MiSTer FPGA Forum

KennyL wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 3:24 am

Mikes' tuning of composite is fantastic and look cleaner than real consoles for many cores. Most definitely not crappy. Wii composite is even cleaner. But they are certainly not accurate. Composite look different even between different models of FC/NES. Even more so on RF. I'd love to see someone go sicko mode and come up with MDFourier style measurements for video signals that could be use for simulating different model variants.

Indeed, I've tried Nes Gradius on Wii's virtual console with composite output and it doesn't show the shining star effect. On my Nes, even with its "clean" composite output, stars shine a lot. It's seems like this effect is viewable on original nes/famicom only. It's a shame from the preservation point of view. I'd like to find if this effect is somehow already emulated by some emulator.

mindfiedx wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 9:37 pm

KennyL wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 3:24 am

Mikes' tuning of composite is fantastic and look cleaner than real consoles for many cores. Most definitely not crappy. Wii composite is even cleaner. But they are certainly not accurate. Composite look different even between different models of FC/NES. Even more so on RF. I'd love to see someone go sicko mode and come up with MDFourier style measurements for video signals that could be use for simulating different model variants.

Indeed, I've tried Nes Gradius on Wii's virtual console with composite output and it doesn't show the shining star effect. On my Nes, even with its "clean" composite output, stars shine a lot. It's seems like this effect is viewable on original nes/famicom only. It's a shame from the preservation point of view. I'd like to find if this effect is somehow already emulated by some emulator.

This is the sort of thing that only something like MetalNES (that transistor level NES simulation that runs at like a 1/2 fps) is capable of doing. We're actually way more likely to see a playable implementation on MiSTer before we see this in an emulator.

dmckean wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:02 pm

Composite video is just generally crappy and MikeS handles it the best way possible by using a luma trap and careful tuning in the cores to combine Y&C. To handle it the way the NES does natively, you're going to need to rewrite part of the core and need a different analog board that would output at the required levels to be in spec with NTSC and PAL. The end result will be worse for 99% of NES games as there's only a small handful that take advantage of artifacting at all.

Is there any list of games which take advantage of this?

Now that CVBS and Y/C output support has been added to MiSTer Main, I'm wondering if a future NES core update will be able to provide a more authentic NES composite output. For me the dot crawl discussed here is part of the original's appeal, but more so the colors that the PPU outputs directly, since no RGB palette has ever looked as authentic or "right" to me, even if the argument that different NTSC/PAL decoders will show different colors is partially valid.

I'm guessing that initial support of CVBS output for the NES core will simply output composite encoded from the selected RGB palette, like most NESRGB installs currently do, but the PPU is already simulated so hopefully it will not be too laborious to encode the NTSC (and PAL) output directly from it. There is precedent of an FPGA-based core doing this in Analogue's NT Mini/Noir.

mindfiedx wrote: ↑Fri Feb 24, 2023 8:22 am

Has anyone got the chance to check out the Gradius stars with the new composite cores /boards from MikeS ?

I ended with some interesting development: I went to try out the NTSC Chroma-Luma Crosstalk test on 240p while in PAL-mode with MikeS's Active Adapter, and it seemed to pass it, actually. So I went to try out Gradius in that mind and behold, the "shining stars"-effect can be seen working there!

Might have to take a video with my smartphone later to demonstrate, but thought this was pretty notable thing to come across.

Hi,
I've noticed them a little too by using MikeS's Active Adapter with PAL Gradius rom. Btw the effect is minimum compared to my original pal Gradius cartridge. And I can't get other effects like the moving jungle trees in Contra/Probotector. And by using the ntsc Gradius version stars are all still.