TVs

[johnnyb]

Government legislation dictated that any light gun created after 1990 must suck ass.

This was repealed right before the Guncon was released.

You are so full of ..... knowledge Rusty! What would we do without you?

[war2thegrave]

Government legislation dictated that any light gun created after 1990 must suck ass.

This was repealed right before the Guncon was released.

Certianly, you must be forgetting the awesomeness of the Justifier.

[Rusty Venture]

You are so full of ..... knowledge Rusty! What would we do without you?

Wander aimlessly through life.

[iluvclassicgaming]

Go on craigslist.com for your area and check for Sony or Panasonic 27" crt's. If one is cheap enough for you, take the chance.
They're the best for classic gaming and people are dumping them cheap for the latest and greatest.

Personally, I hate playing games on widescreen tv's.

[retrospiel]

^ what he wrote.

[Devil N]

Incorrect. The signal sent to the TV IS 240p, not 480i. The TV interlaces only when a half a horizontal line difference is introduced to the vertical sync signal. So an interlaced signal generates 262.5 H lines per field, while a console in non-interlaced mode generates 262 H lines per field. That extra .5 H is critical for interlacing as it actually laces the lines of the next field between the lines of the previous field. Without the half line, the next field is drawn directly over top the previous field. These are NTSC figures, of course. PAL has more lines at a slower field rate.

I've done some more digging, and I hadn't fully realized before that 240p/288p exist as non-standard variants of NTSC/PAL, nor what that exactly meant in practice, nor that it was common for classic consoles to use this.

Of course I now have to test how my TV actually handles these non-standard progressive signals. I don't have my Mega Drive at hand at the moment, so I used Rayman on my PS2 to get a 288p signal. If this Wikipedia article is to be believed, older PS1 games on a PS2 should still result in a 240p/288p signal. So a first-generation PS1 game such as Rayman should do the trick, and its 2D graphics make it easy to see if my TV is deinterlacing or not. Result: the following movie.



As you can see, while the 288p signal should not require any deinterlacing, my TV apparently treats it as a normal 576i signal and deinterlaces it nonetheless. Thanks to the Toshiba's awesome Faroudja DCDi deinterlacer however, the image quality remains very good. Note how the jagged edge of the mountain in the background becomes smoother in motion, without becoming blurry.

Still, I can't be 100% sure that this was 288p, so I'll have to hook up my Mega Drive at some point to guarantee that my TV is getting a progressive signal.

Either way, no matter how good my TV manages to make PAL/NTSC signals look, playing classic games on it just doesn't look right. I'll stick with a CRT for my Mega Drive until there's not a single CRT TV left on this planet.

[Chilly Willy]

One of my HDTVs mentions 240p in the list of modes supported, but the other doesn't. Nice video clip - you can definitely see the artifacts, but it's not really bad. I suppose some games look worse than others with that issue.

[Devil N]

Right. My TV's manual doesn't make any mention of 240p/288p support, only 480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, 720p and 1080i. Of course I didn't choose my TV with 240p in mind. The Faroudja DCDi chip was a conscious choice, on the other hand.

Also, while playing Rayman to make that movie, I had to look really hard to verify that it did any deinterlacing. When the image is still, it looks just as pixellated as it should, without artifacts of any kind. But when the image is in motion, your brain already tends to smoothen out what you see, making it difficult to see if any deinterlacing is taking place. It wasn't until I saw that mountain edge that I was absolutely sure the deinterlacer was active.

Also, as mentioned before, the only time I can actually see any deinterlacing artifacts (as in: the deinterlacer really fucks up) is on flickering effects used for transparency and shadows. I've seen other LCD TVs that do much worse in that respect than mine.

[Chilly Willy]

Right. My TV's manual doesn't make any mention of 240p/288p support, only 480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, 720p and 1080i. Of course I didn't choose my TV with 240p in mind. The Faroudja DCDi chip was a conscious choice, on the other hand.

I don't think most people think of that when buying an HDTV. I mean, you're thinking of HD, not old consoles. I know I didn't think about myself... I was more worried about it working with the PS3.