inceptional's composite discussion thread

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iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

creaothceann wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 1:14 am
iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sat May 07, 2022 5:24 pm I never had any issue with stuff not being visible on my SNES: The picture absolutely looked far better than any footage/images of NTSC composite I have ever seen; the colours were nice and clean; the pixels were soft but I could absolutely see each one nice and clearly (so it wasn't just a blurry and dirty mess, and text and stuff was very legible); the scanlines were never ever as visible as people online always suggest they were (at least not for me on my TV setup), etc.
- get bsnes nightly, set the video driver to OpenGL, set your input keys, set your hotkeys for fullscreen, and load a game (e.g. Super Mario World)
- in "menu | settings | shader" select e.g. "CRT-Glow"
- in "menu | settings | filter" select the various NTSC options

- - -

And the various shaders are meant to 1. break up the low resolution blocks of old consoles and 2. make it look more authentic.
I will give it a go and see how it goes....

Edit: Yeah, NTSC SCART in those settings is much closer to how SNES game looked on my TV. I recall when I had the wrong connections it maybe looked as bad as S-Video but never ever as bad as Composite. So, because I picked some decent cables and the like (and I'm from the UK), I was basically playing SNES games at the quality of that NTSC SCART setting all the time. That's how I remember SNES, and that's what I expect SNES games to look like personally. So, if people are stuck with Composite then I feel sorry for them, but I'm not going to do anything differently in my game to try and compensate for how terrible Composite looks. So I think I'm sorted in that regard. :D
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by Señor Ventura »

lidnariq wrote: Sat May 07, 2022 5:43 pm
Señor Ventura wrote: Sat May 07, 2022 5:35 pm
64 Bytes per tile.

64KB of vram -CRAM -OAM= 1007 tiles at 512x224.

1007 tiles of 16x8 pixels is good.
Nope, that's not how the SNES works.

For each active layer, your tile library is always a 128x512 pixel square, arranged as 16x64 8x8 tiles. In modes 5 and 6, you either get 512 unique tiles (in 16x8 mode) or 256 unique tiles (in 16x16 mode).

(Yes, mode 7 is different)
Sorry, i wanted to say that there is the equivalent for 1007 tiles of 64 Bytes in vram, not that it is literally (in fact sprites are 32 Bytes, the other plane scroll is 2BPP, so 32 Bytes too).

Mode 7 occupues an area of 1024x1024 pixels with a tile library of 256, but i feel the need to fail trying to improve this... xD

I don't know all the details of every graphic mode, and in fact i don't know much of almost every thing, but right now i'm finishing a very big project that is demanding all my time and efforts, so i can't do nothing with the snes stuff for now, although after that i want to begin to learn seriously, and not "fooling around" like until now ^^u

I will have too much work ahead then, but at least i will have all my time, finally.

The hardest part will be how to organize the info, and determining what is esencially the first things to learn... and, coming from basic, i found ASM a little bit rare, but is ok... i bought an WDC book about the 6502/65816, and i expect making good use of it.


Sorry for the off topic,
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

I'm curious why you chose the number 1007? What happened to the other tiles? We do need a tilemap, though I can't think of a size that's equivalent to 17 of your "wide" tiles...

If you want to partition your tiles vertically, I think you could do an HDMI split to switch tilesets and double the 32k of tiles normally accessible to Mode 5 BG1. That should give you full-screen coverage in 512x240, and half-screen in 512x480.

Harder to do something like that in, e.g. a scrolling town map, and the allocation impinges on sprites or BG2, but I do think it's an option?
Last edited by rainwarrior on Sun May 08, 2022 12:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by Señor Ventura »

rainwarrior wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 11:08 am I'm curious why you chose the number 1007? What happened to the other tiles? We do need a tilemap, though I can't think of a size that's equivalent to 17 of your "wide" tiles...
This was a quick reference about the question of the lack of vram size.

VRAM is 65536 Bytes, minus OAM (512+32 Bytes), minus CGRAM (512 Bytes).

Still remains 64480 Bytes, and a way of saying there is enough space, is to put a number about how many pieces of 64 Bytes fits in there xD

Obviously the tilemap information requires another index that occupies memory too, but i never had read any information about it.


In mode 5 you have:
-512 tiles of 64 Bytes at 4BPP (16x8 pixels): 32768 Bytes
-Supossedly another 512 tiles of 32 Bytes at 2BPP (16x8 pixels): 16384 Bytes
-Still remains 16384 tiles for various table index and sprites (the mode 7 transformation table is not a worry in mode 5, and therefor it is not keeped in VRAM, but WRAM).

So, i would say things can be done in mode 5 even for scrolling, and more…

rainwarrior wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 11:08 am If you want to partition your tiles vertically, I think you could do an HDMI split to switch tilesets and double the 32k of tiles normally accessible to Mode 5 BG1. That should give you full-screen coverage in 512x240, and half-screen in 512x480.
The way to go is to repeat a certain number of tiles to draw the whole scene without lacking graphic data, but it was very common then, rigt?.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

Señor Ventura wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 12:33 pmVRAM is 65536 Bytes, minus OAM (512+32 Bytes), minus CGRAM (512 Bytes).
Ahh. These are separate, so you don't need to subtract them from VRAM.
Señor Ventura wrote:The way to go is to repeat a certain number of tiles to draw the whole scene without lacking graphic data, but it was very common then, rigt?.
Yes, it's more unusual for a whole screen to have to be unique.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by Pokun »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sat May 07, 2022 5:24 pm Yeah, then I think some people are way overthinking and over dramatizing the "issue" regardless.

I never had any issue with stuff not being visible on my SNES: The picture absolutely looked far better than any footage/images of NTSC composite I have ever seen; the colours were nice and clean; the pixels were soft but I could absolutely see each one nice and clearly (so it wasn't just a blurry and dirty mess, and text and stuff was very legible); the scanlines were never ever as visible as people online always suggest they were (at least not for me on my TV setup), etc.

Maybe my Toshiba and Sony Trinitron TVs really were working some magic. Also, one of my foster parents was some kind of TV engineer, so I often had my consoles connected up to some sweet high-end PVM monitors or something, as I recall. I mean the kind of stuff people seem to be really after in the retro gaming scene these days. I guess I was real lucky there.

I think I'm gonna go with using that 512x448 mode in my game in some places, including in an actual level, and let everyone else out there deal with the exact display and device/method they're using in 2022 and beyond to view it correctly (real SNES console, emulator, FPGA, CRT, HDTV, monitor, etc).

And, if it somehow really doesn't work, so be it. It's not like I'd build an entire game without getting the programmer to do a test for me anyway.
I've got a feeling that you didn't read my post. SCART is not RGB. Did your foster parents build an RGB cable for your SNES? If not your SCART cable was probably for composite only. It's easy to tell because if it's composite it would most likely have 2 or 3 RCA plugs going into a SCART adapter like this:
SFC Composite SCART
SFC Composite SCART
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by Señor Ventura »

rainwarrior wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 12:36 pm Ahh. These are separate, so you don't need to subtract them from VRAM.
(I thought) Unless you need to update the whole CGRAM and OAM between frames, keeping these appart is safer.

I would like to ask about "how", and "where" do you keep the tilemap information to be conformed for planes. If i'm not wrong every tile requires 2 Bytes to identify its position in the index, horizontal and vertical position, flipped or not, priority, and some more properties.

Where is it stored in memory in each graphic mode?, an tilemap of 256 tiles means 512 Bytes of VRAM reserved only for this (not in mode 7), right?...
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

Señor Ventura wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 3:39 pm(I thought) Unless you need to update the whole CGRAM and OAM between frames, keeping these appart is safer.
What I mean is they are both completely separate memories. They do not occupy any space in VRAM.

Yes, updating them does consume some of your vblank time budget for DMA, but that's a different matter than how much VRAM you have to work with.
Señor Ventura wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 3:39 pmI would like to ask about "how", and "where" do you keep the tilemap information to be conformed for planes. If i'm not wrong every tile requires 2 Bytes to identify its position in the index, horizontal and vertical position, flipped or not, priority, and some more properties.
Yes, the tilemap is stored in VRAM. You can choose where to place them. The basic tilemap size is 2048 bytes. If using 16x16 mode instead of 8x8 you can get away with just using half of that for your screen, needing only 1024 bytes.

Mode 7 is different. There is no configuration of how it's laid out. Its tilemap always goes at the start of VRAM, and it can only address 256 tiles, which are interleaved with its data. The tilemap and tiles together consume exactly 32k.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Pokun wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 2:08 pm
iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sat May 07, 2022 5:24 pm Yeah, then I think some people are way overthinking and over dramatizing the "issue" regardless.

I never had any issue with stuff not being visible on my SNES: The picture absolutely looked far better than any footage/images of NTSC composite I have ever seen; the colours were nice and clean; the pixels were soft but I could absolutely see each one nice and clearly (so it wasn't just a blurry and dirty mess, and text and stuff was very legible); the scanlines were never ever as visible as people online always suggest they were (at least not for me on my TV setup), etc.

Maybe my Toshiba and Sony Trinitron TVs really were working some magic. Also, one of my foster parents was some kind of TV engineer, so I often had my consoles connected up to some sweet high-end PVM monitors or something, as I recall. I mean the kind of stuff people seem to be really after in the retro gaming scene these days. I guess I was real lucky there.

I think I'm gonna go with using that 512x448 mode in my game in some places, including in an actual level, and let everyone else out there deal with the exact display and device/method they're using in 2022 and beyond to view it correctly (real SNES console, emulator, FPGA, CRT, HDTV, monitor, etc).

And, if it somehow really doesn't work, so be it. It's not like I'd build an entire game without getting the programmer to do a test for me anyway.
I've got a feeling that you didn't read my post. SCART is not RGB. Did your foster parents build an RGB cable for your SNES? If not your SCART cable was probably for composite only. It's easy to tell because if it's composite it would most likely have 2 or 3 RCA plugs going into a SCART adapter like this: sfc_scart_cvbs.jpg
Well, I don't really recall exactly what cable I had back in the day 100% beyond "I used SCART", but I do know you can get RGB SCART for SNES as I understand it (whether that's a relatively new thing or whatever):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-Scart- ... B01AWC7OUO
https://www.retrogamingcables.co.uk/pac ... -cable-pal
https://coolnovelties.co.uk/coolnovelti ... cable.html

Etc.

All I'm really saying here is that I certainly didn't use basic Composite as it's always shown in YouTube videos and images and the like, which looks like complete and utter turd, and I used what we call a SCART [or possibly S-Video if my memory is slightly off and it wasn't specifically SCART on my SNES and I'm confusing that with my other other consoles, which I honestly don't think I am] cable in the UK [however you want to break that down in terms of the exact definition of each variation of "SCART"] that looked basically as good as any connection I've ever seen for the SNES (even on an old CRT SDTV). And, ultimately, I think judging how stuff is going to look on SNES via what is, imo, the worst possible connection you can use on it, is, again imo, just utterly [insert whatever word you want here].

So, basically, when I'm designing a SNES game and thinking about what modes and stuff are or aren't going to look good on it, basic NTSC Composite is literally the last thing I'm going to be thinking about. And, when I'm specifically asking questions about SNES and pondering whether this effect will look cool or whatever, I'm not looking for people to just outright dismiss it and say it looks crap based on basic NTSC Composite as thee defining standard (because it is absolutely the worst possible way to test something on SNES imo).

But everyone else is, obviously, free to use whatever they want and design games however they want and around whatever connections they want.

I'm not asking them for them though; I'm asking them for me. And, just in case some people are still not aware of this: I'm from the UK and my minimum bar for judging whether some mode/technique/effect is going to look good on SNES or not is, at the absolute least, a decent connection to the TV (and 100% absolutely not some garbage basic NTSC Composite image).

Does that make sense?
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Thu May 19, 2022 4:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

Stop making this pointless argument here. Start your own thread if you want a place for it.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

rainwarrior wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 4:23 am Stop making this pointless argument here. Start your own thread if you want a place for it.
Someone posted a question specifically in here for me to respond to and I'm responding.

Are you going to moan at them too?
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Thu May 19, 2022 4:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

If they dump garbage here like you do, yes I will.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

rainwarrior wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 4:30 am If they dump garbage here like you do, yes I will.
Then go do so.

I didn't post my reply for you--our non-interaction has been established previously--and I literally do not wish to talk to you further.

I hope I'm clear on that.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by rainwarrior »

I don't want to talk to you either, but this is a thread I started about a thing I made. If you don't want to talk to me buddy this is the wrong place for it.
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Re: Two Ship mode 5 hires + interlaced comparison

Post by Pokun »

Rainwarrior I'm sorry to continue this discussion in this thread, but it's not settled yet. Mods are welcome to move this discussion to a separate thread if it's better.

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Thu May 19, 2022 3:50 am Well, I don't really recall exactly what cable I had back in the day 100% beyond "I used SCART", but I do know you can get RGB SCART for SNES as I understand it (whether that's a relatively new thing or whatever):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-Scart- ... B01AWC7OUO
https://www.retrogamingcables.co.uk/pac ... -cable-pal
https://coolnovelties.co.uk/coolnovelti ... cable.html

Etc.

All I'm really saying here is that I certainly didn't use basic Composite as it's always shown in YouTube videos and images and the like, which looks like complete and utter turd, and I used what we call a SCART [or possibly S-Video if my memory is slightly off and it wasn't specifically SCART on my SNES and I'm confusing that with my other other consoles, which I honestly don't think I am] cable in the UK [however you want to break that down in terms of the exact definition of each variation of "SCART"] that looked basically as good as any connection I've ever seen for the SNES (even on an old CRT SDTV).
I'm saying that you definitely used composite. If you used the SCART connector or RCA connector matters not. SCART can carry composite as I've been saying and that's what your SCART cable did. SNES RGB and S-video cables exists now (I have both myself) but didn't exist back in the day. The only way you could have used RGB or S-video back then is if you or your foster parents built their own cable, and it doesn't sound like they did.

So no you did not use RGB nor S-video but good old PAL composite.
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