Recap escribió:I hear you on the KOF XII subject. I'm still to see how the game works with the system set at 480p and a 31-kHz monitor, though it can't do the background graphics any good, so I'm not holding my breath. What a waste...
Most multi-sync/31 kHz arcade monitor have the same large pitch as usual TVs driven at 15kHz. That means you can't obtain such precise scanline (as on the picture shown before) at 31 kHz on these.
The electron gun is conceived for bright and large beam spot, and you have limited number of phosphore triads. You need a 21 or 22" PC monitor with thin electron gun and precise grid (but small screen size...) or an insanely expensive 32" CRT Broadcast monitor that can really display 720p. You can also have good results with CRT projectors (but not as good as direct view CRT).I don't own an Xbox 360, but I'm pretty sure that the downscaling to 480p is filtred. Anyway, even if it's not as precise as the picture posted above, it will alway be more pleasant to the eye than rough cubic pixels at different resolution of the background, and of course blurry filtred sprites.
And more importantly, you can play the game that way since the system (either, the 3-60 or the Type X 2) does support 480p. Your samples are great and necessary for showing everybody that KOF XII's graphics are ruined by lame design decisions and a full-of-shit technology, and hopefully you'll create with them some short of a virtual museum in order to let the internet see and take notes, but... just that.
This picture [>] is based on a nice .png screenshot of KOF XII (720p), reduced to 360p with nearest neighbor option. Perfect pixel for the sprites and the background, displayed in heavenly conditions on a performant CRT. Each time I look at this, and then go to see the game on 768p or 1080p flat screen (because there are very few true 720p flat pannels out there...),
I do really wonder if there's not a true 768-lines mode on this game. Blaz Blue has it, and Type X 2's most common mode is WXGA, given the arcade monitor standards.
Considering that KOF XIII only runs with filtred sprites upscaled at 150%, there's definitly no chance to try any tricks to display a nice picture on the best CRT displays.
I'm sure there'll be an option to remove the filter (at least for home versions), but in the end, same issue as in XII -- you can't play the game and please your eyes at the same time.
Men, I hate fixed res' pannels, and I hate the "everything scaled and filtred" shit.
What's the point to have easily adressable pixels (the only advantage compare to CRT) if most time you get blurry picture and artifacts ? Flat pannels are just good for internet browsing and word processing. For everything else, you need true multi-sync monitor. And CRT is the only technology that can gives you this.
It's called 'the brainless syndrome of our masses' and it's the same reason why handhelds have taken over proper systems, to name just one. Rhetorical answer for a rhetorical question, I know.
Without modesty, I can say that I'm the expert of CRT photographing. :P
With my advices, you will achieve such quality as this :
Fine then. Moving this part of the conversation to the development subforum then.
Keep in mind that true scanlines aren't perfectly regular black lines; they vary according to the colors they separate, being even virtually invisible with some colors like red if the screen is not too big
The red beam is alway driven stronger than the green and blue (because red phosphore is less efficient and needs more current), but with a proper set-up of every parameters, you can obtain precision at all levels.
So, the usual blur and merging that occur with bright red portions are not a characteristic of the CRT picture, it's just a question of the quality of the adjustment. Hence, we see that carefull observation is not enough, you need to know the way to set-up a CRT to determine what to do for recreating a CRT picture in digital environement.
The truth is that I love the slight 'melting' with bright red lines and whatnot. I'm so used to it that I like to think of it as a particularity of CRT displays (and indeed I miss it in your photographs). But I can understand that, while it may help the overall visual enjoyment depending on your tastes, it goes against pure 'pixel analysis', yeah.
The goal is to "interpret" the picture in only one pass (to have minimum use of resources and minimum lag), directly taking each original pixel and "construct" the final result according to a table that store small sets of values ( 1A to 4F in the examples above) for every variations of greyscale. There would be only one comparison with each previous pixel per line, to determine if the beam increases or decreases. Well, it's a simulated scanning (from top to bottom and left to right) to obtain the data, but the result is made of a full frame (no layers, no transparencies), constructed for fixed resolution.
It may not be very clear, because it's not so easy to explain it in french even for me... ^^
But I think this is the best way. The difficult part is to create the table, you need a perfect screenshot to start from. For this, I will use my method, because it's very tweakable and precise. I need to adust every layer according to the observation of the behavior of the real beam in the best condition : the proper set-up of the screen. For this last point, I'm ready now, I know. :-PI need to explain the trick and convince somebody to write a bunch of code lines, somebody who wants to recreate a perfect CRT picture, not somebody who think that CRT screens produce genuine dirty pictures with lot of defects that you need to focus on. In fact, that's the tricky part ! ^_^
So, wait and see...
Looking forward to it, though you need too big resolutions for that and you know web design requirements... Nevertheless, your ultimate goal is solving to some degree the emulation-related issue, isn't it?
![>]](http://raster.effect.free.fr/31khz/KOF_sprites_360p/KOF_XII_360p_01d_(1366x1080).jpg){kind=link}