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What was the N64 game with the overall best graphics?

Also, my PAL Trinitron had barely visible scanlines, most PAL users wouldn't have scanlines at all due to the smaller size in PAL regions and colour bleed.

I always wondered about this, I never noticed scanlines when I was a kid. The image was a little fuzzy sure, but never had 'lines' along the screen. The biggest problem with most games back then was the huge borders top and bottom of the screen! I wish OpenEmu on mac had a 'PAL' filter.
 
WDC was the goat and Boss Studios didn't use the expansion pack. They cropped the image in "high res".

P.s. It was really interesting the first stuff of Eternal Darkness running on n64 supporting the Expansion pack.



At the time, if you had the chance and the skills to develop a better microcode for the n64 you would have achieved a better result than the standar one.
 

Celine

Member
Im really ok with PS1's wobbly polygons actually. It was a weird time for console graphics but Id take the crispness of PS1 over N64. Was playing Spyro on PS1 and it really holds up fantastic in a way that most N64 titles dont. Its going to be a really subjective era of graphics anyway, so no clear winners here lol.
It was an interesting era in which you could recognize istantly on what console a polygonal game was running on by (quads, jittering, pixellation, kack of transparencies, low res texture, N64 AA).

Personally I can't stand jittering/texture swarming.
It's illogical for a 3D scene to have the image that costantly breaks up.
 

D.Lo

Member
PSX games actually look incorrect if they are too crisp. You can output a crisp image from the console, but the games themselves were made with NTSC colorbleed in mind. This is because, often, for speed, games would downsample from 18/16 bpp to an 8bpp framebuffer that would introduce really nasty fullscreen dither.

When you view many PSX games with crisp output, like you get if you use the SVideo cable, you get stuff like this:

GTdith1.JPG


GTdith2.JPG


Now, that would all look ok if there was a 1 pixel blur applied to the screen, or if there were scanlines, or if there is NTSC/PAL colorbleed going on to mask the dither, but straight, crisp output winds up looking wrong otherwise.
Yep. Not all games, but yes quite a few. And even with scan lines on a consumer CRT it's visible.

When I moved to component for playing PS1 games (on PS2) I thought the display output was broken in certain games. Silent Hill 1 had it pretty bad.
 

Timu

Member
I don't want to be on this thread anymore.gif
They don't, direct capture is the way to go to capture a game without the need of what displays do to see what games looked like without scanlines and such. What I like about them is that they don't hide the flaws that a CRT TV might do, they show them in all of their glory which is suppose to happen just like capturing games from consoles after that gen.
 
I think it's important to take into account the effect a crt has on the image..

Direct feed is not representative of what the console could do at the time. To me the crt is part of the hardware if you're going for original hardware. If you prefer something else that's fine but don't act like direct capture represents how the games originally looked any more than an emulator does. Scart cables and pvm and svideo were all widely available at the time. Direct capture wasn't how almost anybody played those games.
 

Shikamaru Ninja

任天堂 の 忍者
While World Driver Championship is still the definitive answer, I did forget to mention Excitebike 64. Not only did the game play well, but it looked and ran at a solid framerate.
 

Timu

Member
I think it's important to take into account the effect a crt has on the image..

Direct feed is not representative of what the console could do at the time. To me the crt is part of the hardware if you're going for original hardware. If you prefer something else that's fine but don't act like direct capture represents how the games originally looked any more than an emulator does. Scart cables and pvm and svideo were all widely available at the time. Direct capture wasn't how almost anybody played those games.
Emulators shouldn't even be mentioned, at least with direct capture you're actually getting it from the console itself, so it's actually a real screenshot of a game. Yes, back then we didn't have direct capture so CRT TVs were pretty much the way to go, but we now live in a time where we can see what they look like when not on a display. Also since N64 supported up to svideo without modifications scart cables couldn't be used with them. Basically I'm just trying to see them without scanlines since I wanted to know what they looked like and we finally do now.
 
Scart cables and pvm and svideo were all widely available at the time. Direct capture wasn't how almost anybody played those games.

Only if you lived in a PAL region. In North America, Scart cables and pvm were never options, and S-video was limited to TV sets that were generally over 25inch (or maybe it was 27inch?). Back in the day, if you lived in NA and played games on a TV smaller than a 25inch CRT, it more than would likely not have an S-video port on it. For most of us it was composite or coaxial.
 

Timu

Member
Only if you lived in a PAL region. In North America, Scart cables and pvm were never options, and S-video was limited to TV sets that were generally over 25inch (or maybe it was 27inch?). Back in the day, if you played games on a TV smaller than that in NA, you would not have an S-video port on it. For most of us it was composite or coaxial.
Yeah most use composite and yeah, it wasn't pretty.
 

boyshine

Member
Only if you lived in a PAL region. In North America, Scart cables and pvm were never options, and S-video was limited to TV sets that were generally over 25inch (or maybe it was 27inch?). Back in the day, if you played games on a TV smaller than that in NA, you would not have an S-video port on it. For most of us it was composite or coaxial.
SCART or not, N64 didn't support RGB, so it was still just composite with a SCART adapter plug. I live in Europe, and I imported an s-video cable to get the best picture from my PAL N64. It didn't do much, except a little less color bleed from sharp reds and greens. It wasnt until I finally got the RGB mod a few years ago, where SCART could make a difference.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
Kinda surprising TBH. I remember Genesis having awful composite.

The Genesis 2 and 32X at least. The Genesis 1 had pretty alright composite.

The 32X has awful, awful jailbarring when you do composite out from it. It destroys the IQ of any genesis it's attached to.
 

M3d10n

Member
With the current update, I've found that XRGB produces surprisingly realistic results. It's not just black lines alternating, they actually use some slight softening techniques to produce something that looks less stark.

That sounds good. Most scanline filters ignore the fact that scanlines were a byproduct of the way the electron beam scans across the phosphor layer and not an actual physical gap between pixels like on LCDs and that the visible "size" of a "pixel" would vary according to its brightness, like this:


I think a good approach is to render the image using a high-res phosphor-like pattern and linear HDR output, then scale down using bicubic, zinc or lanczos then tonemap into LDR. The good thing about such approach is that you can simulate the output of all kinds of different CRT displays by using different phosphor layouts and luminance ranges.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was one of those N64 games where the developer actually rewrote some the microcode to give themselves more stuff.

I believe they used a lot of it for better sound and more lighting sources.
 

televator

Member
PSX games actually look incorrect if they are too crisp. You can output a crisp image from the console, but the games themselves were made with NTSC colorbleed in mind. This is because, often, for speed, games would downsample from 18/16 bpp to an 8bpp framebuffer that would introduce really nasty fullscreen dither.

When you view many PSX games with crisp output, like you get if you use the SVideo cable, you get stuff like this:

GTdith1.JPG


GTdith2.JPG


Now, that would all look ok if there was a 1 pixel blur applied to the screen, or if there were scanlines, or if there is NTSC/PAL colorbleed going on to mask the dither, but straight, crisp output winds up looking wrong otherwise.

I notice this exact pattern on some PS2 games. I guess this is something that happens in the frame buffer? Would be neat if we could intercept the native frame.
 

FyreWulff

Member
That is the native frame - consoles of the era couldn't actually reproduce all colors natively so developers abused dithering to "mix" colors into other ones via the CRT.

It's why as emulation gets more popular it's also going to be important to have proper CRT emulation as well.
 

televator

Member
That is the native frame - consoles of the era couldn't actually reproduce all colors natively so developers abused dithering to "mix" colors into other ones via the CRT.

It's why as emulation gets more popular it's also going to be important to have proper CRT emulation as well.

Technically, that isn't the native frame. I understand your meaning though. I was thinking it was done due to bandwidth limitations over certain carriers, but I guess it was just a technical limitation.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
That is the native frame - consoles of the era couldn't actually reproduce all colors natively so developers abused dithering to "mix" colors into other ones via the CRT.

No, those consoles could in fact produce all the colors necessary natively. This is not the "native" frame he is talking about. This is indeed the final output framebuffer, but it is produced by reducing the color depth from 18/16/whatever bpp the originally rendered frame was at to 8bpp, which is what causes the dithering. he's asking if is possible to get at the original frame before the reduction in color depth occurs, and in some cases it is.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
Some N64 games have visible dithering too, but it does seem much more common on PS1.

It's something super common all the way until we hit the HD Era. The Gamecube and PS2 routinely use full screen dithering by reducing color depth, it was a common trick.

Even today, in modern games, occasionally they will use dithering for distant objects to help with blending.
 

Aggie CMD

Member
WDC was amazing from a graphical standpoint. I remember pre-release waiting 45 minutes to download, over dial up, 30 second 320x240 clips and being blown away.
 

FyreWulff

Member
No, those consoles could in fact produce all the colors necessary natively. This is not the "native" frame he is talking about. This is indeed the final output framebuffer, but it is produced by reducing the color depth from 18/16/whatever bpp the originally rendered frame was at to 8bpp, which is what causes the dithering. he's asking if is possible to get at the original frame before the reduction in color depth occurs, and in some cases it is.

ah

I thought they had to convert down to fit it into something processable by the system, so the intended native buffer was what we still got
 

televator

Member
No, those consoles could in fact produce all the colors necessary natively. This is not the "native" frame he is talking about. This is indeed the final output framebuffer, but it is produced by reducing the color depth from 18/16/whatever bpp the originally rendered frame was at to 8bpp, which is what causes the dithering. he's asking if is possible to get at the original frame before the reduction in color depth occurs, and in some cases it is.

This is a very interesting revelation to me. It's a detail I was never aware of until now. I'm of the opinion that bit depth is king of PQ after a certain point of bandwidth. So the idea of there being the potential to extract a higher bit depth image from old consoles - however unlikely that will come to fruition - makes me feel warm and fuzzy. lol
 

Markitron

Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
Probably Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo-Tooie, I never played Conker.

Majora's Mask and Resident Evil 2 would be up there as well.
 

Timu

Member
Do "unreleased" games count?
In that case Dinosaur Planet!

hi-res_1.jpg

DINOSAURPLANET865.jpg

dpshot10.JPG

DPSHOT11.jpg

N64DIN7.jpg


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFbAWW_pVUw
It's for the best if they did come out due to the fact that there could be changes in development that may make the game look better or worse before being finished and released.

Someone, somewhere, must have a copy of whatever was finished in N64 Dinosaur Planet, and I hope it leaks someday...
That would be quite a day.

Is there a character from later games as well modeled/animated as Mario's from the SM64 intro?
Not sure.
 

jose1

Member
Except this isn't about CRT TVs, this is about capturing them directly from the console itself without worrying about what they look like on a TV since displays differ their looks. so I'm not sure why it gets brought up unless you only view games on a CRT TV even though the point is to show what they look like without displays in the 1st place.

I'll put it this way:
Showing PS4 direct captures on a CRT TV is not representative of PS4 graphics because you will get a worse image. PS4 games are designed to be viewed on a 1080P HDTV.
Showing N64 direct captures on an HDTV/pc monitor are not representative of N64 graphics because you will get a worse image. N64 games are designed to be viewed on a CRT.

That is why the point should be (IMO) to show/compare what they look like on a CRT.

And it's not interlaced, my shots are scan doubled from 240p, also an N64 game can't be interlaced either unless the game runs in 480i through an expansion pak, and there's no interlacing in any of the direct feed shots either.

You're right about that, my bad.
 

Timu

Member
I'll put it this way:
Showing PS4 direct captures on a CRT TV is not representative of PS4 graphics because you will get a worse image. PS4 games are designed to be viewed on a 1080P HDTV.
Showing N64 direct captures on an HDTV/pc monitor are not representative of N64 graphics because you will get a worse image. N64 games are designed to be viewed on a CRT.

That is why the point should be (IMO) to show/compare what they look like on a CRT.
I see your point, but basically in order to see what they look like without a CRT and what they look like without scanlines it has to be in direct capture, that's the point I'm trying to make the whole time. Also, why is it fine to do direct capture on PS4 games but not N64 games? Really, every game should be in direct capture no matter the res and system to make it fair. Don't forget that it's a real screenshot taken from a real console that shows what the game really looks like when viewed without a display which is the point of it. Also the N64 image isn't worse, it's just how it looks without a display which again is the point.

CRTs have way too many variables like the type and how many scanlines, how good a display is, the settings on the CRT itself, etc. With direct capture, everything is there without the need of adjusting everything. I'm all for displaying N64 games on a CRT, but for the sake of graphics comparisons without the need of CRT adjustments or scanlines, direct capture is that option for a fair and balance comparison with real screens taken from a real console.

I seriously don't see anything wrong with direct capture. I've been using it for years and know how to capture games from many systems from 240p to 1080p. It's just how games look, display or no display. Relying on displays too much isn't critical for everything, sure it's important to play N64 games on CRTs, but for raw, real, direct pics to see them without scanlines, without filters, without CRT features, or heck TVs in general, direct capture is that. I'm sorry but that's just how it is, games just look like that due to the hardware and how it's captured.

I can even do these screens in real 240p as in 320x240 if I wanted to and if you want me to as well.
 
Absolutely. Nothing in here is at all aesthetically attractive.

Wow, you don't even think Super Mario 64 or Majora's Mask look at least good?

Rayman 2 is still one of the best looking game I've played, more so on Dreamcast but it looks great on N64.
 
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