Dissapointed with emulators

[tepples]

please don't try to force a crappy palette like NO$GBA did before. The NDS Lite has a really good screen for playing GBA games, and so does the Game Boy Player.

The last version of NO$GBA that I tried didn't "force" anything. It had an option named "VGA (extra bright)" or something that looked just like VisualBoyAdvance, which in turn looks like the Game Boy Player and the DS Lite.

[Support for 10-bit output] also greatly helps with the SNES at luminance=0, I can show a lot more detail while still having the image as dark as it is on a real TV.

Given that most Super NES games don't use interlace and don't use high resolution (hence 256x224/256x239), would some slight dithering on the output help?

As for staircasing, it isn't as bad on the Super NES as it is on the NES because the extra color depth allows dithering to be more subtle. But I do remember having seen the diagonal stripes in Mario Paint when filling the screen with a pattern of black and dark blue.

[Dwedit]

please don't try to force a crappy palette like NO$GBA did before. The NDS Lite has a really good screen for playing GBA games, and so does the Game Boy Player.

The last version of NO$GBA that I tried didn't "force" anything. It had an option named "VGA (extra bright)" or something that looked just like VisualBoyAdvance, which in turn looks like the Game Boy Player and the DS Lite.

I'm talking about the default setting. By default, it's set to use the non "VGA" mode.

[Near]

> Given that most Super NES games don't use interlace and don't use high resolution (hence 256x224/256x239), would some slight dithering on the output help?

Yes, dithering should be an acceptable solution as well. Definitely more complicated to implement, though. And a good performance hit for a 24bpp->30sim dithering. Also not sure if static dithering is good enough, or if you'd want it to change per frame. Basically it crushes 32 different luminance levels into 0% to about 1.5% brightness. That's only three or so levels with 24-bit colors, so all the details get smashed together.

But yeah, for my 1024 step bar, I can't personally tell the difference between true 30-bit and 24-bit+dithering. And I have great vision.

[Sik]

The GeForce and Radeon series do not support 30-bit color. Period. I think I've heard musings of the $600+ GeForces supporting it, but I wouldn't count on it. My bet is you'll only get 24-bit color over their DisplayPorts.

I think I know from where this comes: if I recall correctly the GeForce can handle 64-bit framebuffers without much issue (and I'd assume Radeon can, too). The problem is that the framebuffer and the output video signal are completely different things. The extra bits are there for increased math accuracy in shaders and such, not for improved video output.

And as for the dithering: I'd imagine it's only a good option if the resolution is high enough (such that each emulated pixel ends up showing a pattern). I'd say that at least 4x the SNES resolution would be needed to be considered acceptable, but who knows. On the upside, at least dithering can be easily done with a shader, so no need to spend CPU time on that.

[tokumaru]

I'd say that at least 4x the SNES resolution would be needed to be considered acceptable

That's a pretty easy requirement to satisfy, considering current monitor resolutions. Maybe not so much on laptops.

[HJRodrigo]

>But I have no choice now, so I'll have to implement a true fullscreen, exclusive mode.

This make me happy

[tokumaru]

Blargg's palette demo (the link is broken, since blargg is having hosting issues) used to show stripes of a single color, but since I don't have the ROM at hand I don't know how it behaves in the current version.

Blargg found new hosting, so I just grabbed his palette demo and tested it. FCEUX indeed only shows blue stripes, and it also appears to have problems with the color emphasis.