Sub-struggle:
CRT vs LCD? Those waterfalls used to look really different, and took advantage of the color bleed of old CRT monitors to mimic transparency
I love CRT displays, but I think an LCD is still fine, and it's definitely the more reasonable option. CRTs are inefficient space-wise, use far more power than an LCD, and are slowly becoming a collector's item. Plus, if you are using a CRT TV, you need to either own the actual consoles plus either the games themselves or a flash cart, or go through a lot of effort and potentially need special equipment to output a 15kHz analog signal from a computer/modern emulation device. I think a good shader to mimic scanlines and an analog signal like in your screenshot is the ideal compromise, but ultimately it's fine to just leave it to personal preference.
That being said, if you do have the ability to play these old games on a CRT, for sure go for it! No shaders can mimic the look of a CRT in motion, and games like Sonic where the screen scrolls very quickly especially benefit from it a lot imo.
I don't believe that any hardware edition of the mega drive/Genesis has native s-video out. The only way to get that would be to emulate it on a Wii or OG Xbox.
I had to check and sure enough, the thing can output s-video but there was no cable or w/e originally. The console can do RGB natively though and used SCART in pal territories soooo...
The point of my smartass question is that the Mega Drive, and also the Saturn for Sonic Jam ofc, can display video that doesn't have the awful composite video artifacts that cause the dithering transparency things. The Mega Drive was SCART originally, right?
I guess I'm just not convinced about the whole, dither-composite-transparency thing, and I actually have an old CRT plus a real Genesis. It's such a weird thing people fixate on, like why make the video output look awful for one goofy visual effect? Plus I'm not convinced that the devs did these things assuming NOBODY would ever see their games in better quality than combined chroma/luma... (composite)
Of course they didnt assume everybody has the same setup. But they likely did make things to appear a certain way on an average setup or a range of setups that only looked good on the top 1% of monitors.
And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad. It makes one specific part look really cool and the rest just looks like a sonic game, which is to say absolutely incredible in CRT and mediocre on a modern monitor.
Looking at the color choices on old sonic sprites alone, the artists at sega would have to suck to make those decisions knowing how they look without the assumed artifacting of an LCD. And that's not getting into the decisions they made that make the pixel grid obvious and deacrease the apparent resolution of the sprite. The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor. The only reasonable explanation is that these artists knew what they were doing and took into account the display media that the end user would experience
And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad.
No, it really does. Again I have a model 2 genesis (the one with better video than the model 1, lol) and its composite video is still basically atrocious. It's probably some of the worst composite this side of the NES, it looks incredibly soft and is full of that rainbow fringing and whatever. When you could instead be playing hooked up via component or RGB or something, why trash the video sigbal for a single visual effect??
And while it's true that the majority of MD/Genesis systems were hooked up via RF, even, (awful, I die) Sonic 1 was also commonly seen in arcades, which would have been an RGB monitor in a Sega approved release...
The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor.
Really? I never considered the spritework to be a point of criticism in the Sonic games... also do LCDs have artifacting? Plus iirc Liquid Crystal Displays did not exist at all in 1991, the first ever LCD TV was introduced by Sharp in 1992 (for the Japan only MUSE system) and they wouldn't become affordable until the late 1990s. By contrast all PAL TVs had SCART basically...
As a bonus shitfact, the Sega Terradrive, a combo Mega Drive/IBM PC, also had an RGB connection to its monitor ✨
Sub-struggle: CRT vs LCD? Those waterfalls used to look really different, and took advantage of the color bleed of old CRT monitors to mimic transparency
I won't struggle over this but I am deeply fond of the CRT bleed being leveraged to add a nice softness to some pixel art backgrounds.
But on the other hand I like crispy character sprites.
Ah fuck I'm gonna self criiiit.
Many older games were designed with CRTs in mind, and the colors and shapes don't look so great on modern monitors without some shaders applied.
I love CRT displays, but I think an LCD is still fine, and it's definitely the more reasonable option. CRTs are inefficient space-wise, use far more power than an LCD, and are slowly becoming a collector's item. Plus, if you are using a CRT TV, you need to either own the actual consoles plus either the games themselves or a flash cart, or go through a lot of effort and potentially need special equipment to output a 15kHz analog signal from a computer/modern emulation device. I think a good shader to mimic scanlines and an analog signal like in your screenshot is the ideal compromise, but ultimately it's fine to just leave it to personal preference.
That being said, if you do have the ability to play these old games on a CRT, for sure go for it! No shaders can mimic the look of a CRT in motion, and games like Sonic where the screen scrolls very quickly especially benefit from it a lot imo.
There are some pretty good CRT shaders out there. The ones used in Sonic Mania get pretty close!
Right so like, if you played Sonic 1 on a mega drive/genesis using its native s-video out on a consumer shadow mask set, what happens?
I don't believe that any hardware edition of the mega drive/Genesis has native s-video out. The only way to get that would be to emulate it on a Wii or OG Xbox.
I had to check and sure enough, the thing can output s-video but there was no cable or w/e originally. The console can do RGB natively though and used SCART in pal territories soooo...
If that's the case, there's a good chance some hobbyists have made a hob for the hardware that can do it.
As for your first question, I don't know A/V stuff that well so I have no idea. What's a shadow mask?
A shadow mask is a type of CRT television :)
The point of my smartass question is that the Mega Drive, and also the Saturn for Sonic Jam ofc, can display video that doesn't have the awful composite video artifacts that cause the dithering transparency things. The Mega Drive was SCART originally, right?
I guess I'm just not convinced about the whole, dither-composite-transparency thing, and I actually have an old CRT plus a real Genesis. It's such a weird thing people fixate on, like why make the video output look awful for one goofy visual effect? Plus I'm not convinced that the devs did these things assuming NOBODY would ever see their games in better quality than combined chroma/luma... (composite)
Of course they didnt assume everybody has the same setup. But they likely did make things to appear a certain way on an average setup or a range of setups that only looked good on the top 1% of monitors.
And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad. It makes one specific part look really cool and the rest just looks like a sonic game, which is to say absolutely incredible in CRT and mediocre on a modern monitor.
Looking at the color choices on old sonic sprites alone, the artists at sega would have to suck to make those decisions knowing how they look without the assumed artifacting of an LCD. And that's not getting into the decisions they made that make the pixel grid obvious and deacrease the apparent resolution of the sprite. The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor. The only reasonable explanation is that these artists knew what they were doing and took into account the display media that the end user would experience
No, it really does. Again I have a model 2 genesis (the one with better video than the model 1, lol) and its composite video is still basically atrocious. It's probably some of the worst composite this side of the NES, it looks incredibly soft and is full of that rainbow fringing and whatever. When you could instead be playing hooked up via component or RGB or something, why trash the video sigbal for a single visual effect??
And while it's true that the majority of MD/Genesis systems were hooked up via RF, even, (awful, I die) Sonic 1 was also commonly seen in arcades, which would have been an RGB monitor in a Sega approved release...
As a bonus shitfact, the Sega Terradrive, a combo Mega Drive/IBM PC, also had an RGB connection to its monitor ✨