Firstly -- don't panic. You'll soon realize all these problems you've got there are quite silly, trust me.
icycalm escribió:Why take a capture of the emulator window with Irfan View instead of saving the screenshot with the emulator and THEN working on it? The only possible answer I've been able to give is that you prefer the emulator adding the scanlines instead of an external application...
Pretty much.
However, my experience with screen-capturing applications is that they degrade the image quality. Isn't the image I get from capturing using Irfan View worse than the emulator's native output? Irfan View seems to save in .bmp format, so perhaps not...
You answered yourself. You could even save it in .PNG and get the very same quality. I'd of course suggest you to do that.
But the problem here seems to be that many emulators do not allow me to resize a window to exactly twice the size of the original resolution. I was able to use ZSNES with no problems as you instructed me, but I had no such luck with MAME32. In MAME32 I can only get a window the size of each game's original resolution, but resizing is done manually by using the mouse and enlarging the window, and if I do that I have no clue when I've exactly doubled the screen size. Kega Fusion allows me 640x480 in windowed mode, but that is not the correct doubled resolution for any Mega Drive games. And with ePSX I wouldn't even know where to begin -- the video options in that emulator are so complicated they give me a headache. Not to mention that -- apart from MAME, which tells you each game's native res -- I wouldn't know how to figure out the native res for most games running on other emulators. I mean, how do you know at what res a Super Famicom game runs? I am sure there must be a way to see this; I just don't know it yet.
Seems I wasn't clear enough. With "display resolution" I meant the display for the game's graphics, not the application's. Forget windowed modes; I think it'll be easier for you if you take the full-screen route. In this mode, you must force the emulator, whichever it is, to do three things when it runs the game:
- To change to Windows' 640 x 480 mode.
- To preserve the exact "line-double" resolution for the game's display (check again the example with the standard SFC game I mentioned). That implies a) no "stretch to fill the screen" options enabled at all, b) some black borders displayed on screen (unless the game's native resolution was of 320 x 240, as it's obvious).
- To use 50% scanlines (and only that).
Since I was only able to use your tutorial with ZSNES, my snapshot was 512 x 448 so there were no added borders. Still the game ITSELF (R-Type III) has black borders at the top and bottom. Am I supposed to crop those off?
Well, that's up to you. If in that case there were borders, then the game didn't have "full-screen graphics", hence I'd say the borders should be in the snapshots. Check Postback's Edo no Kiba article.
All these sliders were at random values and I had to set them all to zero. Then I selected 8 for curvature.
Is this what I should be doing? All the sliders at zero except curvature?
Yep. But try it out and take whatever you happen to like more.
And do you have any idea what the "Random Seed" option is at the bottom?
It refers to the filters' pattern applied. Ignore it for the better.
Also, why are you choosing such a low curvature number? I was always wondering about that. I know that different monitors have different curvatures and all, but the curvature you are adding is so imperceptible you might as well not bother, no?
"Imperceptible"?
This is where I got stuck. The Resize/Resample menu has no option for automatic resizing to 4 : 3 aspect ratio. I have to set the size manually by entering pixel numbers... Frankly, I am completely lost here.
Do it manually! That's something you'll be doing without worries once you get some experience and have the page layout.
Here I have to ask: Do you really add blur to your screenshots?
Sure!
They look crystal-clear to me... And if you do add blur, do you really think it's necessary/desirable?
If I thought it isn't, do you really think I'd do it?
I guess you are doing it to get closer to what you'd see on a real monitor?
Yep.
Again, I am completely lost here. So lost that I feel like a complete moron. I mean, why mess with the colors? You say that we darkened its "original colors" by adding scanlines, but I don't understand how this works. Scanlines are just lines added between the regular lines, they are not added on top of the regular lines. So how did we darken the image?
'Cause fake scanlines and real scanlines are actually two very different things. You're used to RGB monitors, so you should know that. I'm, more or less, explaining it in detail in a forthcoming article, anyway, so let's leave it at that for now.
Besides, the Enhance Color menus scares the hell out of me. How am I supposed to figure out the best positions of all those random sliders? I don't even have a clue as to what I should be aiming for.
Hum... Practice. And rely in your eyes.
How do I tell if more blur is necessary?
See above.
So anyway, here's one of my tries:
With everything you skipped:
Still, that picture fails at something... The emulator's scanlines? I'm not sure. Compare it with these:
http://postback.geedorah.com/revisiones … lay_01.htm
