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[lazygecko]

http://www.retrocollect.com/News/ni...cs-via-action-replay-or-flash-cartridges.html

Thought this was interesting. The "normal" way of doing it is via ROM hacking, but it turns out you can even disable it using Pro Action Replay codes, so if you have one of those you don't need to bother with IPS patching and flash carts. Results are going to vary from game to game, but more often than not it does seem to look better.

 

[Shiggy]

Don"t hacks usually try to make games look better, not worse?

 

[E-Cat]

Looks like a PS1 game. Clearer, but more jagged.

 

[-shadow-]

But why would I want to remove the AA?

 

[SerTapTap]

Can you disable the texture filtering too? I always thought textures looked worse on n64, not sure about this AA situation since CRTs blur to about that degree anyway.

But why would I want to remove the AA?

No AA is occasionally preferable to bad AA. I'm not intimately familiar with N64's AA method, but FXAAx2 can make some textures less readable.

 

[mullet2000]

But why would I want to remove the AA?

N64 games are kind of notorious for being pretty blurry.

 

[E-Cat]

N64 games are kind of notorious for being pretty blurry.

'Smeared with vaseline' comes to mind.

 

[3bdelillah]

i'm not very technical, but isn't aa supposed to make games look better? how does it make them blurrier?

 

[Borman]

i'm not very technical, but isn't aa supposed to make games look better? how does it make them blurrier?

Not all AA is created equally.

 

[Pancake Mix]

Better? OoT looks worse in your example without AA.

 

[Crayon]

i'm not very technical, but isn't aa supposed to make games look better? how does it make them blurrier?

The n64 had pretty crude aa method.

 

[Jonneh3003]

Better? OoT looks worse in your example without AA.

I think it looks a lot better, the image on the left is pretty blurry.

 

[lazygecko]

i'm not very technical, but isn't aa supposed to make games look better? how does it make them blurrier?

Early primitive AA at low resolutions really doesn't do much to help image quality. Everything gets this uniform blur, but you can still clearly see all those jaggy lines that the function is meant to mitgate. Hell, it's something we've still had to contend with in more modern times with FXAA.

In theory removing the AA should also provide a performance boost for N64 games. Not something I can verify though.

 

[Celine]

Some N64 games (especially early in the life span) were a bit too blurry but overall N64 blurriness is overstated IMO.
I'm not sure what is the advantage to disable the AA filter when developers keep it in mind when developing the final game aesthetic (for example the filter hide the low res textures used for terrains in most cases).
On the other hand if you get a framerate improvement by disabling it then it could be interesting...

 

[slash000]

Not yet convinced that for N64 games, the lack of AA is better than the AA.

But it's really hard to decide based on these photographs, prob would have to try it for myself.


As for the texture blurring-
Removing the texture filter that "blurs" the textures won't suddenly make the textures crisp, either. I know it's a common request "How can we disable that texture blurring! So blurry!" but the end result would make the textures blocky like a PS1 game and just as lacking in resolution / not crisp at all.

 

[Spiritwalker]

Better? OoT looks worse in your example without AA.

No it doesn't

 

[lazygecko]

I'm not sure what is the advantage to disable the AA filter when developers keep it in mind when developing the final game aesthetic (for example the filter hide the low res textures used for terrains in most case).

That's bilinear filtering which is unrelated to antialiasing.

 

[SatanicNemesis2K]

Need to get a cheap action replay and try this out on my CRT, I can imagine it looking much better.

 

[Tain]

Interesting, and possibly preferable on SD CRTs. How about 480i games?

And I assume official N64 emulation skips this step when rendering at higher resolutions.

 

[Domaje]

I like more the original version with AA.

 

[Ivan Amiibo]

makes the details so much clearer in that shot


gaf responses going about as expected. not sure if retro threads are even worth it in the main forum these days.

 

[Zomba13]

Eh, I prefer the slightly more blurry less jaggy versions. Never had an issue with N64 games being too blurry.

 

[Celine]

That's bilinear filtering which is unrelated to antialiasing.

You are right, I've used the wrong term.
The concept still persist.

I quote a Mega old post:

They're low-res textures stretched over polygons which creates a mess of big pixels in some games. Then the (bilinear?) filter blurs them to hell. I think some emulators let you disable this filter. Then you can really see how limited N64 textures were compared to PS1, Saturn, even the DS.

 

[entremet]

N64 fans who still play the system and want an upgrade for modern displays should consider the HDMI mod, which has been getting great feedback.

This long and informative video has details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpy1M6v2_MI

 

[Jinkies]

Play N64 games on an emulator in 1080p widescreen. No blur.

 

[lazygecko]

As for the texture blurring-
Removing the texture filter that "blurs" the textures won't suddenly make the textures crisp, either. I know it's a common request "How can we disable that texture blurring! So blurry!" but the end result would make the textures blocky like a PS1 game and just as lacking in resolution / not crisp at all.

It all depends on the game. Often for 3D games in the 90's, the textures were essentially pixel art where just a single pixel line could infer specific fundamental details. That kind of art direction tends to scale up without filtering pretty well. It's why I prefer to play Doom and Quake with filtering turned off. MGS1 would be another example.

Here's a Quake 1 texture scaled 2X with and without filtering. It's pretty clear to me that the filtering is detrimental to its quality and detail.

 

[-shadow-]

You are right, I've used the wrong term.
The concept still persist.

I quote a Mega old post:

Wow. This is really something! I just want a texture filtering for DS games in the DS emulator. But we jsut got HD resolution rendering, so that'll probably take a while.

 

[Tain]

Play N64 games on an emulator in 1080p widescreen. No blur.

also no aesthetic cohesion

 

[slash000]

It all depends on the game. Often for 3D games in the 90's, the textures were essentially pixel art where just a single pixel line could infer specific fundamental details. That kind of art direction tends to scale up without filtering pretty well. It's why I prefer to play Doom and Quake with filtering turned off. MGS1 would be another example.

Here's a Quake 1 texture scaled 2X with and without filtering. It's pretty clear to me that the filtering is detrimental to its quality and detail.

Agreed.
Mostly I was referring to the comments I often see expecting that disabling bilinear filtering will somehow make things crisp in all cases, when that isn't true; other than your excellent Quake example.

 

[MrNelson]

But why would I want to remove the AA?

I'll take no AA over something like FXAA.

 

[Gipsy Danger]

Those Mario Kart/Mario 64 screens look SO much better without AA. I never noticed before but seeing them side-by-side that blur is surprisingly pronounced.

 

[Celine]

Wow. This is really something! I just want a texture filtering for DS games in the DS emulator. But we jsut got HD resolution rendering, so that'll probably take a while.

Keep in mind that those screenshots were probably taken from emulators so the final result on a CRT may be slightly better.
However it should be useful to demonstrate that , since bilinear filtering was a required (by Nintendo)/free hardware feature, developers adapted their efforts to live with it and other N64 hardware limitations (as it is always the case for every hardware).
So disabling the bilinear filter is not automatically an improvement.

 

[dark10x]

Ha, people comparing this to FXAA. Not even remotely similar.

What the N64 does is quite interesting and really did attempt to eliminate aliasing at 240p but it definitely reduces apparent detail and makes for some VERY blurry games. Some games allow you to disable this (ie - Quake).

 

[Crazymoogle]

Thought this was interesting. The "normal" way of doing it is via ROM hacking, but it turns out you can even disable it using Pro Action Replay codes, so if you have one of those you don't need to bother with IPS patching and flash carts.

That's because it is a hardware feature; most games used it because the way Nintendo and SGI built the console, the performance hit of using it was virtually zero. (For awhile they even asked for it on at submission) So it was trivial to turn off but there was never a real reason to do so.

 

[Mac@NeoGAF]

Just about every N64 game I played back in the day gave me headache after an hour or so because of the horrible blurred output.

 

[Light_End]

Don"t hacks usually try to make games look better, not worse?

It always kind of confuses me when people live and die by AA. I will rarely care if a game lacks it, and if i have the option to increase performance slightly by turning it off, i'll do it every single time. I prefer the clear sharpness over what little is sacrificed in order to make it look smooth.

Maybe it has something to do with me being nearsighted, i dunno. I recently got FFXIV on PC, my PC destroys it on its highest settings but I voluntarily turn AA off.

 

[Akuun]

I think OoT used edge smoothing AA and not FXAA. That's why the edges look blurred rather than jaggy.

I don't get this talk about blurry N64 games. It was just how things looked back in the day.

 

[Diablohead]

The last time I booted up star fox on my n64 I remember it being blurry in places, I wonder how it would look with this kind of trick.

 

[Nikodemos]

It all depends on the game. Often for 3D games in the 90's, the textures were essentially pixel art where just a single pixel line could infer specific fundamental details. That kind of art direction tends to scale up without filtering pretty well. It's why I prefer to play Doom and Quake with filtering turned off. MGS1 would be another example.

Here's a Quake 1 texture scaled 2X with and without filtering. It's pretty clear to me that the filtering is detrimental to its quality and detail.

The shift between the clear and the filtered versions makes me go cross-eyed. Fuck, filtering is atrocious.

And yes, N64 was crap when it came to texture clarity. Look at upscaled shots with all effects removed of Saturn, PS1 and N64 games. The N64 ones are the worst-looking.

Of course, at the time it was difficult to notice how bad the textures were due to CRTs smearing everything to shit.

 

[Celine]

Ha, people comparing this to FXAA. Not even remotely similar.

What the N64 does is quite interesting and really did attempt to eliminate aliasing at 240p but it definitely reduces apparent detail and makes for some VERY blurry games. Some games allow you to disable this (ie - Quake).

Top Gear Rally too, allowed you to experienced a "playstation mode" (funny name chosen by the developer).
You just need to input the following code while racing:
B, Left, Right, Up, Left, Z, Right

 

[nkarafo]

Don"t hacks usually try to make games look better, not worse?

In the case of the N64, this is better IMO. N64 has terrible video output quality and it's also very low res, like all the consoles of the time but PS1 and SAT had much better output quality at least. Add to that how most developers didn't bother trying to overcome the texture limitations of the cache+low storage and you have a pretty blurry image. The AA only added to the blurriness so whatever you can do to help making the image sharper is welcome in my book.

At least this is better than removing texture filtering (which makes the textures look even blockier than a PS1 game due to the smaller textures used most of the time)

Ha, people comparing this to FXAA. Not even remotely similar.

What the N64 does is quite interesting and really did attempt to eliminate aliasing at 240p but it definitely reduces apparent detail and makes for some VERY blurry games. Some games allow you to disable this (ie - Quake).

You are talking about texture filtering. This is different.

 

[Castef]

'Smeared with vaseline' comes to mind.

"Stop hitting me in the eyes" too.

 

[lazygecko]

Textures on N64 geometry seems to moreso be used as some kind of glorified gourad shading. Other hardware seemed to have enough memory to let developers to strike a balance between texture fidelity and repeated tiling. If they had gone with the tiling approach on N64 (apart from things like brick walls which by their nature are repetitive), things would have looked excessively tiled so they probably just prefered to stretch out the textures over large surfaces and just let the filtering smear it all out.

 

[nkarafo]

Textures on N64 geometry seems to moreso be used as some kind of glorified gourad shading.

That's because developers were using tiny textures that would stretch afterwards. Very few developers bothered making lots of textures + combining them to make a bigger one (like how RARE did with Banjo Kazzoie/Tooie). I think this is because of the tiny texture cache. You could overcome it easily but developers didn't care about the N64 enough to do so.

Also, some games seem like they don't have the usual texture issues. DOOM 64 is the best example.

Edit: I just saw your edit, damn

 

[Celine]

Textures on N64 geometry seems to moreso be used as some kind of glorified gourad shading.

4kb texture cache is a known bottleneck for N64.
At least they don't get distorted

 

[entremet]

N64 didn't look too bad on a smaller CRT.

I had a Samsung GXTV and it was rather excellent for its time.

 

[jediyoshi]

It always kind of confuses me when people live and die by AA. I will rarely care if a game lacks it, and if i have the option to increase performance slightly by turning it off, i'll do it every single time. I prefer the clear sharpness over what little is sacrificed in order to make it look smooth.

Completely depends on the AA method, it can't be generalized like that.

i'm not very technical, but isn't aa supposed to make games look better? how does it make them blurrier?

TLDR: Depending on the AA, some techniques work by essentially taking a frame that's already completely rendered, analyzing jagged edges, and then blurring.

 

[nkarafo]

I wonder if this makes games with unlocked frame rate (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark) run smoother on the actual hardware. Has anyone ever tested this?

 

[borghe]

Looks like a PS1 game. Clearer, but more jagged.

was going to post exactly this. N64 was a bit blurry, but between filtering and AA at least held a distinction over PSX (which was very raw). Now it just looks like PSX...

I was always in the "N64 looks better" camp. So this change does not appeal to me. N64 games (on the actual console) hold up WAY better than PSX games (on the actual console), aside from 2D PSX stuff which is still mostly flawless.

 

[nkarafo]

was going to post exactly this. N64 was a bit blurry, but between filtering and AA at least held a distinction over PSX (which was very raw). Now it just looks like PSX...

I was always in the "N64 looks better" camp. So this change does not appeal to me. N64 games (on the actual console) hold up WAY better than PSX games (on the actual console), aside from 2D PSX stuff which is still mostly flawless.

Goldeneye looks much better without AA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csgtihnp75c

Just look at how the walls look....