Nintendo 64 |OT| YOU COULD ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT, AND CHANGE ANGLES!

Ooh Bangai-O! Looking forward to reading your impressions of it. I loved the DS game, the XBLA one not so much, but an N64 cart goes for a lot nowadays. If it’s really good I’ll take the plunge when funds permit - I’m also interested in just seeing the game in action on real hardware.

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I finally got round to trying composite. I tried my PAL N64 with the official Nintendo composite cable and was quite impressed by the overall image, I think the PAL console is outputting a higher number of horizontal lines (288p) because the image is a lot softer.








However, when I tried my NTSC-J console I was even more blown away - the image was often indistinguishable from my Hori S-Video cable, I put it up there with my PC Engine.

I’ll need to post some proper shots but does anyone know why this is? Is it PAL vs NTSC lines output (i.e. 240p matches the rendering resolution, 288p doesn’t?) or did some N64s have better composite video output than others? Or both?

Some quick shots from my NTSC-J console via composite:





On the blue craft F-Zero shot there is a lot of ringing and artefacts around the text. Looks good but not as good as your other shots.

Yeah, the artifacting around some objects is still noticeable in certain scenes and games - for some reason on Mario 64 it’s much worse than other games. I am impressed by how good the colour reproduction is though - almost indistinguishable from S-Video which is very rare. The other consoles I’ve tried composite with, PCE aside, have noticeably washed out colours via composite video.

The dot crawl isn’t so bad if the TV is more basic and has just a notch filter. That kinda smears the whole image horizontally but hey that’s the way it’s meant to be!

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Interestingly it’s really hard to make out any artifacting at all when everything’s in motion, that must be the comb filter on my CRT? Still shots expose all.

Composite vs S-Video still shot comparison:

Animal Crossing - composite

Animal Crossing - S-Video

Animal Crossing - composite

Animal Crossing - S-Video

Majora’s Mask - composite

Majora’s Mask - S-Video

Goemon 2 - composite

Goemon 2 - S-Video

Goemon 2 - composite

Goemon 2 - S-Video

Goemon 2 - composite

Goemon 2 - S-Video

Tsumi to Batsu - composite

Tsumi to Batsu - S-Video

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N64 and PC Engine composite are the best there ever were of the format.

I really wish I had tried it with my N64 earlier, I’m also blown away by the colour reproduction being almost identical to S-Video after being used a washed out image where I need to adjust the brightness going between inputs.

I should try my Super Famicom next.

On a related note, it’s the N64’s 25th anniversary in Japan lately!

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Saturn is no slouch either.

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Man. 20th anniversary of Xbox, GBA and GCN this year too. I officially feel old.

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Dude! Great choice of games. That is so cool to compare! They both look amazing. I can hardly tell the difference, but in the Composite shots there are “dots” around lines and the edges, where the S-Video shots look smooth. Especially visible in the Animal Crossing shots. I’m not sure whether it’s just differences in how the image is output, or if I’m seeing dithering or artifacts or what.

I’ll have to try busting out my composite cables one of these days. I haven’t used them since the 90s.

Cheers! Yeah as you mention you can still shots you can still see some dot crawl around certain colours, but it’s significantly reduced in motion on the CRT itself - in the F-Zero video you can only really see it on the red machines, and in the other videos it’s barely visible. It’s crazy just how close it gets to S-Video like that!

That being said, I think different N64 models have different output quality - my PAL system has the usual washed out over-brightened colours compared with S-Video and RGB, but the artifacting is kept to a minimum still. It’s also significantly blurrier, to be honest it doesn’t even look like 240p content output at 288p to me because of it!

I wonder if Saturn is the same, because my ~1997 NTSC-J Saturn also has very disappointing colour output via composite.

I wonder what components they all use to do composite?

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I’ve read discussions about certain later revision Funtastic consoles having sharper composite output but I don’t think anyone has ever reached a unanimous verdict. Always seemed like wishful rumors.

Yeah I wonder what the real reason is. Both my consoles are grey consoles. And some PAL consoles apparently can’t output S-Video at al.

Really good interview with former Nintendo EAD programmer Giles Goddard on the N64’s 25th anniversary: When Nintendo went Hollywood: a casual conversation with the man who helped shape the N64 • Eurogamer.net

I really liked the closing questions in particular. I think it’s part of why gaming on old machines will always have appeal, because each console was almost like its own character in itself. You really could look at a game and tell what era it came from and what console it was on, whereas it’s not possible to do so today.

If anything the consolidation of tools is the only thing that can tell us something, it’s quite easy to tell if a game was made on Unity engine for example. And that’s rather boring, compared with looking at a game on the DS, a game on the PSP, a game on the Wii, and a game on Xbox 360 and instantly knowing what system it belonged to. That was probably the last time it happened in a meaningful way. There was 3DS but it was on its own.

My PAL console can do S-Video but after that generation found the composite to be quite poor in comparison to what came after. Hell, the PS1 composite looks night and day better than the N64 IMO. Surprised to read you praising the composite output tbh!

There’s has to be some variation between N64 models, my PAL system on the same official cable looks so different and has the typical washed out colours that I’ve come to expect from composite that generation.

Likewise I read encouraging things about Saturn’s composite output but was left underwhelmed - very blurry unfocused image and washed out colours. Great with some games (like Baroque with its film noir colours and heavy use of transparencies) but undeniably worse than S-Video for most. My Japanese Saturn is one of the last board revisions so I wouldn’t be surprised if other models gave better output.