The episode expresses the need to come to terms with the PS2 as a 480i machine. So the fact that OSSC is a better scaler for 480p is kind of irrelevant to what they present and in actual practice with the PS2. The FM is a much better deintelacer and will give you a better picture overal with PS2’s most common output of 480i.
Yes, the PS3 has lag. Otherwise, the OG 60GB has all the strength and accuracy of having original PS2 hardware built in while having a couple of other perks on top.
I’ve thoroughly used a 60GB PS3 for PS2 playback and I haven’t seen anything iffy in my experience. The only reason why I can’t recommend a PS3 for BC is the fact that they just die and I can’t recommend something guaranteed to die. Aside from that, tales of PS3’s incompetence with PS2 games are greatly exaggerated.
There wasn’t a lot of deinterlacer talk. I was really impressed with the FM deinterlacing but my TV has a good deinterlacing too and I think most modern TVs will.
I wasn’t clear on the PS3 situation, cause I thought that it had lag no matter what, but they showed the guncon working with PS3 on a CRT which would imply no lag.
I popped in Mark of Kri which also has a PS2 classic on PS4 and man, I really not a fan of 480i on my PVM20L5. I should probably try one of my 480i monitors instead. The ossc did an okay job with the 480ix2 (Bob) but I think I remember liking what the Framemeister did with 480i more.
I tried it on PS4 too. I don’t know if I can ever go back to this game on PS2. I did experience a couple of jumps but that could be due to me having the game installed on my external drive.
That generation for me is the absolute hardest to go back to. Everything looks like crap compared to 240p and the nature of early 3D games doesn’t really lend itself for me to want to get back into it too much. I think 480p looks pretty outstanding compared to 480i. I probably will move my PS2 back to a storage bin to make room for another console.
TBH, I could probably retire my GameCube if we ever get another solution for playing my GBA collection in RGB/Component or even HDMI. (I know about the woozle mod coming soon).
Informative video. I didn’t realize that scart cables for PS1 and PS2 are supposed to have different specs. I remember when I purchased mine, they were sold as the same. I just opened up the cable a few minutes ago, and they have 220 µF caps.
I have 2 PS2 consoles in my setup, so I can use component for now, but I guess I need to purchase new scart cables specifically for my PS2.
Great episode, as always. I have the official Sony component cables, so I’ll probably just roll with those when I hook my PS2 back up. I’m glad I don’t have to spend the money on RGB cables to get the same quality. I also like that PS2 does digital audio output.
The episode expresses the need to come to terms with the PS2 as a 480i machine. So the fact that OSSC is a better scaler for 480p is kind of irrelevant to what they present and in actual practice with the PS2. The FM is a much better deintelacer and will give you a better picture overal with PS2’s most common output of 480i.
Sure, but while the system’s library is overwhelmingly 480p in terms of raw numbers, there’s a nontrivial number of games which allow for 480p, many of which are games that people closely associate with the system like the Ratchet & Clank series. More, with homebrew – as mentioned in the video – 480p is expanded to, if not the majority, a huge number of titles. Even if 480i is what you should be looking at primarily, acting as though 480p is a nonfactor is completely out of touch with the landscape in my experience.
That said, if you’re only looking at a handful of titles, they’re all 480i, and you aren’t interested in homebrew, then sure. It’s a 480i device through and through. But frankly, anyone who’s invested enough to be looking at an expensive upscaler for their PS2 should seriously consider both the larger library and homebrew, which weighs heavily in the OSSC’s favour due to the Framemeister’s absolutely awful handling of 480p.
My experience with forcing 480p on PS2 was seriously underwhelming. Most games I tried produced artifacts and/or aspect ratio anomalies as they show in the video.
Forcing GC games into 480p isn’t perfect either, but it is still a world better than trying it on PS2. It simply wasn’t worth the hassle. I’d rather let the FM handle it via deinterlacing. Hell, I’d rather build an emulation PC than try to wrestle 480p out of non 480p PS2 on real hardware.
Okay, just finished the video. It really puts in perspective how getting good IQ from PS2 games is a bit more involved than pretty much any other piece of retro hardware due to the 480i focus of the machine.
By the way, that M-cable looks like a joke. Like… if you’re going to go that route under any circumstance, just smear vaseline over your eyes instead. It’s way more cost effective.
I had a lot more consistency with patching 480i games to 240p (mostly shmups and fighting games) than using the GSM homebrew. That thing never worked for me, too many glitches. Even if I tried the same game with both methods, the patch almost always worked and GSM didn’t.
I didn’t notice any weird text but I only tested them in CRT. The IQ improvement is pretty good in most cases. Games like Mark of the Wolves and Matrimelee look so much better with the 240p patch.
I’m also really impressed with all the interlaced CRT footage. I paused the video a few times and saw scanlines… can’t believe they were able to get such good footage of that.
Some Pro monitors are really good at showing scanlines on 480i and even 480p. My DT-V1710CGU has more space between the rasters in 480p than consumer sets at 240p.
Regarding lag playing PS2 discs on PS3; it’s always there regardless of full hardware or partial emulation. It made many games unplayable if your display device added additional frames of lag. It is also present when using a CRT. Guitar Hero 2 has a latency calibration function that will make this readily apparent.
PS2 classics on PS4 can also lag! Well, at least Psychonauts does. I got it for free with the Rhombus of Ruin, and promptly deleted it!
Halfway through and my goodness, the amount of informations is overwhelming. Fantastic episode so far… Huge props, guys.
One thing I may figure out myself during the second half, which still surprised me, is: no mention of the official Sony RGB cable for the PS2?
As I use official RGB cables only for my 480i consoles (PS2, GameCube and XBox), I was quite curious to see how it compared to other solutions (especially the modern RGB cables, currently produced by RGC and Retro Access).
