Trailer mentioned in the above video
The dream of 60fps for every N64 game could be realised…this is so exciting. If you’ve got a CRTEmudriver or Mistercast setup then at the very least you could be experiencing 240p60 on a CRT! Having tried the SM64 port at x2 res/480i and 60fps it’s easily my favourite way to play that game now. (seriously considering buying an RT capable card just for these recomps)
that looks incredible. the N64 Zelda games in particular I always felt were kind of held back by the original 240p graphics, they’re kind of dark and muddy even on a CRT. trying the Wii Virtual Console versions in 480i really opened my eyes
Really cool CRT footage in this, also nice to see Alex’s preference with keeping things at x2 res where asset quality isn’t stretched beyond congruence!
wow the 640x480 on a PC CRT looked amazing. like he said, like some long lost PC port from 2002
yeah it looks awesome. you don’t really realize how choppy the original frame rate is until you increase it. I had it on 60 fps, and the motion was almost too smooth!
That looks so nice! What res is that? Colours looking really good there.
Yeah it’s going to be hard going back to original frame rates, I remember returning to golden eye after years of 60fps FPS games and was shocked how it felt, although adjusting isn’t impossible lol
Does your monitor go above 60fps? I might be team consumer CRT but might do a 85hz run on my PC CRT (not sure what the max refresh it can handle).
One thing I noticed in that DF video is that there was something off about the recomp
I put my PC to 640x480. The game doesn’t actually change the output resolution oddly, so I had to do it manually from the Windows setrings
I think natively the monitor is 1024x768 at 85Hz, it never occured to me to try it at that refresh rate, but I think my GPU would need to output that to actually see the benefit. The good thing is u can increase the frame rate by increments of 1. I’ll need to play around with it a bit more. but then I don’t think 320x240 is a clean scale to that resolution
but I think ultimately my use case will be playing it at 240p with AA and 60 FPS on a consumer CRT. like you said, something’s off with the higher resolution graphics, even though it’s miles above the typical software emulation look. Even setting everything to “Original” didn’t look right
I think that means you should be able to do 480p@85hz! (pending your GPU being able to put out 85fps)
Yeah it’s subtle but it would be nice to get the OG N64 presentation (warts and all) and then play around with whatever changes/settings you might like starting from there.
Did you get mistercast setup? I still need to do that, still using CRTEmu for getting to a consumer set.
I’ll try 480p 85Hz! I need to setup Mistercast as well. I got GroovyMister working as that was the one I was interested in (I wanted to play arcade games with low input lag), but now this opens up a whole new use case
could probably play games like AM2R that way, the possibilities seem endless
The less latency and the fact you can use ANY gpu vs CRTemu is huge; Definitely want to switch over to that, also nice to see all the $99 de10s on the horizon so you can keep a board just for outputting to a CRT.
Looks like res plays a part in the look of those edges, x2 is the sweet spot for me. (Native res on a flat screen is hideous, CRT or bust for 240p/native). Looks like dithering gets finer as you up the res, would like an option, like in Duckstation, where you can choose to scale the patter to resolution.
I think the change in appearance is more down to the resolution than fps, so many of these effects were designed around the native rendering resolution.
Dithering isn’t implemented at all from the looks of things, just like all the other VI passes.
Oh in the recomp? yeah it doesn’t look like it’s implemented dithering (I’ve not tried it yet, maybe @akumagorath can confirm). I noticed the dithering getting finer in mupen, at x4 it’s almost entirely gone! Interestingly enough there’s this ‘film grain/noise’ effect that appears to scale with the resolution and retain that chunky pixel look:
Perhaps, but I thought everything was still 20fps internally so don’t see how interpolation can make that much of a differrence, I could understand that being the case if it was actaully a true 60fps. I dunno…
Does the port not have an option for the original FPS? Could also be the lack of VI filters not being implemented giving an inaccurate result too. I would look at this stuff like the Virtual Console, an enchanced way to play the games but not one that (in it’s current state) should be used to show how N64 games actually used to look and perform. I don’t really buy this being a preservation project as many are touting.
Looks like the the noise filter which is another one of the VI’s functions, it’s used heavily in Star Fox 64 and one you start looking for it notice it all over the library. I can’t say it looks very nice scaled like that though, looks busted at the higher render res.
I wonder how much this will discourage decompilations, although I think decomps don’t guarantee accurate presentation too, right?
Agreed, looks bad at such a high resolution. I love how Star Fox 64 uses the noise filter in such a way to give a pseudo depth of field, really cool effect for the time (looks even better in composite).
I think it will depend on how quicky other games can be put out there with this new technique, I guess it depends on the individual and what they want to get out of a decompilation. No, none of this guarantees accurate presentation, the work being done by RT64 will be important for that part of things, but I still don’t know how they will get original performance right or if that is being considered.
The asteroid stage on the easy route in Star Fox 64 shows the noise filter working it’s magic, like you say can really create a sense of depth, that was one of the first real stand out differences I noticed when first using the Parallel renderer in emulation.
I absolutely adore the N64’s presentation and what they achieved visually, such thoughtfulful consideration for all the new techniques and how they would be used. Playing the MiSTer core has really made me fall in love with the first party games all over again.
