Official Upscaling Thread or let's make old games look better 32xAA AND 16xAF PLZ OMG

[Pharmacy]

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Pixel art scaling algorithms are image scaling algorithms specifically designed to enlarge low-resolution pixel and line art that contains thin lines, solid areas of colour rather than gradient fills or shading, and has not been anti-aliased.

for the "non-wikipedia" of us out there, this also means taking an old videogame, 2D or 3D, scaling up the resolution, then applying all amounts of filters to create a more visually pleasing image
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2xSai

if you've ever used an emulator before, you'll know what this filter is. Bog standard in all emulators, works well with most 2D games and a staple for 3D texture filtering in PSOne emulation



HQ3x

the high-quality filter appears in most emulators. Works great on games with highier resolution sprites like CPS2 and other arcade titles, but generally gives a "watercolour" look on older games (personal preference really)



Scanlines

scanlines are fucking baaaallin' in motion and allow you to scale up things quite a bit with no other filters needed. Also pretty retro if you're into that sort of thing (aka jizz over original sprites and hate 3D gaming SEGA FOREVER)



Anti-Aliasing (AA)

the thing that PC gamers fap about and console gamers wish they could have. AA makes all the edges of objects and geometry smooth, getting rid of "jaggies"



and if that isn't self-explanatory:


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Final Fantasy VII smoothed out - Insert Credit


ballin ass comparison with Yoshis Island - chubigans


HQ3x on Chrono Trigger - Gilgamesh


Legend of best game ever - Danne-Danger


Final Fantasy VIII - Insert Credit again


off screen shot of the King of Fighters 2000, HQ3x & AF applied - BY ME ITS ME IM THE ONE WHO TOOK IT


Paper Mario with AA - theultimo


Dragon Ball GT - ITS MY SCREEN I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT


you all have a boner for contra so i thought id put this one in - Seiken


he just wanted a namedrop in the OP, but i love him and his screens anyways - Alaluef


heres quake with a bunch of filters on - Sciz


bee you are a hero, after posting screens like this i think some serious love making must take place?????

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post your screens! post your screens! post your screens!
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me...........................pepsimanvsjoe

[Dali]

Oh Noez! Now the 2D sprite fetishists are going to eviscerate you for this blasphemy. I got your back dog.

[ThePeter]

This is not the thread you promised. >_<

[DigitalA1chemy]

2D stuff looks worse. 3D stuff looks better.

[Chittagong]

2D stuff looks worse. 3D stuff looks better.

.

[Sumasshu]

Oh Noez! Now the 2D sprite fetishists are going to eviscerate you for this blasphemy. I got your back dog.

2D stuff looks worse. 3D stuff looks better.

.

My mind has just been blown.



What goggles are you guys wearing, and where can I get a pair?

[Powerslave]

I want to blow your mind.

[jooey]

it's like when you were a kid and would make a bead-art picture then you iron it out to melt it slightly and it doesn't come out looking like you wanted it to in your head

[medze]

I love the way 2d games are enhanced by this.

And another example, including one of my favorite 2d titles of all time

[DigitalA1chemy]

What goggles are you guys wearing, and where can I get a pair?

In 2D games with hand-drawn sprites, especially those with particularly low resolutions like most classic games, every sprite is made to completely maximize the amount of pixels it is allotted. When done well this results in incredible looking art in games like Metal Slug and Yoshi's Island shown above. Once you start scaling them up to higher resolutions and smoothing them out, you're adding more pixels but you're not increasing the amount of detail. What you're left with looses most of the fine-tuned attention to detail and ends up looking like a shitty watercolor painting.

It's all personal preference, of course. A lot of people just admire well-done pixel art.

[theultimo]

Megaman 3 Hq2x Vs Standard. Subtle, but a lot nicer at higher res.

HQ2x


Standard


Contra
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HQ2x:


Standard


Scale2x


Mario 3
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Hq2x:


Standard


Scale2x

[SOLDIER]

I like the concept of the thread, but please be sure to

1. Show lots of screencaps

2. Provide links to the different filters and shaders used.

[Powerslave]

I already posted it in the FF7 thread from Himuro, but I can't get the ePSXe emulator to work. I get an error about a missing framebuffer extension.

I would post lots of screencaps if I could.

[Draft]

I don't think it's a one size fits all solution. Some games look great, some look like shit.

[theultimo]

I don't think it's a one size fits all solution. Some games look great, some look like shit.

True, but almost all 8 bit games look a lot nicer with HQ2x on a larger screen. It works great for classic titles.

[Imperial Hot]

I don't think it's a one size fits all solution. Some games look great, some look like shit.

Agreed. Contra looks fucking retarded, and so does Mario, but Yoshi's Island looks pretty fucking hot.

This isn't for all games, but when it does work, god damn it's pretty hot(FF7).

[Oneself]

Sony should take note and add this kind of filter options to the next PS3 firmware update. I'd like my eyes to not bleed when I play PSone on my HDTV.

[Eteric Rice]

Seems to work with 3D.

2D looks like shit with it, though.

[ThePeter]

Gimme some Atari 2600.

[kbear]

I think the 2D looks great as well. I don't see any 'subtle detail loss' in those pics.

[theultimo]

I think the 2D looks great as well. I don't see any 'subtle detail loss' in those pics.

Some people like the pixely look more then the smoothed out look. I personally prefer the latter.

[Diablos]

These filters are hard to get used to. I tried playing Chrono Trigger with HQ2x and it looked weird. HQ3x and especially 4x were overkill.

It sharpens stuff, but it looks TOO sharp. The way it handles small changes in direction (such as a small slant of someone's mouth, or something like that) always looks kinda messed up.

[CrushDance]

Sony should take note and add this kind of filter options to the next PS3 firmware update. I'd like my eyes to not bleed when I play PSone on my HDTV.

Final Fantasy 8 looked like jaggy city :(

[McBradders]

I don't like the 2D stuff, 3D looks like they promised the future would in 1988.

[Router]

Leave my pixels alone damn it!

[Phaethon0017]

I need to look into doing this for my PS1 games. I've been playing them on my PSP, so I haven't noticed the jaggies so much. But it looks like it'd be kick ass to try anyway.

[_dementia]

Faux scanlines over the standard image is perfect for 2D. Fuck the AA.

[DavidDayton]

Ack... it's like my glasses are covered with a thick layer of vaseline.

(Seriously though, I don't get how the "upscaled" versions look like anything OTHER than ghastly, blurred out stuff. Is there a big difference between folks using standard displays and the new LCD/plasma stuff?)

[drohne]

keep those hq whatever filters away from my pixel art pls

i like a little bilinear filtering if i'm using a flat panel. no filtering on crts.

[Dr. Kitty Muffins]

2D stuff looks worse. 3D stuff looks better.

All of it looks better to me. I'm not a purist. I would rather it look like how nostalgia has colored it in my mind than to see it as it actually was so long ago.

[Josh7289]

For the 3D, that's not upscaled, but the game is simply running in a higher resolution (along with some filters and other graphical tricks touching up the image a bit).

[VideoMan]

[Tain]

I'm all for running old 3D games with high AA at high resolutions, but as said a million times in here, 2D filters are simply ass ugly. Like every single part of the above post.



^ This monstrous image? Save for HUD sprites, this is great. Hell, if we could run Sonic the Hedgehog like this:



...then we might be doing something kind of interesting, but emulators can't quite do that.

[chubigans]

I don't think games like Zelda benefit all that much...whereas Yoshi's Island looks MUCH more like it was intended: a storybook like game. Unfiltered to right, new enhanced to left:



Enhanced on bottom:

[KennyL]

Faux scanlines over the standard image is perfect for 2D. Fuck the AA.

Incorrect. 1:1 is the only way.

[usea]

You're blind, those are terrible. And if you're trying to wow people with the clarity of those images, couldn't you maybe not fill them with compression artifacts?

[Tain]

Faux scanlines at 25% visible when done properly over a 2:1 image is perfect, if the options are there.

1:1 isn't bad, but the games weren't intended to be displayed quite like that.

And if you're on an LCD, then prescaling followed by some bilinear filtering is probably as good as you're going to get.

[_dementia]

Incorrect. 1:1 is the only way.

Not on a flat panel display. Faux scanlines are almost necessary.

[Slavik81]

You're blind, those are terrible. And if you're trying to wow people with the clarity of those images, couldn't you maybe not fill them with compression artifacts?

What?

I have my face up against the screen looking at individual pixels trying to see these compression artifacts you speak of. Then again, I don't really know what sort of compression artifacts a PNG file would have as I normally only really notice them in JPGs.

[Ydahs]

Yoshi's Island

Now that looks good.

[usea]

What? I have my face up against the screen looking at individual pixels trying to see these compression artifacts you speak of. Then again, I don't really know what sort of compression artifacts a PNG file would have as I normally only really notice them in JPGs.

I'm not replying to you, I wasn't going to quote a post of images and no text. If you can't tell from context clues, I'm responding to people who are posting jpgs.

However my point about those being terrible still stands. Fucking bad.

[VideoMan]

You're blind, those are terrible. And if you're trying to wow people with the clarity of those images, couldn't you maybe not fill them with compression artifacts?

If you're talking about the ones I put up, yea, photobucket auto-resized and compressed them. I've already deleted the originals and it's late so I'm not redoing them. Just imagine them without compression. You can do it.

[Elbrain]

Damn I was just talking to my friend about this subject that if 2d games had AA like 3d games do it would be over. I just wish there would be an easy way to do this for all 2d maybe in 20 years or something.

[arhra]

What? I have my face up against the screen looking at individual pixels trying to see these compression artifacts you speak of. Then again, I don't really know what sort of compression artifacts a PNG file would have as I normally only really notice them in JPGs.

I think he was referring to the images in theultimo's post (which are, indeed, filled with nasty jpeg compression artifacts).

Really depends on the game (or rather, the artwork) whether the scaling algorithms work well or not, imo. Yoshi's Island generally comes out OK thanks to the sketchy art (although you still get the occasional bout of nastiness now and then), but that LttP title screen is a perfect example of where they go horribly, horribly wrong - the wobbly-edged A, artifacts on the inner edge of the shading in the Z, the many and various artifacts on the outline of the triforce in the background, etc.

[AdmiralViscen]

I like the concept of the thread, but please be sure to 2. Provide links to the different filters and shaders used.

plz

[doogles]

I want to blow your mind.

You're back!

I love the way 2d games are enhanced by this. And another example, including one of my favorite 2d titles of all time

I think this, and the Yoshi ones, are my favorite.

[Sharp]

Personally I think Super Metroid loses something with upscaling, considering how fucking perfect the sprite art is. Of the 2D games posted here, Yoshi's Island and maybe Earthbound are the only ones that I really see an improvement in. I find the effect much more useful for GB games, which are almost unplayable on a big screen without it thanks to the low resolution.

[Gilgamesh]

Chrono Trigger with HQ3X







Can't believe the people saying this is worse.

[Sharp]

Gilgamesh, the top image you posted emphasizes most of what is wrong with upscaling. The beautifully constructed ground textures just look blurry, the characters overly bright and smoothed to the point of unrecognizability, and the water is a mess. It's one of the main reasons I don't usually like upscaling in games. Again, this is for 2D games only, which featured nonvector sprite art! 3D art, or vector art in general, will pretty much always benefit from a higher resolution.

[PepsimanVsJoe]

Nice my eyes just melted out of their sockets.