Had a chance to test out the PSP component cables, but unfortunately the OSSC’s PSP sampling setting doesn’t seem to work with my TV. Maybe I need to dial in custom timings.
What I did test, out of curiosity was how 240p from the PSP looks. There’s a trick where if you set the output to interlaced, the PSP outputs 240p when running PS One Classics, and sure enough it does.
Tested Suikoden 2 (because lord knows I don’t want to pay $400 for an original copy). Here it is on the PS3 via HDMI at 1080p vs from the PSP at 240p via the OSSC (with scanlines of course).
Some Saturn Vampire Hunter thru RGB on a Sony CRT. This game is great for taking shots not only because of the insane animations, but because it has a cheat to hide the pause message and advance frame by frame!
Some things were truly meant to be seen through composite like those fake transparency meshes. No doubt. I still think S-Video is worth the trade off though, especially for sprite based games.
The color, in particular, is just so much better in your last comparison images via s-video. (What game is that one?)
Really impressive how consistent the lighting is on your shots!
Would you mind sharing some expert tips? At the moment the best I can do is set the time value to 1/60 for 60hz games, and try to keep ISO and exposure low enough to prevent colour bloom, but my shots just aren’t as uniform as I’d like.
So far I’ve found two games where the colour depth trade-off is worth the benefits of composite: Baroque, and Virtual-On.
Baroque for sure was unlikely intended to have more vivid colours to begin with, given its heavy Film Noire aesthetic, and Virtual-On actually looks really good with softer video output. Both games have a lot of dithered transparencies on screen for effects and in the environment too.
NiGHTS and Sega Rally are two other 3D games I’ve tested, and while it’s nice to have proper transparencies, as you mention the trade-offs elsewhere just aren’t worth it. NiGHTS almost looks like a completely different game when its dream-like worlds are presented with washed out colours!
The last game is Bulk Slash, a really fun and fast flying action game where you can transform your mech between land and flight states with the press of a button. It’s got some of the best visuals on the machine too, a great use of 2D ground layers mixed with 3D graphics!
That’s impressive! I’m going to have to try that myself. Which model were you using again - I seem to remember @dubc having issues with the new SE compared to his old iPhone, presumably because new phones tend to use machine learning techniques/“computational photography” to improve the image in ways which aren’t transparent to us.
