HDMI out? I wonder if they're going to simulate NTSC TV artifacts such as colour bleed and dot crawl. These artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design [0].
Slight rant, but I wish these CRT simulators could simulate decent CRTs, they always seem to emulate really shit ones with huge curvature and really exaggerated scanlines etc, can't they emulate a nice Trinitron TV or something. They always just look fake to me.
(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).
The ones I've seen included with MAME (or maybe it was a MAME front end) are pretty easy to configure to get the look of a nice CRT display. Maybe because of the focus on emulating high-end arcade hardware instead of the sort of television set that the typical NES was plugged into.
The whole frame, no. But due to the persistence of phosphors, any pixel which weren't re-excited in a replacement frame would have some amount of "ghosting" while the phosphors "cool down" from the previous frame. The effect is more pronounced on black backgrounds, and nonexistent on white backgrounds, with other colors being heavily dependent on the contents of previous frames. Higher-quality CRTs also tended to have less persistence (my VT 520, for example, has virtually no visible persistence).
It's been a while, but IIRC higan has a filter that just simulates NTSC composite effects without simulating the whole CRT. It's especially useful for things like SNES pseudo-alpha transparency (which relies on exploiting NTSC composite artifacting).
Honestly most (if not all) retro gamers don't feel that way. We prefer to see the actual pixels. The XRGB Framemeister upscaler is the most popular way to play retro games on modern TVs, and it provides a visual experience about equivalent to an emulator on a PC. The other popular way is to use an RGB monitor. Both provide pretty darn close to pixel perfect rendering.
I've never met a single gamer into old games that prefers the artifacts the old, cruddy CRTs we used to use had. We're all quite relieved they're gone, to be honest.
Speak for yourself. I prefer to have accurate rendering, especially for something like pseudo transparency which straight pixel displays always get wrong.
But I challenge the notion of "accurate rendering". Only America had crappy TVs. Europe had SCART and Japan had RGB21. While America was suffering through a blurry mess, everyone else had beautiful RGB output. I strongly contest the idea that developers "intended" games to look that way.
And my arcade monitor is not a good CRT at all (sadly...). Good CRTs look like this: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe In the last photo of the fighting game, that "grid" pattern in the back of the meters would look like the Sonic waterfall on bad CRTs, but is clearly defined on good ones
There are some CRT specific effects. For example the black shadow under the ninja in this video should be rapidly moving back and forth between each character to accomplish a transparency effect. But most modern TVs can't do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsa8NQICnY
(For the record good upscalers fix that shadow effect.)
My point is that the article that started this thread that claims old games are supposed to look like this http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png is just utterly not true. It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Look at the image right after it [0]. Look at the shading on Samus and the pillar nearby. This image clearly demonstrates that the original artwork was designed to achieve a dithering-like effect due to the presence of colour bleeding in the signal. This effect occurs even on higher-end CRTs. What you are complaining about is the bloom effect of the phosphors, a separate phenomenon.
They probably have an emulator already built, given that they sell NES Virtual Console games & have quite a history having ported their games to various platforms (goes as far back as the Game Boy Color I believe with having ported Super Mario Bros. - that is over 16 years ago).
Reimplemented, not ported. They wrote it from scratch, using innovative techniques to get the smooth side scrolling that was supported by hardware in consoles.
Back in the day nearly every "port" was a full reimplementation, from the code to custom graphics and sound. Such are the perils of writing to bare metal.
There are lots of ports from the 8-bit home computer era which don't have this problem. See for example, the number of ZX Spectrum ports to the Amstrad CPC machines.
Commander Keen was an impressive achievement for the time, but it did not have console quality smooth scrolling. It ran at only 35fps, not the 60fps of the NES Mario games.
The earliest (better than) console smooth scrolling PC game I can think of is Monster Bash, which runs at 70fps.
They're releasing with 30 games, and although they don't say it explicitly reading between the lines there's no mention of being able to install more, so they don't need a generic emulation for the 700-ish NES games that were released.
Those video flaws are not important, as proven by the existence of the PlayChoice-10, an arcade machine which played NES games with high quality RGB video.
Most younger persons might not care about this, but some are buying dedicated video hardware like the XRGB Framemeister to emulate the picture that you had back then on old CRT TV sets. (scanlines etc)
I don't like the sharp and blocky video you see today on modern LCDs when using old consoles. I also don't like the video filters that some emulators use to make the games not look too pixelated.
I just want it to look approximately (emulating it perfectly is probably out of scope for this price) as it did back in the 80ties. Hope Nintendo provides an option for scanlines.
I know, I use it myself. It's just isn't that user friendly especially if you use many different consoles because you'll often require different settings.
For some consoles that output different types of resolutions depending on the game you'll also need to change the settings on a per game basis.
The NES (and most early consoles) ran at 50/60fps, not 25/30fps. It achieved this by ignoring the PAL/NTSC spec and sending all the fields at the same polarity instead of alternating odd/even fields. This halves the resolution but gives you double framerate progressive scan video, which is a good tradeoff for games.
The traditional game console solution for PAL consoles was to just have letterboxing with the extra 100 lines blank, with everything vertically squashed a little. Games usually didn't compensate for the lower framerate, so just ran slower.
PAL console gaming was a GREAT experience, as you can imagine.
Things got better from the Dreamcast onwards as they could software switch to 525 line / 60Hz modes (usually with PAL encoded colour for composite video, except for the PS2 which used pure NTSC), and it's all now moot with HD.
(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).