over the last year developer Mike Simone (MikeS) has been working hard implementing high-quality composite1 and s-video output capability in the MiSTer FPGA project.
he's finally done cooking. result? largely fantastic. look at that shot of NES Gun.Smoke in composite. it's exquisitely analog, perfectly imperfect (the display is my PVM-2950Q). i love it and am excited about likely adopting composite video, and sometimes s-video, as my daily driver for various consoles.
but, getting ahead of myself. let's talk about how this is working, why i like it, and that time two of Sonic's creators went on record shit-talking Sega's penny-pinching on the Mega Drive.
as interpreted by MiSTer's Y/C MD core, that is.
Eternal Champions uses a ton of dithering to create transparencies and smooth gradients. this stage's fog looks much nicer in composite because the transparency effect actually comes through. you can see a lot of smoothed color blending on the wooden buildings and other areas too.
meanwhile s-video is just too good at resolving fine detail for these effects to still function; instead you see every pixel rendered discretely. this really hurts the look of this game, in my opinion.
unfortunately the Mega Drive's composite picture is also just all around poor, resulting in an abundance of blurriness and smeared details beyond what the dithering effects require. if you check out the composite NES shots in my post above they look way cleaner than this, showing just how nice composite can look.
so the choice here1 is between unpleasantly artifacted visuals with effects that are truer to the original intent / MD visual tricks or overly sharp visuals that bungle some very important transparencies and gradients. i'm still really hoping MikeS (creator of the Y/C cores) sees fit to release the tweaked MD core he's teased that has much cleaner (than a real MD) composite video out2.
speaking of, amazing news on the Y/C core front: yesterday MiSTer project lead Sorgelig accepted a pull request to incorporate MikeS' Y/C work into MiSTer's main branch. so, goodbye to separate Y/C cores, and hello to mainstream MiSTer cores having native composite / s-video output forevermore. Lovely!
- should mention that the MiSTer MD core also has an option to fake composite-style pixel-blending with a software algorithm. in RGB i find it "neat" but a half-measure, and it causes some artifacts itself. that said i haven't tried it with s-video yet, and i should.
- a real have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too proposition! but why not improve old hardware a bit, when today's technology allows it? as long as it's optional, of course.
