shadows in things like Top Gear 2, so maybe things got too sharp I guess…

For PS2, I did use component. Anything really modern I would prefer component or just HDMI.

I think it’s great that RF, composite, S-Video, etc. can be simulated, since honestly it was kind of subjective how we played the games. I remember the NES always looking different depending on who’s TV it was being played on. In particular colors and backgrounds in games like BattleToads…

The right way is how you like it, in some cases the barebones default might the best for older consoles, since newer ones had more colors and did not need to use as many “tricks” to get a really cool picture. NES without composite looks sterile to me, but someone may like it that way…

[Cyber]

Was it here we were discussing Notch and Comb Filters and the like? Can’t remember but anyway, this seems interesting:

https://manadream.shop/product/notch-filter-composite-to-s-video-converter

[Jobima]

@Cyber

this seems interesting:

https://manadream.shop/product/notch-filter-composite-to-s-video-converter

it is, also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKcf6hr5WiM

[Jamirus]

Here’s a bunch of grabs taken from things I was curious about from my PAL Wii. Unfortunately, I forgot that I didn’t manage to get PAL60 out of the grabber the last time I used it, this is very likely because of it’s hardware. So I had to use 50 Hz PAL. NTSC is possible on the Wii via region changer app.

To my surprise, there are still apps like the native Wii 240psuite that don’t play nice and expect PAL60. I had the SNES suite on SD card and used it with the SNES GX emu (limited to 480i for NTSC) instead to display the color bars here:

I didn’t bother to adjust screen settings so it’s perfectly centered, I assume that’s why the border shows up that way on the left side for NTSC. Colorwise I can see…nothing in terms of significant differences.

Next up, the waterfall in Sonic. I also took S-video captures via my external RGB-S-video converter.

Finally, high-res content, a Game Cube game that has a 50 and 60 Hz option:

The capture settings were of course kept constant except for the resolution. It seems PAL ends up a notch brighter.

[Jobima]

@Jamirus

seems PAL ends up a notch brighter.

that also what I remember from PAL

@Jamirus

btw, that 480i but the game is 240p, you can get real 240p from that 480i with AviSynth/avs+ using “SeparateFields().AssumeFrameBased()”

Edit: here that in action

[guest.r]

Dunno if anyone already posted this, but it’s good reading, quite informative:

Composite Video Separation Techniques:

https://www.renesas.com/en/document/apn/an9644-composite-video-separation-techniques?srsltid=AfmBOooPlLpIAxDpMuNslT0QPhWTKILQDNVsdehifR28HCpRPRxBXx7d

[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