RyaNtheSlayA wrote:Yea the graphics card is rendering things. You don't seem to get it though. An emulator EMULATES the hardware. It immitates the hardware from yours through software. So sure, your graphics card is doing some work, but its not native. AF will make it blurry as its simply a filter over the original game. The game is still whatever it was programmed as. AA doesnt keep things especially old games looking realistic. You are looking at a screen right? Well back then, you were looking at a screen and guess what, SPRITES MADE OF PIXELS! When you throw an AA filter over something that doesnt have it built in (or even if it does if you are like me) it just blurs over everything resulting in a loss of detail. Also you are also missing the point as tons of games are designed on computer monitors, so your "meant to be run through composite" theory is flat out wrong in a lot of cases.
Sprites? But we're talking about 3D dreamcast games.. If you want proof for my "meant to be run through composite" theory, just look at the Sega Saturn. It tries to hide its inability to do transparency by using stipples. These stipples would be blurred and somewhat close to a transparency through RF or composite, but the effect is completly lost through s-video or RGB.
Yes, emulators do TRY to imitate the hardware, but its definitely not 100% in most cases. They take many shortcuts along the way and sacrifice accuracy for speed. AF simply a filter over the original game? It determines how the graphics hardware renders textures..instead of using the bilinear filtering the original console would use. Please show me an example of it blurring the picture. Its suppose to look like this. Bilinear on the left, AF on the right..
RyaNtheSlayA wrote:Yea the graphics card is rendering things. You don't seem to get it though. An emulator EMULATES the hardware. It immitates the hardware from yours through software. So sure, your graphics card is doing some work, but its not native. AF will make it blurry as its simply a filter over the original game. The game is still whatever it was programmed as. AA doesnt keep things especially old games looking realistic. You are looking at a screen right? Well back then, you were looking at a screen and guess what, SPRITES MADE OF PIXELS! When you throw an AA filter over something that doesnt have it built in (or even if it does if you are like me) it just blurs over everything resulting in a loss of detail. Also you are also missing the point as tons of games are designed on computer monitors, so your "meant to be run through composite" theory is flat out wrong in a lot of cases.
Sprites? But we're talking about 3D dreamcast games.. If you want proof for my "meant to be run through composite" theory, just look at the Sega Saturn. It tries to hide its inability to do transparency by using stipples. These stipples would be blurred and somewhat close to a transparency through RF or composite, but the effect is completly lost through s-video or RGB.
On an HDTV yes, but the scanlines on an SDTV already filter the images themselves and are used to produce those effects. The only reason composite cables were included was because they were for the most part the de-facto home standard at the time.
Also 'extra geometry' is just fancy words for panorama mode where an image is stretched and morphed gradually by the graphics card to simulate true widescreen, but it's still a 4:3 image regardless. 3D or 2D a game will be limited by it's programming and if it's code is in SD or ED then it's always in SD or ED no matter how nice your emulators, filters, upscaling or 'extra geometry' is.
My Consoles: Genesis - Nomad - SegaCD - GameGear - Sega Saturn - Dreamcast - NES - SNES - N64 - Gamecube - Wii - Playstation - PSone & LCD - PS2 - PS3 - Xbox - 3DS
Niode wrote:Send him a dodgy cheque. Make it out to Scammy McScammerson.
Please tell me how this image is stretched. It's a dreamcast game running on an emulator through dual projectors. Anything beyond the HUD would not be there in a normal 4:3 image that was stretched. Where is your proof that it doesnt render higher than 480p? Explain why a high resolution image produced by the emulator looks tons better than a 480p image of the game resized in photoshop. If it was simple resizing it should look the same. Moreover I've tried running my dreamcast through vga on my projector, and the picture just looks like shit. While through the emulator, the image isnt too far away from a next gen game.
tgod wrote:Please tell me how this image is stretched. It's a dreamcast game running on an emulator through dual projectors. Anything beyond the HUD would not be there in a normal 4:3 image that was stretched. Where is your proof that it doesnt render higher than 480p? Explain why a high resolution image produced by the emulator looks tons better than a 480p image of the game resized in photoshop. If it was simple resizing it should look the same.
Camera hacks such as that aside, a picture of the upscaled software taken in an emulator will look better than a resized photoshopping taken from a DC's composite out, that's just basic knowledge.
When you say render you mean the image that you see after all of the upscaling and post processing has been done, yes polygons have no actual resolution but the game code is limited to the DC's max specs. When I see an emulated image rendered in a far higher resolution all I see is an image that has had filters and other forms of 'enhancement' forced on it butchering the true image. In the end I'm a hardware purist so I'm a stubborn bastard when it comes to all of this stuff.
My Consoles: Genesis - Nomad - SegaCD - GameGear - Sega Saturn - Dreamcast - NES - SNES - N64 - Gamecube - Wii - Playstation - PSone & LCD - PS2 - PS3 - Xbox - 3DS
Niode wrote:Send him a dodgy cheque. Make it out to Scammy McScammerson.
tgod wrote:Please tell me how this image is stretched. It's a dreamcast game running on an emulator through dual projectors. Anything beyond the HUD would not be there in a normal 4:3 image that was stretched. Where is your proof that it doesnt render higher than 480p? Explain why a high resolution image produced by the emulator looks tons better than a 480p image of the game resized in photoshop. If it was simple resizing it should look the same.
Camera hacks such as that aside, a picture of the upscaled software taken in an emulator will look better than a resized photoshopping taken from a DC's composite out, that's just basic knowledge.
When you say render you mean the image that you see after all of the upscaling and post processing has been done, yes polygons have no actual resolution but the game code is limited to the DC's max specs. When I see an emulated image rendered in a far higher resolution all I see is an image that has had filters and other forms of 'enhancement' forced on it butchering the true image. In the end I'm a hardware purist so I'm a stubborn bastard when it comes to all of this stuff.
Same here. Plus you would have to provide better pictures than a cell phone pick taken sideways to convince me otherwise on that game. The fact that you are saying that a Dreamcast game isn't that far off from a game "next-gen" (which is stupid to say, considering it's not next gen because guess what, all that hardware is out now) just shows your ignorance. A Dreamcast game can only have texture maps a certain size, and I can garuntee you that its a great deal smaller than we have today. Same with polygon count etc.
Mod_Man and I have been trying to tell you whats all wrong with your claims in the first place. He put it very well
Mod_Man_Extreme wrote:yes polygons have no actual resolution but the game code is limited to the DC's max specs
tgod wrote:If the game's code was limited to the DC's specs, than why do games that lag on consoles not lag on emulator? It must be using the extra specs?
Emulators have settings to overclock the hardware. Anyway, there is not a single case where it would not lag on a emulator and would on the hardware. It's an emulator for the 5 billionth time. It is replicating the structure and operation of the original game hardware. So even if you are overclocking in the emulator, you are basically increasing the max specs of the hardware.
tgod wrote:If the game's code was limited to the DC's specs, than why do games that lag on consoles not lag on emulator? It must be using the extra specs?
Emulators operate differently than hardware and have things such as security bottlenecks, v sync and frame limiters removed which accounts for the speed increases. Of course you can reactivate all of these via the menu and get a more accurate to hardware experience, but usually at the sacrifice of a high framerate or added glitches.
My Consoles: Genesis - Nomad - SegaCD - GameGear - Sega Saturn - Dreamcast - NES - SNES - N64 - Gamecube - Wii - Playstation - PSone & LCD - PS2 - PS3 - Xbox - 3DS
Niode wrote:Send him a dodgy cheque. Make it out to Scammy McScammerson.
RyaNtheSlayA wrote:The fact that you are saying that a Dreamcast game isn't that far off from a game "next-gen" (which is stupid to say, considering it's not next gen because guess what, all that hardware is out now) just shows your ignorance. A Dreamcast game can only have texture maps a certain size, and I can garuntee you that its a great deal smaller than we have today. Same with polygon count etc.
Excuse me for wanting to give my beloved console a little flattery. You still can't deny the system's GPU was powerful for its time, with its deferred rendering technique that would only render what was on the screen, saving fillrate.
For me its either having a shitty display using the original console, or using my display's native resolution and having a good quality picture.
Last edited by tgod on Sun Sep 27, 2009 2:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
RyaNtheSlayA wrote:The fact that you are saying that a Dreamcast game isn't that far off from a game "next-gen" (which is stupid to say, considering it's not next gen because guess what, all that hardware is out now) just shows your ignorance. A Dreamcast game can only have texture maps a certain size, and I can garuntee you that its a great deal smaller than we have today. Same with polygon count etc.
Excuse me for wanting to give my beloved console a little flattery. You still can't deny the system's GPU was powerful for its time, with its deferred rendering technique that would only render what was on the screen, saving fillrate.
For me its either having a shitty display using the original console, or using my display's native resolution and having a good quality picture.
The DC is probably in my top 3 consoles of all time. I'm in no way denying that for the late 90's and early 2000's, it was a beautiful piece of hardware. I understand you have a different opinion of what looks better and thats fine, you just need to understand the facts about the hardware and software and how it all works. All you are doing is applying filters on top of the image. Mod_Man's statement on how emulators handle things also applies.
Last edited by RyaNtheSlayA on Sun Sep 27, 2009 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
RyaNtheSlayA wrote:Don't change the subject. The DC is probably in my top 3 consoles of all time. I'm in no way denying that for the late 90's and early 2000's, it was a beautiful piece of hardware. I understand you have a different opinion of what looks better and thats fine, you just need to understand the facts about the hardware and software and how it all works. All you are doing is applying filters on top of the image. Mod_Man's statement on how emulators handle things also applies.
But there is no magic resizing chip than can make a 480p picture look HD in my graphics card. The emulator is intercepting the game's calls to the hardware and replacing them with similar PC equivalents, thus game runs at higher resolution.
