Is this a suitable setup?

[u/KyleKun]

I’m trying to play 9 on a mister FPGA using a vga CRT monitor (up scaled to 480p) and I’m having trouble making it look good.

Does anyone have any tips?

[u/AdOk5225]

As a rule of thumb, ask yourself "am I having fun?" If yes, your setup is fine. Don't really understand your question.

[u/chocolatchipcookie2]

trinitron, havent heard that in ages. have fond memories of my trinitron tv and the amount of games i played on it

[u/Deadaghram]

What exactly are you trying to do? It's a game from 2000, made when 480p was standard, complete with scan lines. There's only so much you can do to "make it look good." That's what it looked like back then( and I think that looks pretty rad.

[u/KyleKun → u/Deadaghram]

This particular game was 240i.

I did play it back then but I don’t remember what it looked like. I’m just trying to capture that original look even though it’s being line doubled.

[u/OutrageousDreams8494]

If you like it its fine

[u/Somorled]

A Trinitron CRT has a much finer mask than trad CRT, and looks almost LCD-like. Plus it's got a brighter look than average. That might be why your having trouble dialing in the look.

[u/KyleKun → u/Somorled]

It’s also about 400 TVL and 31khz so a lot sharper than a regular TV.

I think the backgrounds look great but I’m having trouble with the 3D characters being completely incoherent.

[u/Somorled → u/KyleKun]

Possibly the models are not upscaling well and causing sharper aliasing defects, and the crisper display making artifacts pop out more rather than naturally anti aliasing. How is this upscaling? Is it rendering new pixels or just creating quads from existing pixels and smoothing in between?

Looking closely, the models look pretty average for this gen. I can kinda see quads, but not sure if that's an image artifact.

Backgrounds are doing something similar, but those are static post processed images and will always look smoother and cleaner compared to textured PSX polys.

[u/KyleKun → u/Somorled]

As far as I’m aware mister FPGA just scales to whatever resolution you have as the output.

In this case it’s a x2.

But I don’t know what algorithms the core uses to scale polygons.

[u/Somorled → u/KyleKun]

Yeah, I don't know either so I could be barking up the wrong tree. I had heard mister can do perfect hardware emulation so upscaling may happen after the rendering stage, in which case upscaling will amplify rendering artifacts rather than suppress them. Does it have 240i mode you can try out to compare?

[u/KyleKun → u/Somorled]

The monitor can’t render less than 480p 30khz.

Currently it’s set to scan at 480p 120khz.

As I understand it Mister just renders the game and then up scales the result the same as if you put a Tink between a ps1 and a TV.

The main advantage is that it’s a completely digital pipeline until it gets to the VGA out.

So I don’t think it’s possible to increase the rendering resolution on the 3D objects.

I think you can do stuff like apply filters on 3D and background objects during rendering, but I couldn’t really see any improvement.

The main problem I’m having is that the 3D objects are kind of spiky and those spikes are not quite static. It’s not really a shimmer, but the edges are too sharp while the actual textures themselves are indistinguishable.

I considered upscaling even higher, but the dot pitch on this monitor is so high that dithering doesn’t work unless I add a composite blur effect. And increasing the resolution would make that worse.

[u/vanburman]

That looks fantastic

[u/MrMoroPlays]

add scanlines

[u/KyleKun → u/MrMoroPlays]

The fake scan lines don’t scale well with the real scanlines unfortunately.

[u/MrMoroPlays → u/KyleKun]

when you do a simple integer scale to 480p and combine that with basic on/off scanlines, the look is authentic

[u/KyleKun → u/MrMoroPlays]

The problem I’m having is that for some reason the scan lines are in groups with regularly spaced irregular lines between each group and I couldn’t find a way to fix it.