MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hello there, it's Neocaron,

While not directly MiSTer related, I recently started a YouTube channel where I remaster old game cinematics, trailers, or whatever else I feel like remastering. In the real world, I work mostly as a video restorer and video editor. With advancements in this space, I developed my own restoration model, which has made my job so much easier, achieving really good results on real-life footage. (Important to note, this is not something you can do with Topaz, it's much more advanced than that. It has text understanding, object/people understanding, texture, lighting, and much, much more. I even trained it to know what scanlines or TV noise are, so it doesn't try to remove them.)

I thought it would be fun to apply this to video games, and funny enough, after a couple of tries, I discovered my model wasn't so good with video games. Three iterations down the line, I think it works pretty damn well, and I've even seen improvements in work related projects (nice bonus ). Suffice to say, I really enjoy going down this path, and I plan on releasing new episodes as often as I can. I probably won't be doing only that on there though, I might be doing some retrogaming content in general as well.

As an anecdote, I actually use the games running on my CRT and my MiSTer (for the PSX anyway) as reference points and I adapt the restoration to get a result I feel would be the perfect scaling on a 4K screen, while adding a bit more detail and removing all compression artefacts. I keep the frame rate as is though because I don't think framerate interpolation is restoration (my opinion). Anyway, If some of you are into it, you're all welcome to check out my work. I'd say the only current episode using my latest changes is the Alien Trilogy one! The others are not as good, and I'll probably redo them sometime soon. Coming next, we'll have (not in order) FFVIII (all FMVs from disc 1), Tomb Raider, KOTOR, and I'm also open to any suggestions, so be my guest!

In the meantime here is the latest episode, which will probably end up being the first but anywaaaay:

https://youtu.be/PFBzyHYHJNc

This is awesome! Fantastic work! Subscribed on YouTube!

This is cool! Thanks for sharing!

I would love to see some of the cut scenes from the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid (The Twin Snakes).

PistolsAtDawn wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2024 6:40 pm

This is cool! Thanks for sharing!

I would love to see some of the cut scenes from the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid (The Twin Snakes).

The cinematics are video files for MGS Twin Snakes? Because if they run in realtime, I'm pretty sure someone on youtube has done a full playthrough or a cinematics package in 4K using Dolphin and it should look pretty awesome already. ^^ If not I'll look into it!

Neocaron wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2024 8:21 pm

PistolsAtDawn wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2024 6:40 pm

This is cool! Thanks for sharing!

I would love to see some of the cut scenes from the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid (The Twin Snakes).

The cinematics are video files for MGS Twin Snakes? Because if they run in realtime, I'm pretty sure someone on youtube has done a full playthrough or a cinematics package in 4K using Dolphin and it should look pretty awesome already. ^^ If not I'll look into it!

I probably should have thought to look for that first. I forgot about Dolphin's 4K capabilities. There are several such videos already.

Holaaaa! I need help here because I'm absolutely losing my mind with the FFVIII remastering process. I started by using the PS1 FMVs because they have better color representation and because I thought the PC version .bik files looked like a macroblocking hell. But in the end, I could only match the latest PS4 version in terms of image quality, with some moments better in mine and others better in the PS4 version. I searched and found out that the PS4 version uses the PC version as a base, which has twice the resolution of the PSX version, so it made sense that they had better micro details than mine. So I decided to restart from scratch using the PC version .bik files, which are 640x448, while the PSX is 320x224.

Sooooooooooooo I did my thing, but now I’m noticing something: the PC version actually has more info on both sides while having a taller/stretched vertical look. I tried FFVIII on my Mister, and the "fatter" look is how it appears on the CRT. So, in your humble opinion, which should I go with? If I respect the aspect ratio of the PSX version, the FMVs are getting pretty close to a 16:9 aspect ratio, but maybe I'm just dumb and missing something. Anyway, any opinions are welcome! Thanks, here is a comparison.

PC aspect ratio:

PSX aspect ratio

The new episode is out! After 2 months of hard work, it's finally ready for release! Hope you guys enjoy it! The main 10-bit high-bitrate file will be available on Archive.org soon. It's probably not the final version, but it will be for now. I'm thinking of tackling the first Tomb Raider next. ^^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3bpZOH66Mk&t=130s

I have uploaded in 1 file all the 4K fmv's stitched together but at their original framerate (even though it's in a 60fps container), it can be downloaded on archive.org, I'll do that for every project:
https://archive.org/details/ffviii-cd-1 ... -10bit-v-1