http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/660
So many lols involved there. A pity the better ones can only be found out by those with staff privileges here.
Moderator: JC Denton
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 01:27
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 01:37
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 01:59
You're still maintaining that there's some value in displaying pixels 'as the creator intended'. Personally I think this is elitist bullshit
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 02:12
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 02:23
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 02:37
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 04:22
icycalm wrote:There is only one thing you are convincing me with these comments, and that is that neither of you has a strong grasp on the issues involved. Resorting to namecalling and barb-throwing is a sign of weakness. If you or Recap had a firm grasp on the subject, you'd have posted a clear, lucid, succinct explanation whose truth would be immediately apparent.
So neither of you have the full answers to the questions we are asking here, but what you do have is arguments and observations which you've accumulated by thinking about this subject for years. So post them in as clear and concise a manner as you can manage and spare us the histrionics.
by JoshF » 20 Apr 2009 05:14
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 05:38
JoshF wrote:Not worthless
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 14:00
Recap, as far as I can tell, with my limited knowledge of the subject, his article is interesting and contains many useful explanations.
Are some -- or all -- of those explanations wrong?
Perhaps, but if so, someone needs to come in and explain to me, in detail, why that is so. Because, right now, I cannot see much wrong with the factual part of the article -- only with the conclusions drawn from those facts.
So, what I am saying to you, is that if you have something to say, please say it either in an article
So please. NFG is my friend and I value his contributions and opinions. If you want to counter him, do it the correct way -- in your writings.
If you or Recap had a firm grasp on the subject, you'd have posted a clear, lucid, succinct explanation whose truth would be immediately apparent.
So neither of you have the full answers to the questions we are asking here,
1: sprite rippers have been using raw digital output as a standard for a decade, 2: F12 = raw digital output, and 3: pixel artists use computer monitors, and they aren't publishing their work on CRTs either.
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 14:22
Recap wrote:Laughs. You at least see the conclusions are wrong. Even yet, you find the article "interesting" and "worth posting"
Recap wrote:and that's despite admitting that you don't have the proper knowledge to make sure the factual part isn't wrong.
Recap wrote:Astounding nonsense, if you ask me. Not the type of stuff I'd expect from Insomnia nor the line of reasoning I'd expect from Icycalm.
Recap wrote:But whatever. You're aware this fella is clueless
Recap wrote:And now you're posting on the frontpage an article of his on the subject I am warning you is HORSESHIT
Recap wrote:and where, despite using the stuff he learned thanks to me, the introduction is a lame attempt at an insult towards myself.
Recap wrote:You "respect me so much"? Are you sure?
So, what I am saying to you, is that if you have something to say, please say it either in an article
http://postback.geedorah.com/informes/i ... rte_i.html
For Christ's sake.
The guy is already "countered". He or what he has to ever say is not of my concern. I was "countering" Icycalm's nonsensical behaviour.
"Firm grasp on the subject"? Man, I even forced myself to do it in [crappy] English. You must have read the article 4 or 5 times now. Let's see once again: which were the questions you're asking there you think are not addressed?
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 15:12
Exactly. These conclusions need to be refuted, and you better believe that that is exactly what I'll be doing.
The same goes for everything posted on this site. It is impossible to verify every claim every single one of the contributors make. Half of the games they write about I haven't even played -- nor will I ever. Not to mention that there's already loads of stuff on this site I plainly disagree with. That's how publications work, I am afraid, except those that are the work of a single person -- and this one isn't.
Recap wrote:And now you're posting on the frontpage an article of his on the subject I am warning you is HORSESHIT
And what am I supposed to do with this warning? It is useless to me,
2D consultant
Raúl Sánchez
Recap wrote:But whatever. You're aware this fella is clueless
He is not clueless. I have already told you several times that I don't think he is clueless. I have learned a lot over the years by reading his half a dozen websites -- as much as I have learned by reading yours.
Recap wrote:and where, despite using the stuff he learned thanks to me, the introduction is a lame attempt at an insult towards myself.
I realize this, and if it were anyone other than NFG I would have edited it out. However, there are a few contributors to this site whose writings I will not edit, and those include you and NFG.
What I will do is post both your opinions on my site, then my own half-formed opinions, and leave it up to the reader to make up his own mind. Once I have fully made up MY OWN mind, I will post an article that will explain everything and that will be the end of that.
You have got to be kidding me. I find it hard to understand some of your explanations on this subject even in English, and now you are giving me babelfished Spanish? What am I supposed to do with it?
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 16:23
Recap wrote:Exactly. These conclusions need to be refuted, and you better believe that that is exactly what I'll be doing.
How could I believe that if after dozens of forum posts of myself everywhere
Recap wrote:Just by posting horseshit on the frontpage you're giving it some extent of credibility.
Recap wrote:But whatever. You're aware this fella is clueless
He is not clueless. I have already told you several times that I don't think he is clueless. I have learned a lot over the years by reading his half a dozen websites -- as much as I have learned by reading yours.
He couldn't even notice that the emulator's direct CP-S II screenshots had a prominently incorrect aspect ratio. FOR FUCK'S FUCK.
If you're placing me in the same room as this guy I'm banning myself. Again, I'm really sorry.
What I will do is post both your opinions on my site, then my own half-formed opinions, and leave it up to the reader to make up his own mind. Once I have fully made up MY OWN mind, I will post an article that will explain everything and that will be the end of that.
Read, Icycalm: That's a dumb thing to do.
This all is not a matter of "opinions". His article is full of shit, misinformation hence it's totally misleading given that most won't understand the technicalities involved.
Additionally, It's also unrespectful towards myself.
Use your human translators and, for more color, wait for the second part?
by JoshF » 20 Apr 2009 16:50
Who-gives-a-shit about sprite rippers or pixel artist wannabes.
by Recap » 20 Apr 2009 18:58
icycalm wrote:Meh. I post horseshit on the frontpage all the time. I have entire articles which contain nothing but horseshit -- and my refutations of it. I constantly link to horseshit both in my articles and in forum posts. If I tried to hide horseshit under the carpet I would almost never have anything to write about. -- And I would certainly never have started this website in the first place.
He is not clueless. I have already told you several times that I don't think he is clueless. I have learned a lot over the years by reading his half a dozen websites -- as much as I have learned by reading yours.
He couldn't even notice that the emulator's direct CP-S II screenshots had a prominently incorrect aspect ratio. FOR FUCK'S FUCK.
And there are surely many more things he can't notice. But there are also a crapload of things he CAN notice.
Please stop giving me ultimatums on how to run my website -- I have never done this to you and I will never presume to do it. You have your site and I have my site, and we can only make SUGGESTIONS to each other -- suggestions which can, and should, be ignored if we do not feel they are valid.
What would you do if I suggested that you remove the silly percentage scores from your site and replace them with a 1-5 rating scale? (And do it immediately because if you don't I'll never talk to you again.) -- You would of course ignore me, and I wouldn't expect anything less from you. So please allow me the same courtesy.
So apart from that we are also currently collaborating on getting your site translated into English, and hosted as a distinct subsite of Insomnia. If for whatever reason you no longer want to go ahead with this, just say so.
Same old same old. Instead of taking his article apart line by line, as I do in this forum with shit articles all the time, you keep giving me these useless generalities, that the article is "shit", that it contains some vague "misinformation" etc. etc. All this does for me is reinforce the conviction that you are not capable of taking his article apart.
My posting of NFG's article on the frontpage, as well as the posting of my response to his article, has nothing to do with my ability to wait patiently for your own articles, and for their translations.
I wasn't saying those points gives them validation, but it does in their head. Give the best argument in the world and they can still hide behind some old Amiga artist's DeviantArt page.
I don't dislike the guy though (used to visit the site quite a bit)
NFG wrote:And Recap's right, I was probably the one who started dismissively insulting the other party's ideas. I called them silly and worse, but really, dear Recap, they are. =)
and didn't want to look like I'm trying to control Insomnia's content.
by icycalm » 20 Apr 2009 19:41
Recap wrote:The way you're explaning you're posting his write-up is not at all as if you ackowledge it is horseshit (because, indeed, you don't think so, it seems).
I'll ask it more directly: Why my warning is "useless to you"
and at the same time you have that line on the staff page?
I mean, you don't rely on your "consultants" even when you admit to not totally understanding the subject?
Don't you see that's kind of insulting?
About actual dot art you have learned shit by reading him.
Everything else is out of this discussion and I don't really care.
You kidding again, right? The fucking subject of the discussion was how dot art is intended to be displayed. Not getting that bit revealed he just missed the whole point for a clear lack of proper education. The whole fucking point. Fuckingly miseducated. As say, the idiots who programmed PS2 Mushihime-sama. What else do you need, seriously.
I'm just giving you the reasons why I'm stopping contributing here before it happens.
A shame you can't still see the difference. In using percentage scores, where's the disrespect towards you?
If there happens to be any so, I wouldn't even hesitate.
Yeah, I no longer want to go ahead with that if I'm stopping contributing here, obviously. What you had already done, it's fine, no worries.
You're crazy if you think I'm going to scrutinize and explaining myself in English line by line an article of this guy. Especially when you have everything explained for 3 years now in an article you asked me to do (and re-explained even more carefully in another article, this time in Spanish).
When you're asking me to address line by line his shit, it obviously has everything to do, you can believe that.
You know what gives them validation in their head? Finding out their articles discussed on other websites, especially on quality websites as this one.
Maybe that's because you care more about your own internet "look" than about Insomnia's content. Maybe.
by Recap » 21 Apr 2009 17:43
A couple of years ago I got into a fiery argument on a forum with someone who thought he knew the 'right way' to display a video game, and all other ways were simply wrong 'cause the designers wouldn't want it that way.. He went through great lengths to add screen curvature, scanlines and even reflections of overhead lights to try and replicate the appearance of gaming on a CRT monitor.
He was obviously deranged.
Still, there was a hint of fact in there: modern fixed-resolution displays don't do a very good job of displaying older games. No matter how they're displayed, some changes are made and compromises have to be accepted.
First, a crash-course in TVs:
Older CRTs (the big, heavy, glass tube-style TVs (basically everything pre-LCD and pre-plasma)) use a firehose approach to drawing images on the screen. Imagine three big, sweaty firemen spraying their three hoses back and forth along the back of a giant drive-in movie screen that's been painted with red, green or blue stripes. There's a grid in between the firemen and the screen, so that each fireman's hose will only spray one colour, the grid prevents their stream from hitting any other colour. They spray in sync: special signals tell them when to start again on the other side of the screen, and when to start at the top. For their entire working lives they zigzag right and left, from top to bottom, over and over and over.
Basically, that's how the old TVs worked: three electron guns sprayed electrons at different coloured phosphors, which would light up based on the intensity of the beam. It was never very accurate: sometimes the beams would drift out of alignment, failing components caused all kinds of undesired visual artifacts, and even the Earth's magnetic field would wreak havoc on the display.
For all these problems,
they had some capabilities that the modern fixed-resolution LCDs and plasmas can't match. While modern displays have caught up or surpassed CRTs in many respects,
in two specific criteria the old units are better than modern displays: image scaling and refresh speed.
I'm going to focus on the former, for now.
Generally speaking, older screens used a 4:3 horizontal:vertical aspect ratio. In other words, the screen was one third wider than it was tall. Most modern TVs are widescreen, which presents a simple problem: what do you do when you have an image 1/3 wider than its height, on a TV that's nearly twice as wide as its height? If you leave it the same ratio, it'll have unused black space on the sides (fig. 1).
If you zoom in, you lose the top and bottom of the image (fig. 2), and if you stretch it horizontally, it looks a bit funny (see below).
LCDs and plasmas (and DLP projectors) are fixed resolution displays, and they don't scale images well.
Photographs and TV shows and movies look just great when you zoom in or stretch them a little. They use a technique called resampling to create an image that's not quite entirely unlike the original, but bigger.
Pixels, however, are hard-edged pointy little things which look really terrible if you stretch them at all. Resampling a pixel makes it blurry, and half the appeal of pixel art is its clarity... Even if you're not a pixel-art fan, they often look out of focus.
Many people won't notice, or won't care, and they might as well stop reading here.
The alternative method of making them larger is hard-scaling. Rather than stretching them, you simply duplicate one horizontal or vertical row at a time until the proper size is reached. The problem with this approach is... Well, it's really ugly. The only appealing option on a fixed resolution display is to hard-scale an integer value: 2x, 3x, 4x etc.
Rarely though will this ever fit your screen without leaving gaps, and filling the gaps is what CRTs do best.
CRTs had a little secret skill: when an image needed to be stretched vertically, the firehoses just moved from top to bottom a little quickerr, adding just a tiny fraction of a millimeter between each sweep of the beams. If you needed to fill the horizontal screenspace with a smaller image, you just updated the signal a little slower, so as the beams swept side to size (you couldn't change this speed) a pixel might cross one red phosphor, or two, or maybe two and a bit.
The thing is, a CRT's never really looked pixel-perfect to start, so a little bit of futzing with the image was rarely noticed by the user.
Arcade games, consoles and even computers often took advantage of this, and created a RAM- and CPU-friendly smaller image that would be stretched out to fill the screen with no more effort than a tweak of the synchronization signals.
The vast majority of SuperNES games created a 256-horizontal-pixel image, but TVs felt most comfortable displaying a 320-pixel image.
No one playing SuperNES back in the day ever complained about this 25% difference in size, they simply never noticed.
It was very common. Almost all NES and SuperNES games did this. Most PC Engine games did too, and many MegaDrive games. In the arcade, Ghosts n Goblins used this effect. The sequel, Ghouls n Ghosts, used a higher-resolution screen. Even though the firehoses were spraying at the same speed, more pixels were pumped out for every line in the sequel, ultimately resulting in more detail.
On the SuperNES, games like Super Ghouls n Ghosts and R-Type II had to re-draw the arcade sprites to be 20% smaller, so when stretched on the SNES TV screen, they'd look right to the player. If you didn't know it was being done, you'd likely never notice.
I have to assure you, on a CRT it's just invisible,
unlike how these examples appear on your LCD monitor.
In the images above, you can see how the SuperNES sprites are nearly identical to the arcade.
They're a little bit blurry, but you'd never notice the difference on a CRT.
This little visual trickery confers an immediate 20% savings in required storage space, which is a very valuable savings in the days of cartridges.
In the Castlevania images above you can see 'scanlines'. These black gaps between each each illuminated line are a key feature of older games and CRTs. To my old-gamer eyes the graphics of old look much better with scanlines applied.
Modern fixed-res displays have trouble displaying pixels that aren't exactly the same number they were designed for and they can't easily manage the scanlines between 'em. You can fake the appearance of these scanlines, but like the pixels themselves, it tends to work best at when enlarged by a whole number (2x, 3x). Consider these two examples:
The scanlines above are not quite accurate. On a real CRT the illuminated lines are slightly thicker than the scanlines. If you enlarge the pixels 3x and apply a 1x scanline on every third row... Well, this is pretty much my ideal way to view old games on a fixed res, high-res screen:
Trying too hard to replicate the failings of old hardware is probably a sign of mental illness, but we do it anyway. I can't abide the idea that it's better or that the games were designed that way, or even that the designers intended them to be played with scanlines... It's just a silly pursuit which we engage in because we are chasing a personal ideal, a fleeting and enjoyable memory. I love this stuff. =D
While peaking of aspect ratios so far I've focused on older games that stretched themselves horizontally to fill the screen, but there were other examples of designers taking advantage of the CRTs capabilities. Capcom's CPS-1 and CPS-2 arcade platforms used images 20% larger than most, and compressed them to fit the screen.
You may ask why, but Capcom more likely asked why not.
There was no compelling reason not to. Their arcade hardware was world-beating at the time, with gobs of power to spare, and with as much storage space as they could ever use.
There was no reason to skimp like there was on the consoles. Second, it looked better. Any arcade running a good quality monitor could display more than 320 pixels on a horizontal line,
and by feeding a top-quality signal to the display, the games would scintillate with detail that a lower resolution game simply couldn't match. Arcades with old, cheap monitors would not suffer, as the extra detail in the firehoses would automatically be shown to the monitor's maximum capacity. Remember that the old systems weren't digital. Analogue displays could be very forgiving. An LCD or Plasma monitor has one signal for each pixel, everything calculated and pre-determined long before the signal ever reaches the glowy side of the monitor. On a CRT, the additional detail would be sprayed against the phosphor with absolutely no regard to their landing point. Sometimes the signal would change from one pixel to another while the beam was still on a single phosphor, but this would just change the colour shown, blending the two pixels together as the beam moved on.
by Recap » 21 Apr 2009 17:49
by icycalm » 21 Apr 2009 18:13
Recap wrote:Keep in mind I'm leaving anyway.
by icycalm » 21 Apr 2009 18:26
Recap wrote:but because I can't waste another full morning with things I've already explained
Recap wrote:and horseshit I'm not interested in