Final Fantasy IX - Faithfully Enhanced

[Phil]

It looks way better to me. Switched my monitor from Multimedia to "Natural" while running the shader and it looks awesome.

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Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others

[Speder]

Originally Posted by Princess Garnet

I haven't read or digested it all, but thanks to Stevacus for posting all of that! It looks very informative. I'm glad there's others of the interest/preference out there that this sort of approach helps or interests.Did my private messaging help any? If not, you'll have to refresh me. Sorry, but I had a bit going on yesterday and today.I never liked it. I can't put my finger on why, but I never did. It just seemed to increase the contrast and saturation and darken it. I much prefer a natural look, hence this thread.

Yeah I just loaded a in-game save and because the battle menus were missing I just entered the city, saved using save-state and reloaded and voilá it worked fine. After this I always save in-game and also save-state so I don't get screwed over later.

Thank you for the tip.

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Last edited by Speder; June 14th, 2012 at 13:26..

[Princess Garnet]

That was odd, but I'm glad it worked for you.

Originally Posted by Phil

It looks way better to me. Switched my monitor from Multimedia to "Natural" while running the shader and it looks awesome.

Whatever works for you, but this thread is about a certain configuration and you say "use something else; it looks way better"? Isn't that a bit rude towards my efforts/thread? If you like it, that's fine of course, but that's not what this thread is for (I believe there is a thread/place for that).

As an aside though, why were you running multimedia mode to begin with? Don't they (and game modes) usually have that horrid variable contrast?

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[Phil]

I guess so. Sorry.

It makes web pages more readable, as browsing is what I use my Ultrasharp primarily for.

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Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others

[watermark0n]

Originally Posted by cloudbill

Those little white lines were from using anti-aliasing (2xSal) on 2d pre-rendered backgrounds. I believe anti-aliasing lowers resolution to blur the image thus smooth the image. Since 2d pre-rendered backgrounds are at a fixed resolution and can't be re-sized that's where you get the "extra" lines.

Well, I suppose this is a little late, but this post has a great deal of mistakes in a very small space.

The kind of anti-aliasing used in most 3D cards (MSAA) scans the screen for jaggies, and renders those parts of the image at a higher resolution in order to more accurately approximate the scene. An older version, SSAA, simply renders the entire scene at a higher resolution, but that's so intensive that it can really only be used on old games (however, it does produce better results in some cases - it's just not worth cutting your framerate in half). I suppose you could say this is the blurring of sub-pixels inside of a pixel together. It would, of course, be more accurate to simply display at a higher resolution, but that's usually not possible. It doesn't ever blur together a whole pixel with a neighboring whole pixel, so I don't think it could be called "blur" in a traditional sense.

Where the image you intend to represent is already at it's highest possible quality, this obviously would have no effect. This is the case in, for instance, 2D games, or 3D textures, since the quality of those is limited by the source file. However, when rendering 3D polygons and such, you can obtain a more accurate representation by rendering at a higher resolution and shrinking. Those jaggies are not additional information, they're an artifact of the fact that the renderer can't have infinite resolution, and so had to stop somewhere - when two objects could be said to occupy the same pixel, it has to pick one of the two and have that one fill the whole pixel. This is not, in any sense, a more accurate way of rendering the scene than picking an intermediate color. There is less information present in a picture with jaggies than one antialiased using these methods. If you'll notice, you never see jaggies in pictures of real life, because real-life is at an effectively ridiculous resolution already, and the antialiasing is effectively done for the camera already.

Now, there are some new-fangled filters (FXAA) which, I suppose, you could still call "anti-aliasing" because, after all, they do reduce aliasing. Their approach is to look at the final image, find jaggies, and blur together the neighboring pixels that make up the jaggies in an attempt to reduce them. This is much faster. But, at best, it's an attempt to recreate information, and will therefore never be as accurate as the aforementioned methods which actually have that information. And, often, it does make mistakes and destroy information. You will get some people saying that such filters are the second coming of Jesus, and other saying it looks like running your monitor at a non-native resolution.

However, now that I think about it, you could maybe use FXAA to help somewhat with the pixellation in even 2D images, since it simply identifies pixellation and blurs it, whereas traditional AA doesn't do anything if there's not a more accurate real representation available (it never attempts to recreate). If you have an Nvidia card, you can force FXAA on any 3D program in the drivers. You could also use the FXAA injector if you wanted to (this would work even on ATI cards). I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know how much good it would do.

I think your confusion about AA and lowering the resolution might be due to hearing about people lowering their resolution on LCD's in order to obtain a blurrier, "antialiased" image. However, this is not specifically due to lowering the resolution, it's merely a result of the interpolation the monitor does to approximate a non-native resolution, which could, I guess, function as a crappy FXAA.

As for your comments about 2xSAI, it's a resizing, not an antialiasing method. Whereas traditional AA only operates on polygons, 2xSAI operates only on textures. Its purpose is to increase texture size, not decrease it (which would be fairly pointless). It is attempting to recreate a higher information version of an image from a lower information version, and accomplishes this with varying degrees of success (it is at least usually better looking than nearest neighbor, which just blows the low-information image up). However, it's specifically designed with 2D line art, not 3D textures, in mind. In the emulators I've seen that tried to use it with 3D textures, the results did not seem very impressive to me. I think a general purpose image resizing algorithm, such as bicubic or lancroz, might do a better job, but I am not an emulator writer and am merely making a conjecture.

As for the lines, I think that's probably just some sort of bug on the part of the emulator or plugin, not a result of 2xSAI itself.

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Last edited by watermark0n; July 8th, 2012 at 22:47..

[watermark0n]

Originally Posted by Stevacus

quoting myself. get a copy of Entechs power strip http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm it will let you input custom resolutions into your Computer E-DID which is EXTREMELY helpful You want to multiply the games native resolution over 640x480 since lcds/led/oled/eoled/plasma cant do standard resolutions ( anything under 640x480), For instance Castlevania Symphony of the nights in game is 256x240 the first title screen is 700 horizontal 224 vertical or around that, so your going to want to make a multiple of the in game higher than all the other resolutions displayed by menus/title screens/etc to avoid distortion.

It is true that older consoles like the NES and Playstation sometimes rendered at resolutions like 256x240, however, they were displayed with rectangular pixels, so they came out at a 4:3 aspect ratio. An LCD, on the other hand, is always stuck with square pixels. It is true that you can avoid the distortion that comes from stretching by using a resolution like 256x240, however, you will be displaying at an incorrect aspect ratio. The CRT's effectively stretched by stretching the pixels themselves, and unfortunately we can't do that on an LCD, so we have to do the best we can.

so lets take 256x240x3=768x720, so 768x720 is you best bet. you want to avoid to much stretching with 2d because the color gradients can change dramatically and cause blurriness though 3d depending on game looks much better at 640x480 or higher because the textures are shrunk on the psx. here is an example i made of 2d scaling and stretching. http://i47.tinypic.com/oqauxw.png

With 2D games, your best bet is usually to set it to your monitors native resolution, tell the emulator to scale it to the largest 4:3 size possible, and apply some sort of resizing algorithm. With more pixels to work with, the resizing algorithm can usually do a better job of approximating the rectangular pixels. However, with 2D/3D, as Garnett has noted, this doesn't seem to work very well - the 2D parts of the image come out pixelated and harsh. Maybe there's something deeper going on here that I don't know about. Regardless, I would recommend the same resolution she sets for them, 640x480.

you may also want to look into monitor calibration there is a software called atrise Lutcurve http://atrise.com/lutcurve/ it completely calibrates whites/blacks/gamma/color correction/points, 99.9% of monitors are uncalibrated and use the Whiter than white theory(wtf is whiter than white?)

Obviously different monitors have different white points. You can't just set a "white" and expect to be all and well. If you don't have a concept like whiter than white, or blacker than black, people wouldn't be able to boost their white to correct levels when the softwares "maximum white" didn't cut it. However, this is also means that a lot of times people will overboost their white, incorrectly making near-white things totally white.

to blur all the in-corrections for instance in my sig i thought orange was yellow till i calibrated it, calibrating makes a world of difference. you can also get a colormunki http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=1513 its the hardware version and easier to use and is referred by Sony for there DE fact o broadcast Production Monitors (some are $26,000) http://www.sony.co.uk/biz/product/bvm but with a $450 price tag.

My experience with monitor calibration is somewhat mixed. Calibrating blacks and whites works alright, though not much better than what I could otherwise do by eye. However, when I try to calibrate the gammas of individual colors, the different colors will be stronger and weaker at different points, so a midtone grey will be perfectly grey and a dark grey will be heavily tinted blue or something. The defaults my be off (slightly reddish), but at least they're uniformly off.

As for a plugin i would use gpubladesoft 1.41 (edgbla's Software Rendering Plugin) http://emu-russia.net/en/files/plugins/psx/ found over at emuRussia it has the best most accurate color palette Ive seen, all the shaders and filters, and most accurate geometry,

That's all rather subjective. Finding the perfect color palette is sort of like trying to square the circle. Whatever works for you I guess.

it even offers progressive video mode by turning of dfe emulation(psx uses interlaced,

Every video mode on your computer is likely progressive. If you have a CRT, you might be able to hack it into displaying in interlaced, but that's about it. If you feed an interlaced signal to an LCD, it will deinterlace it. Since interlacing is something that has to be done to the signal, I assume that most emulators simply skip the interlacing that would normally be done by the console. At least, I've never noticed any deinterlacing artifacts on any of the emulators I've ever used, so I assume that to be the case.

Luckily for myself I have a 16:10(for correct 4:3 aspect)

How does 16:10 get you a correct 4:3 ratio? I'm unsure what you mean here.

wide screen HDTV CRT with RCA/S-video/Component/hdmi ports with 175Hz-120Hz-60Hz with progressive up to 720p and 1080i so i can do any resolution under the sun, ive even full screened at native 160x140 for gameboy in progressive HDMI clarity. so if you can find a nice HDTV CRT Pick it up ASAP! and there becoming antiques so the prices are going up mines worth $600 on the net.

I was about to buy one of those once but, alas, I decided against it. I have little need of a desktop these days anyway.

[R4Zi3L]

Originally Posted by watermark0n

How does 16:10 get you a correct 4:3 ratio? I'm unsure what you mean here

Im not sure about 4:3 but always if something is widescreen on PS1 or PS2 its 1.6 (16:10). Like FMV, letterboxed cutscene or anamorphic widescreen (the rest of the signal is black boarders).

[SkepticTA]

I just started using this emu, but I've gotten FFIX running just fine at 1920x1080, no complaints about how it looks. Using low res on this monitor is awful.

I'm using:

ePSXe 1.7.0
PeteOGL2 2.9
Natural Vision Shader

[Princess Garnet]

Originally Posted by SkepticTA

I just started using this emu, but I've gotten FFIX running just fine at 1920x1080, no complaints about how it looks.

Everyone has their own preferences. I didn't make this thread on account of anything else being wrong, but for those who prefer a more faithfully looking result (obviously the primary goal isn't total accuracy or we'd be using a software plug-in, but the goal is for getting the 3D benefits of the hardware accelerated plug-ins while still being close on the 2D). If yours works for you, I'm glad, but for some others and myself, that's too pixelated and stretched for our liking. I'm not a big fan of the natural shader either; just never was.

Originally Posted by SkepticTA

Using low res on this monitor is awful.

Indeed, which is why LCDs just don't work as well for this. Ever since I was forced to give up my CRT, I've done next to no emulation partly for that reason. I'll probably still fire up Final Fantasy IX (or whatever) every here and there when I really want to play them, but... it won't be the same to me.

Either way, I'm glad you found something that works and that you're enjoying this wonderful game, no matter how.

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[KingWizardButt]

I'm just really bummed that square never released a pc port like they did with 7 and 8. Sure they had issues, but it seems like the community has fixed a lot of them.

[R4Zi3L]

Originally Posted by SkepticTA

That looks quite nice.... but i still prefer gpuBladeSoft ;P

[rapsodiaverde]

Really thanks, works really well and the graphics looks awesome!!!!
You rocks! 5 stars ^^