Fullscreen S-Video out "brightness" question

TheRedEye · Post by **TheRedEye** » Sun Sep 02, 2007 7:38 pm

This has been driving me absolutely mad, I hope someone can help.

I'm currently running ZSNES through S-video out onto my television, using 640x480, stretched, fullscreen, with filters. The results are excellent. Everything is sharp and pixellated, my entire TV is filled, and - most importantly - the colors are incredibly vibrant and bright. In fact, they are brighter and more discernible than anything else I use, emulator or otherwise! Even native Windows games are dark and sometimes unplayable in comparison.

So this isn't a tech help question for ZSNES at all, it's a question regarding everything else, I guess. What is it that ZSNES is doing that nothing else, including my native Windows XP desktop, is able to? Is this some kind of feature that I can request in, say, SCUMMVM?

Some more background, though I doubt most of this is necessary:

*Running XP SP2
*S-video out from a standard cheapie Acer laptop
*Extended desktop, TV monitor forced into 640x480 via QuickRes
*TV is a Sony PVM-2530 pro editing monitor from the 80s

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 2:38 am

your TV was where you are meant to see the SNES in action.

you may have to adjust the brightness/gamma for the other games.

TheRedEye · Post by **TheRedEye** » Mon Sep 03, 2007 9:34 pm

You know, you're absolutely right. I didn't realize that my video card's software had bright/gamma settings, I can tweak everything to look fantastic now. Thanks for the help!

NFITC1 · Post by **NFITC1** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 3:09 am

Unless you're using a HDTV, 640x480 is the max resolution for any standard TVs. Cable runs at 320x240 or something close to that, and most DVDs run 640x480. Anything higher and things will look out of focus because the TV is trying to do its own interpretation of what's going on. If you're running your desktop at 1024x768 then the TV has to do what it can with too much information.
I ran into this too a few years ago and learned just that.

TheRedEye · Post by **TheRedEye** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 4:07 am

NFITC1 wrote:Unless you're using a HDTV, 640x480 is the max resolution for any standard TVs. Cable runs at 320x240 or something close to that, and most DVDs run 640x480. Anything higher and things will look out of focus because the TV is trying to do its own interpretation of what's going on. If you're running your desktop at 1024x768 then the TV has to do what it can with too much information.
I ran into this too a few years ago and learned just that.

Yes, I know. As I said, I'm running everything in 640x480, including XP itself.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Tue Sep 04, 2007 5:00 am

NFITC1 wrote:Unless you're using a HDTV, 640x480 is the max resolution for any standard TVs. Cable runs at 320x240 or something close to that, and most DVDs run 640x480. Anything higher and things will look out of focus because the TV is trying to do its own interpretation of what's going on. If you're running your desktop at 1024x768 then the TV has to do what it can with too much information.
I ran into this too a few years ago and learned just that.

It's actually not quite that. 480 visible lines is reasonably close to the spec'ed 486, but there's not a fixed width. DVDs run at 720*480, which I gather is close to the maximum you can feasibly achieve with the carrier frequencies used.

And I'm reasonably sure cable doesn't abandon half the fields AND run at less than half the practical horizontal resolution as you claim. At least for analog cable, it uses standard NTSC channels, with only the frequencies used varying from broadcast TV(see: "cable-ready" televisions). THAT means 486 visible lines and an analog horizontal equating to roughly 720 columns.

DIGITAL cable is an MPEG stream(I'd bet money it's 640*480), and compressed to hell to maximise channel counts. It's not that it runs at 320*240, just that it's covered MPEG artifacts(it;d be a lot blockier if it was ACTUALLY 320*240).