I think I’m going to have to because it’s trully awful running natively. 240p signals from a Mega Drive, PC Engine or Super Famicom put it to shame.
It’s basically mandatory to force 480p for 480i games if not using a CRT. Even via the best scalers interlaced just doesn’t translate well to fixed pixel displays.
Luckily it works flawlessly for 99.9% of Gamecube games and 95% of PS2 games, but of course you need homebrew of some sort and some fiddling, particularly on PS2.
was Psyvariar a 240p game originally? I’ve played it in interlace on the PS2 and DC and didn’t notice much of a difference tbf, but playing it now and it’s super soft. I think it has some kind of flicker filter? looks awful
The DC game has always looked super sharp. Back in the day I used RGB on a CRT and now VGA to HDMI and yep, still looks super sharp. The PS2 game just looks ass. It’s not even a fact of it being 240p (if it is) because other 240p consoles from the 8bit and 16bit days not to mention my Neo Geo, Saturn, and original PlayStation all look great on my LG display.
I’ll give it a try with forced 480p to see if that helps.
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Sadly, Psyvariar did not work with any video modes. The best I got was half a screen in stable view or full screen jittering up and down. Oh well.
Apparently it works when booting with the Xploder HDTV Player
http://www.benoitren.be/ed-palps2.html
But not with GSM.
I’ll give that a try. Thanks.
95% is an overstatement.
Most of the early PS2 catalogue on the early SDK that uses field rendering doesn’t work, or displays the game with a progressive frame at half resolution. Also FMVs are a problem in games that otherwise work well as the frame buffer front buffer difference either cuts off the image or causes the game to crash.
It is an amazing piece of homebrew but it’s not magic.
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Fair enough. yeah guess I’m not experienced enough to give a good percentage, I managed to get most stuff I wanted working.
Maybe I’m spoiled from Gamecube, everything I own works perfectly forced to 480p. I use almost exclusively PAL games forced to 480p these days.
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That makes sense as to why Psyvariar only displays half a screen when it can be forced to work. But even then it looks like arse. I guess that game just looks like crap no matter what.
One thing I have noticed with the PS2 over the years is that video quality was way down at the bottom of Sony’s priorities. Games never look as crisp as the Dreamcast or Game Cube. And I’m sure not as crispnas the Xbox either. Although I don’t have an Xbox to compare it to.
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It’s truly bizarre and I wonder if it is a result of a “bad” design decision on Sony’s part?
The PS2 has internal bilinear filtering of the image, the Gamecube and Wii are filtered too with the copy filter but that doesn’t produce such a soft image. The PSP used bilinear filtering on a large amount of games as well so wanting to soften the output seems to be a very deliberate choice for Sony with the PS2, my thinking it was because so much of the output was interlaced, of varying resolutions and the console scaled some assets before output and others it didn’t. FIltering is a good way to mush everything together into a more coherent, if not sharper image. PCSX2 quite recently added an option to disable it, not sure if it can also be disabled via homebrew for real hardware.
Some 6 years later I’m back on Kero Kero King and aim to finish it!!!
I thought I had done, but my archived save seems to show otherwise.
Guess we’ll see for real, if the credits are …familiar …or not!?!
How exciting.
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Old article that just popped up again approaching the 25th Anniversary of PS2. Worth a read.
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It was me that resurfaced the above article! 
Gran Turismo 3 in ULTRA WIDE-SCREEN (3x PS2, 3x screens!)
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I had no idea this was a thing on the PS2! Had seen the GT5 PS3 linkup before, which supported (up to) five screens.
Almost makes me wish I hadn’t sold off my extra PS2s, haha.
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That is fantastic. Is it only time trials then? You can’t play the main game with three screens…?
Only arcade mode
Is it me or PS2 RGB is terrible compared to component? RGB is dimmer. Colors in component pop out more.