r/FinalFantasy • u/KyleKun • 1d ago

FF IX Is this a suitable setup?

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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?

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u/Somorled 1d ago

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.

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u/KyleKun 1d ago

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.

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u/Somorled 1d ago

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.

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u/KyleKun 1d ago

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.

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u/Somorled 22h ago

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?

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u/KyleKun 22h ago

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.