VF4 screen resolution in arcades here

Recently I read a post by adamyuki discussing screen resolutions and aliasing. This is a sample of what VF4 in arcades over here looks like:



And close-up, you can see the horizontal lines I talked about running across the screen:



I understand that the arcade machines used in other countries don't have such poor resolutions? Do your screens look like that? With horizontal lines running across?

 

VF4 has two modes it can run in. One mode is for VGA monitors (which are high resolution) and the other mode is for other monitor types.

There's a little switch (right next to the free credit switch) that the operator can flip that turns it back and forth from one mode to the other. It's actually a row of four switches, and to be on high res mode, they all should be up. For low resolution mode, the first one (on the left) should be down.
Yours may be set to low resolution. If their monitor can handle it, you might try asking the arcade owner to switch to high resolution. But the scanlines probably mean it's on a crappy monitor and switching would not work. In fact I dunno what happens if you try high resolution mode on a low resolution monitor. No effect? You break the machine? Who knows.

Good luck. Hey, is that from a digital camera? It's a nice pic.

 

The two resolutions are 15K and 31K horizontal.
15K is the same as normal TV's, which mean it is an interlaced image. It runs at 60 HZ (or fields per second) with each field consisting of half a frame from the Naomi 2's framebuffer (which is 640 by 480, so at 15Khz it is 640 by 240 lines). At 31K it displays a full frame each field (that is 640 by 480). It's all down to the monitors that the arcade has. Naomi 2 outputs 31K as standard, but comes with a daughterboard that allows 15K output (sort of a scan converter).
You haven't seen the game until you've seen it running on 31K monitors. VGA all the way, baby!

 

Wow, the detail on Jacky's face is giving me goose bumps!

Yeah, where's your cat, I know...

 

Where did you take this pic from? It looks 100 times better than the one I played at Marina.

 

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Where did you take this pic from? It looks 100 times better than the one I played at Marina.

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It's a cam shot from the machine @ Bugis. All machines in Singapore are using the same low-res setting. /versus/images/icons/frown.gif So the one @ Marina should look the same.

 

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But the scanlines probably mean it's on a crappy monitor and switching would not work. In fact I dunno what happens if you try high resolution mode on a low resolution monitor. No effect? You break the machine? Who knows.

<hr></blockquote> Wow if this is really the case then arcades here really suck. Not one place I know of here has a machine capable of displaying a higher resolution. All the machines with VF4 I've seen so far have scan lines (cool, now I know what they're called, those lines! lol). But it's not really surprising seeing how old cabinets are recycled for VF4. No VF4 machine here is actually using its own cabinet. The ones @ Bugis are even broken - there's this huge near the joystick. And the coin slots are always faulty (they eat your credit, then you have to go call the technician. Sigh.). /versus/images/icons/crazy.gif

I guess arcades here are still a far cry from matching up to the standards of those found in other countries. /versus/images/icons/frown.gif

Oh, and yes, the pic was taken using my digital camera. I had to suppress the flash for it to prevent a reflection. Heh. It was quite tricky getting a still too (moving images on-screen will become blur w/o a flash) - I had to wait till Jacky did his infamous close-up pose when the match ended! lol /versus/images/icons/laugh.gif

 

> Wow, the detail on Jacky's face is giving me goose bumps!

Yeah, it has that effect on some people *wink wink nudge nudge*

> Yeah, where's your cat, I know...

My cat is fine. Yours is in the microwave.

 

I feel ur pain and share the same feelings abt having the play it in a low res screen

 

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The two resolutions are 15K and 31K horizontal.

<hr></blockquote> Darn. So I think we must be running on the 15K one. =(

 

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Wow, the detail on Jacky's face is giving me goose bumps!

<hr></blockquote> Here's a wallpaper for you then, since you like Jacky so much!

<a target="_blank" href=http://home.pacific.net.sg/~fhha/vf4pix/jackywppr800.jpg>Jacky wallpaper 800 x 600</a>

<a target="_blank" href=http://home.pacific.net.sg/~fhha/vf4pix/jackywppr.jpg>Jacky wallpaper 1024 x 768</a>

 

With regards to the Low-High res. I would actually prefer the TV to be of the same quality of PAL60 or at least NTSC and not run the game in high rex(640*480 progressive).

The reason I prefer TV res is that with VGA res you get no free downsampling and since the game is not implementing FSAA(full scene anti aliasing)there will be a lot of aliasing errors!!!

Today I found this cool arcade which has these machines:

F355 twin(has one unit with sound so loud you need ear plugs).
SEGA Rally 2 twin
Daytona USA 2 Power Ed twin(with huge projection screens!!!)
Virtua Tennis
Silent Scope
SEGA Touring Car Championship
Sports Jam
HOTD
SCUD RACE twin
Virtua Striker 99
World Kicks(or something similar, It has the balls(football ones ) so you can kick them(ouch!!).
Time Crisis 2
R360
Vampire Night
Harley Davidson
Soul Calibur
etc......

As you can see there were a few N@omi games(F355 and VT to name 2)
Now while VT was obviously running in interlaced mode F355 was running in VGA and it looked alot worst than the DC ver I play so often. It had too much aliasing errors up close(it was nice when viewed from about 2mt distance. VT on the other hand looked like the DC version with minor aliasing on the net and it was really clean. Another example is Confidential mission at another arcade which was running in VGA. CM was nice in VGA since the guns are a good 1+mt away from the monitor.

CIN

 

DC or Naomi 2 don't perform any hardware FSAA.
They do an advanced form of CRTC filtering, but I'm not even sure if the Naomi 2 does this because it uses a downsampler to create its 15K TV-quality image. My arcade has VF4 in VGA and it looks bloody awesome.

 

IIRC PVR CLX can do FSAA via Supersampling. It was I think the first commercial GPU that could do it in hardware.

Regarding the downsampler in N2, you could be right but since N1 could do it I doubt N2 couldn't. Anyway I am not sure about this.

PS. I prefer interlaced image when you can have free 3 sample CRTC filtering to VGA in most cases(because of the reduction in jaggies)

CIN

 

Sure, Naomi 1 and 2 can perform FSAA through it accumulation buffer, but it doesn't in any arcade games because both naomi 1 and 2 don't have enough fill rate.

I'm not sure about the CRTC filter on the N2 either. I doubt the daughterboard does anything more than blends 2 fields into 1, which is what the PS2 does. It isn't very effective though

 

Agreed! But with 200Mpix/s N2 should have enough fillrate for FSAA!! Even N1 could do FSAA but than texture passes would have to be reduced and attention made for translucent effects.

CIN

 

Actually, no Naomi games use FSAA. The only game on DC to use it is ready to rumble 1 &2. Naomi 2 needs the fillrate because there are so many translucent polys and lighting effects (lightmaps) in the Vf4. You should also remember that CLX2 only has one textel engine, so multitexture is a 50% hit.

 

Who cares , it looks killer .
Oh BTW you americans are really getting the short end of the stick .
PAL is a superior imagequality format and on a decent TV with a SCART connection we can get an image as clear as with a VGA box but without the jagies .
The difference with NTSC ( even with monster cables ) is like night and day .

 

Sure, except that PAL runs 17% slower than NTSC
Pros and cons on both sides.
BTW, the arcade actuall runs in RGB video mode, which is 60hz (when using video).

 

Yes no N1 games use FSAA and that is because of fillrate shortages. N2 could use FSAA but my guess is that the devs have not experimented with this feature. The same happend with bump mapping which could be easily implemented on some surfaces since it requires only 2 passes and is done in hardware.

PS. Considering that with 200Mpps you have 10 passes available before hitting a fillrate limit, I think that even VF4 could use FSAA. And the biggest disappointment I have with VF4 is not FSAA(since you can run in interlaced) but the absence of bumpmapping which could have improved the gfx quality by quite a margin.

PPS. We have PAL 60 m8 That means PAL res @ 60hz!!!
And the reason I said that I like TV res better is that like Almaci said we play in RGB on our TVs with the advantage of reduced jaggies due to the CRTC filter.

CIN