that sounds pretty good. i'm tempted to try that since i already have a lot of that ready.
how's amarec's input lag in this setup?
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Retro AV Club Thread 2: Classic Gaming Done Right!
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that sounds pretty good. i'm tempted to try that since i already have a lot of that ready.
how's amarec's input lag in this setup?
Shin Johnpv
Member
No problem, I hope you can find someone who can help you out over there. I did indeed! Is the toomanyshaders chat still going? I stopped going by cause they blocked irc stuff at work.
Not the most accurate method but doing repeat manual lag tests in 240p Suite I get about 3 frames of lag, nearly all of which should be from my TV (40ms lag). I tested Tatsunoko, NSMBW, Klonoa, Muramasa and Metal Slug and they all felt good and as expected to me. I'll try another time with some NES/SNES platformers and shooters... I personally think they're the strongest indication if lag is good enough.
I have to say, I' m very impressed with the OSSC. I am going to be playing many more retro games next year. Just did a run through of Elevator Action Returns and it was flawless. It has two/three key advantages over the Framemeister for me- pretty much no noise on the picture (which is a hugely understated problem imo), zero lag, and perfect scanlines. Combined with a good monitor with nearly no input lag it is the solution I have been looking for. I am putting my CRT in the closet, or relegating it to Melee duty.
PS- everyone should play Elevator Action Returns if they can get their hands on it. Nearly perfect game. Have replayed it so many times.
PS- everyone should play Elevator Action Returns if they can get their hands on it. Nearly perfect game. Have replayed it so many times.
cyborgnumberblue
Member
Elevator Action Returns is pretty fun and has an awesome soundtrack. Too bad it's about $500 for the Saturn version.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Yeah, I genuinely believe Elevator Action Returns is one of the best arcade games out there. Great aesthetics, satisfying gameplay, and it's shockingly replayable. I mean, I can 1cc the game without any trouble, and I still find it fun to plow through EAR anytime.
Hopefully you mean the arcade version.
I see copies between 200-300 on amazon, but yeah still pricey and it's often above 500.
What's wrong with the Saturn version? The vertical scrolling is a little finicky sometimes but that's all I know.
Nothing, just it's price since it's very price nowadays, more so CIB.
Finally took the plunge on a MIST FPGA console. Hope I know what I'm getting myself into!
Better start reading up on setting up the individual SD cards with console/computer cores. Strangely looking forward to trying ZX, C64 and Amiga games.
For anyone interested, this is the most affordable place to get it:
https://www.dragonbox.de/en/285-mist-fpga-fpga.html
Better start reading up on setting up the individual SD cards with console/computer cores. Strangely looking forward to trying ZX, C64 and Amiga games.
For anyone interested, this is the most affordable place to get it:
https://www.dragonbox.de/en/285-mist-fpga-fpga.html
IrishNinja
Member
there's no way EAR is over $500, cmon now
someone's gotta point me to a video, i'm dying to beat that game - much less 1cc it!
someone's gotta point me to a video, i'm dying to beat that game - much less 1cc it!
It tends to be in the 200-400 range.
YesManKablam
Member
Hey guys, I've been away from the retro av scene for about two months or so since I got a new job and moved to the other side of the country. Now I no longer have a CRT or a TV at all. I have pretty good 1440p ultrawide gsync monitor however, but as expected it's displayport or HDMI only. I was planing on getting a framemiester, but I've noticed that another batch of the OSSC came out.
Is the OSSC now the go to device if it's possible to get one?
Is the OSSC now the go to device if it's possible to get one?
Laevateinn
Member
Here's a question that's been on my mind: I have a Joytech AV control center 2 switchbox. So far I've connected all my consoles to it via RGB scart and then onto my PVM with BNC-scart adapter.
But now I'm getting more consoles and I was wondering what to do. I play a bit less nowadays on the PS1, so I was thinking if I could get something like a PS1 S-Video cable and hook it either in the front (one more extra connection with S-Video and composite, backside has 5xRGB scarts - but these also have S-Video and Composite) or on one of the same inputs than RGB scart. Now, I tried this setup with a PS1 composite cable, but I just couldn't get a picture from either connection setups. Cable is not faulty since I already tried it directly to a PVM.
My PVM takes S-Video, but my issue here is that the BNC scart allows me to hook the audio directly to my amplifier and get a 5.1 stereo sound for my consoles. Putting a PS1 into the PVM is a possibility but then I'd have to settle for mono audio from its dinky speaker.
So I guess what I'm asking is - why doesn't the composite cable give a picture via the Joytech switchbox? If I use an official PS1 S-Video cable, would it be different and I could get the picture and sound using the switchbox?
But now I'm getting more consoles and I was wondering what to do. I play a bit less nowadays on the PS1, so I was thinking if I could get something like a PS1 S-Video cable and hook it either in the front (one more extra connection with S-Video and composite, backside has 5xRGB scarts - but these also have S-Video and Composite) or on one of the same inputs than RGB scart. Now, I tried this setup with a PS1 composite cable, but I just couldn't get a picture from either connection setups. Cable is not faulty since I already tried it directly to a PVM.
My PVM takes S-Video, but my issue here is that the BNC scart allows me to hook the audio directly to my amplifier and get a 5.1 stereo sound for my consoles. Putting a PS1 into the PVM is a possibility but then I'd have to settle for mono audio from its dinky speaker.
So I guess what I'm asking is - why doesn't the composite cable give a picture via the Joytech switchbox? If I use an official PS1 S-Video cable, would it be different and I could get the picture and sound using the switchbox?
I'd definitely be interested to know if there is a significant difference as well!
RadarScope1
Member
Ah, man, I would love to get one of these. They never even pop up on eBay. If you ever consider changing your setup because of the number of consoles, you have a buyer here...
You can't send Composite or S-video into the switch and out to the PVM if the connection at the end is RGB. Input and Output signals in the chain must match.
Get the 3 RCA Composite cable for your switch's output: yellow to the PVM, red and white to the amp. Or same idea for an S-video + 2 RCA audio cable. If the audio inputs in your amp are already occupied (by the Scart-BNC cable), get a passive audio mixer so you can have multiple audio inputs going into your stereo setup.
As an aside, I noticed the Composite, S-Video and RGB are on the same input but I'm assuming that they don't interfere with each other and you can have 15 consoles connected at once without a problem (5 for each connection type). Let's say you had NES Composite, N64 S-video and Genesis RGB on Input 1, and matching outputs to your PVM, would the switch keep separate clean signals with all three consoles turned on? My gut says yes and this is probably an obvious thing if your switch isn't junk. PVMs can definitely have these three different inputs directly connected and on at the same time, using the front panel buttons or OSD (depending on the model) to switch between the three inputs.
If you want more RGB inputs, the answer is really to daisy-chain a second switch or get a switch with more inputs!
cyborgnumberblue
Member
I'm not arguing what was got, though. It's going for $600.
I'd struggle to justify paying over $100 for it, honestly. It's a fun enough game, but not multiple hundreds of USDs fun.
Holy shit EAR is multi-hundreds of dollars? So does this mean that people are finally done scrubbing the Jpn game shops clean of PC Engine games and have moved on to PS1/Saturn? I barely follow Japan retro game trends.
I bought my copy of EAR in 2006 for maybe $24-45 range? I bought a bunch of Saturn games while on a JPN trip and there were only a handful that were over ¥2000. Most games were like ¥100-500.
I bought my copy of EAR in 2006 for maybe $24-45 range? I bought a bunch of Saturn games while on a JPN trip and there were only a handful that were over ¥2000. Most games were like ¥100-500.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Saturn's been expensive for longer than PC Engine... I think. EAR has been going for around $80-100 or so used and maybe $120-150 new since 2009.
Laevateinn
Member
My point is it will never sell at that price unless someone really wants the game and isn't aware that ebay has an option to look at what something has recently sold for. Typically this game goes for somewhere in the 200s. My guess is the seller put it at a ridiculous price hoping for people to send offers. Even now there's multiple available for much less than that. Is a spine card and registration form worth that much?
I agree though. I would never pay more than $100 for a port of an arcade title no matter how fun it is. If I wanted to play it that bad, I would buy the JAMMA board or move on to something else. Most titles that command this high of a price have moved beyond being bought for the game and are instead bought as trophies.
I think I'm going to start collecting Saturn Eroge. There's tons of it and they tend to be pretty cheap.
Point is it's not going for $600. BIN prices are not at all a reliable indicator for the online market price of a game. That listing is an attempt at nabbing a sucker or hoping someone submits a high offer somewhere in between the real market rate price and $600. The actual prices people are willing to pay are found by doing a filtered search so that you have Show Only: Sold listings and Sort: End date: recent first. That tells us the majority of copies are going for low $200s. Extreme outliers can be impulse/desperate buys or fake sales to inflate prices across the board.
This is more or less what I have to do, as in, daisy-chaining another switchbox there. I could do like you said and run an additional cable to the amp for the S-Video audio side, but it turns out that I was not that impressed with the S-Video picture quality compared to the PS1 RGB.
So when I get my PC Engine Duo and my Dreamcast, I guess I'll just manually switch them around (already have RGB AV Famicom, SNES, Megadrive, Saturn and the aforementioned PS1) until I can get another suitable switchbox.
I would get another Joytech in a heartbeat if I could find one.. maybe I'll get one of those Bandridge ones.
So I've wondered this for a long time and as it came up in the most recent episode of Gamesack I felt someone here may know; for games that are output in 480i, specifically on Gen 6 and older consoles, are they actually rendered in half frame interlaced fields or does the console split the full rendered frame into seperate fields before sending them to the display? If it's the former and there's a full frame rendered before it's split, then why wouldn't every game have a 480p mode on the PS2/GC/XBOX?
PumpkinSpice
Banned
I think some games do, especially using the "field rendered interlace" mode on PS2. There are memory differences in generating a framebuffer for 480i (a 240 line field) vs 480p (a 480 line field) as well.
So reasons I can think of for not doing 480p:
- Use of field rendering to allow higher performance (render half the frame in each field)
- Memory is stupid tight in some games so they couldn't afford the extra framebuffer
- Testing overhead. Generally good QA would mean testing everything in 480p as well just in case. I mean not every studio will do this but a lot of places will have requirements to thoroughly test all modes.
- General apathy since virtually nobody had 480p screens through the PS2 era
I was thinking along the same lines regarding performance savings but then there are games that seem far more visually impressive then others that have a 480p mode, such as Valkyrie Profile 2, so I'm inclined to go with your fourth reason that it was simple apathy due to the lack of 480p sets at the time.
QA overhead is relatively low for testing an extra resolution, as you just put some staff on 480i and the rest on 480p, and continue testing normally. General apathy is a real reason though. 480p doesn't make money either (there is exceptions), so spending time on it is time taken away from something else.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
Right, that makes sense.
I could also see a situation where a bug only manifested at 480p for whatever reason and the solution was just to remove the ability to do 480p rather than actually fix it, time constraints being what they are.
NormalFish
Banned
Tons of games can be forced to 480p on all 6th gen consoles so I agree it's not a technical limitation.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
Yeah but some of them have severe issues or don't boot at 480p which hints at technical problems in some cases. If something is making use of the 4mb edram in PS2 to do something crazy (since it has very high bandwidth; that's where the "fill rate monster" stuff came from) it could very well mean that doubling the framebuffer causes issues.
Update on this:
Setting the Wii to Widescreen outputs a horizontally squished 720x480 picture with the expectation that one's HDTV will stretch the picture to the proper 16:9 aspect ratio (854x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080). Everything will look as it should (eg. round objects are oval in the output but look like actual circles when finally viewed on screen). I've read widescreen DVD works the same way.
So in doing the above 1440x960 frame with Amarec, I knew something looked a little off and narrow. I set the aspect ratio to 16:9 and this corrects the picture to 1706x960. But that creates a problem that I have sporadically read about online: "Wii looks blurrier on my HDTV when switched from 4:3 to 16:9."
The Wii's output is horizontally blurry for starters and the 16:9 horizontal stretch magnifies that blurriness. I confirmed this affects everything from the menu to Wii games to emulated 4:3 games. If the Wii had sharp output like the NESRGB or Hi-Def NES, (which needs to be stretched from 256x240 to 320x240 to look correct), this wouldn't be an issue.
The fix is to play at 720x480/1440x960 (looks wrong)... or set the Wii to 4:3 mode (640x480 output). I'm doing the latter and playing with a line-doubled 1280x960 integer scaled frame, no horizontal stretch after the fact. Outside of some new hardware mod solution that bypasses Wii's blurry native video, I think this is now the best possible output the original hardware can pull off.
NormalFish
Banned
I'd wager most of those games have technical problems more because of the structure of the code causing incompatibilities with 480p hacks moreso than 480p itself being an issue. Especially given that the distribution of games that offer 480p doesn't seem to follow a great deal of logic. For example, the later jak games, infamous for coding to the metal (all of it) and beyond allow for 480p, while many contemporaries which were far less demanding do not.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
It's not just "how graphics is this game" that determines the use of system resources. I'd imagine early games where developers were more time constrained and less familiar with the hardware are much more likely to run into issues with forcing different video modes. There are also some video effects that, even if they don't make the whole game look amazing, might just be using too much RAM.
The Jak games have some crazy code for sure (I can't even imagine starting on developing a game in fucking LISP) but if they were designed with 480p in mind they wouldn't run into the same problems as one not designed that way.
Are you sure the Wii is always putting out 720x480 at widescreen? I remember reading a while back that there are at least a few different horizontal resolutions possible for Wii.
NormalFish
Banned
Yeah, I don't disagree with you and didn't mean to imply something elsewise with my comment. Just that a lot of issues with those hacks seem clear to me as being unrelated to performance so much as side effects of trying to force a resolution the game isn't designed for like you say.
Good example would be games that screw the pooch whenever 480p is forced and it tries to play a prerendered cutscene or something. It's clearly not that 480p is just too much for the PS2 to handle with what's being displayed, but that the developers didn't account for what to do when a video, designed for 480i, suddenly gets forced to play at 480p.
It does I believe.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
There's this for one:
The video encoder must be doing some blurry horizontal scaling of whatever the game native res is to exactly 720 pixels wide. That would explain Wii softness.
I've noticed first hand games like Fortune Street use notably lower horizontal resolution than other games on Wii.
Edit: I'd look up more but trying to google Wii related stuff is painful. Man there are some stupid people out there.
Edit2: God even looking for Wii screenshots is painful. Fucking emulator screenshots all over the place, or the lowest resolution some preview site could possibly use in 2008.
The video encoder must be doing some blurry horizontal scaling of whatever the game native res is to exactly 720 pixels wide. That would explain Wii softness.
I've noticed first hand games like Fortune Street use notably lower horizontal resolution than other games on Wii.
Edit: I'd look up more but trying to google Wii related stuff is painful. Man there are some stupid people out there.
Edit2: God even looking for Wii screenshots is painful. Fucking emulator screenshots all over the place, or the lowest resolution some preview site could possibly use in 2008.
NormalFish
Banned
So how much would a PAL NGC with some way of using GBI run me these days? I've been wanting to play gamecube and gameboy games recently and realized I don't have a great solution for recording either at the moment, though I do have a wii.
Also, anyone know of a box that i can use to split/convert a single DVI-D input (from the OSSC) to 1 DVI-D (or DVI-I) and 1 either VGA or HDMI for recording?
Also, anyone know of a box that i can use to split/convert a single DVI-D input (from the OSSC) to 1 DVI-D (or DVI-I) and 1 either VGA or HDMI for recording?
PumpkinSpice
Banned
I've been doing some more reading about Wii framebuffers. I was curious what's different in how the GC operates since they're so similar. Sounds like copy to XFB doesn't need to stretch out the full resolution, but as far as I can tell Wii titles must generally do that. This would also explain why GC titles on Wii don't look nearly as soft as many Wii titles.
If the GCVideo is outputting from the XFB then you'd probably still have the scaling issues present on Wii, and wouldn't bypass it.
If the GCVideo is outputting from the XFB then you'd probably still have the scaling issues present on Wii, and wouldn't bypass it.
I've read about how the internal res is smaller... but yeah, it always outputs a 720x480 frame. Games themselves are not always exactly 720x480 either. In all my direct caps, edit: some don't fully cover the frame and each has differing amounts of black border on the sides from the fixed Amarec window. I need to set a wider than 720px frame in Amarec because there's no reason for that top/bottom gap in all the pictures. Factoring that out and scaling proportionately, Mario is 720x480, Klonoa is 705x480... no idea what their internal res might be. Guilty Gear is 640x480. That game as far as I can tell is remarkably sharp compared to others and has no very discernible blur. That tells me that perhaps like a 4:3 GC game, there is no horizontal stretch for the crappy encoder to pull off and blur the image.
Thanks for the link. I think it's interesting that the encoder horizontally stretching + the anamorphic 16:9 widescreen together are the likely culprits of the Wii's soft output.
NormalFish
Banned
Mega are those screencaps compressed at all? I can't tell if I see a bit of noise or if I'm just tired.
NormalFish
Banned
guess it's just weird texturing and ringing, then. 480p is just enough detail that it's hard to tell these things at times.
They would probably look better at 720x480.
Yeah, that crap is always present to some degree. Madao had some screens from a couple months back showing how GC has the cleanest output of the three last Nintendo consoles.
My caps are a straight 2x scale. At 480, any ugliness is still there but at half the size.
Well, they tend to look better at native res than scaling.=p I see what you mean though.
NormalFish
Banned
they'll look exactly the same with an integer scale. just bigger. It might look better 'cause it hides flaws, but not because the flaws aren't there.
Yeah I know, it's just me being myself when it comes to this since I prefer sticking with native res, though I don't mind 240p games being scaled to 720x480 since Framemiester and capture cards see them as 720x240.
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