I can’t imagine the color profile issue won’t be fixed, and soon. But it sounds like the scan line situation may not based on past history. I don’t own any kind of upscale and don’t play retro games on my modern TV (except for ports) and I just have a feeling that ANY attempt to recreate this distinctly analog feature will never satisfy my brain. Therefore, a solution that perfectly and easily scales real carts with zero lag in a non-scanline image would probably suffice for me. I can go to my CRT for the analog look.
https://twitter.com/kawikacheco/status/963988793526075392
https://twitter.com/analogue_co/status/963988954839052289
I think it actually might happen for the Super NT. Not so much for the Mini but who knows.
1 Like
Yeah I started playing through LTTP last night and I noticed how dull everything looked. I cranked my OLED color to 70 from 55 and it looked much much better.
Thanks for reminding me about Frank. I have an unused KI 2 hard drive that should be dumped for preservation. I need to contact him.
The Hi-Def NES will definitely not be fixed. There’s not enough room in the FPGA to add either 5x or more comprehensive scanline options. That’s what I’ve been told. Although I don’t think I ever applied this firmware update. https://www.game-tech.us/blog/hi-def-nes-firmware-update-is-here/ I should get on that since I always hated the default palettes (that deep purple sky = not my SMB).
Kevtris could fix it but it just seems low priority to him. If he really collaborated with Marshall in regard to scanlines and borrowed his Hybrid lines technique, the lackluster implementation is all the more baffling.
@Radarscope1 there are a few emulator CRT shaders that do a decent job at simulating variable line width and other CRT characteristics with varying degrees of success. Some of the basic scanline options are effective at achieving the “mind filling in the gaps” effect that squashes the raw pixelated look which I think is the primary and most important part of scanline filters before complex shaders try to mimic blur, glow, curvature, convergence, etc. Some CRTs are kind of emulator-like, so something like OSSC with scanlines enabled is not far off the mark in replicating that style of CRT.
Below: 480p CRT, 480p2x OSSC with lines, 480p2x OSSC no lines. This was before upsample2x was added, which brings the middle OSSC image closer to the smoothness/softness of the CRT image on the left.
1 Like
Yeah, that is looking really good! Agree about the most important part of scan lines being to preserve the overall original intent and the “mind filling in the gaps” effect.
I joined on day one, my friend. I mostly lurk here and occasionally post. Plus, I didn’t want anybody stealing my cool name and impersonating me. 
I long ago unsubed MJR. His vids weren’t doing anything for me after a while. I won’t be too critical, but I need more substantive content nowadays.
It’s sort of off topic but when I first got back into retro I enjoyed his hidden gem and top 10 videos but once you know the games there’s really nothing on his channel to keep me interested. Once he switched to YT full time he really started shitting out the videos and with the state of youtube ad revenue I don’t blame him.
He’s a cool dude though and I’d love to have a beer with him and talk about Sierra!
Love my Super NT, but emulation issues are throwing me off as there are plenty!
- Actraiser level 1 dungeon won’t load as your player level is 0.
- Ninjawarriors Again game breaking bugs.
- Front Mission Gunhazard dialogue boxes not displaying.
- Sigma joystick freezes upon system overlay menu, have to switch to regular controller to get function back.
And that’s probably the tip of the iceberg. At this point I feel like might even be imagining some graphical glitches: e.g. Front Mission (OG) portrait transition glitches just because I don’t trust the accuracy of the emulator. Was it this bad for the NT mini when it launched?
1 Like
Asked kevtris on atariage about the scanlines. his reply:
yes there’s some issues with the scanlines; I am going to totally retool how they work in the relative near future when I get the rest of the game bugs handled. I want to get rounded edges and stuff working on it to make it look better.
and about the colour issues in a prior post:
yeah you are right. I think I have it figured out how to make it report properly so it displays as full range. I have this on the list of fixes to add for the next release so hopefully that will fix the problem for people. Funny how we still can’t shake the CRT stigma on HDMI with overscan, interlace, and limited range (to account for synch pulses and such AFAIR). The fix will be to report as “computer” which should clear up the range issues. I am going to add separate rgb gamma sliders so that should quell all the other issues people had with the brightness stuff, and recalculate how the levels are generated. Maybe in the future I will do some testing on various model SNES to get actual voltage levels to see how linear the DACs are (there’s four DACs - the three RGB ones and the overall brightness DAC)
So it looks like these issues are gonna be fixed. yay
Transparent looks good!!!
I didn’t follow the whole Super NT thing that much - mainly due to not playing with and collecting for the Super Famicom/SNES - but I watched both Digital Foundry and MLiG in depth coverages, and I was under the impression the console was pretty much flawless. Kinda surprised about all those issues.
It’s actually made me lose a huge amount of trust in digital foundry and mlig that they didn’t notice the colour and scanline issues.
I, along with others like FBX noticed it immediately.
Firmware updates that fix one thing tend to create other problems; eg. Ninjawarriors Again was working fine right out of the box, but the latest update seems to have borked that and a lot of other things. I’m sure Kevtris would get around to fixing it eventually.
Never noticed the colour issue on my Kuro, maybe because I’ve set it to PC mode. But the scanlines are indeed terrible and they lower contrast when applied, making the picture appear more washed out even when not applying gamma boost. OG SFC through OSSC 5X mode is still the gold standard for now (Kevtris working on a fix). But yeah these should have been immediately obvious.
Yeah, that must be the case, isn’t it? Eventually, it’ll all get to the right places.
They kinda did drop the ball in missing some things that were obvious to people on retro forums. Unless these problems only popped up after launch in a new firnware…? It’s a possibility.
@memecomplex
I think it was on shmups someone said there are three instances of gamma shift. One is on by default(?!), another if you use scanlines and a third if you use the gamma toggle. I haven’t seen it mentioned but with Hybrid scanlines I also get a strong color shift, like a new color palette has been toggled in the background. Reminds me of Garish on the NESRGB mod.
To be fair, both the snes via ossc and the super nt look almost identical. My 4K tv selects which color palette and until people starting talking about it looked the same to me. The tv actually chose two different color profiles via auto which made the two nearly identical. Also, if your calibration is wrong on your crt it could be easy to miss. Especially in light of the way TV’s tend to be under saturated when calibrated.
Your TV’s internal upscaler can do odd things when going from 720. I don’t know if I lost any faith. Basically, once I saw the scan lines looked like shit I just stopped using it. I could imagine they did the same thing.
Ordered a black one for March. Based on my experience with the NT mini I am not too worried. I also like the idea of having the Turrican games on there and the Fish UI. Worth it for me. No desire to hack my SNES/SFC mini so hoping a firmware upgrade will allow for easy rim loads. Otherwise will get a SD2SNES