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> The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive[...] This is something that a lot of even very plugged into

> The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive[...] This is something that a lot of even very plugged into retrogaming people don't really get about the NES and RGB mods. I think it's very counterintuitive for people now that there is no part of the system that operates in actual 'color' information. The NES' video output is composite from start to finish[1], with palette entries corresponding to approximate output frequencies for the color subcarrier. So there is no canonical palette for the NES - the colors produced by games varied by region, a little bit by unit, and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color even by TV. So people imagine that RGB or HDMI mods of the NES are somehow tapping into a missing layer of raw color information, but what it's actually doing is intercepting communications with the PPU and modelling (on an fpga) an extra PPU that does operate in RGB, and then constructing a new video signal from that. And then you have to pick a palette, because there isn't just one. I have an RGB modded NES (a US toploader) but I doubt I will ever buy or make another one. At this point I think it's better to just use an upscaler, which will produce no less authentic a picture. The main benefit imo of the rgb mod is that there's less interference so the picture is clearer, even if you just output reconstructed composite from it. [1] There is actually a model of NES PPU that outputs RGB, it was used in the PlayChoice arcade machines (which generally used RGB monitors, not composite) and it has a palette that most people agree is ugly as sin.

derefr 5y ago
Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works. My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the designers — probably working on something like an Amiga — chose when creating the pixel art for the games; and that Nintendo likely has institutional memory, if not hard records, of what that design-time palette was; and so later palettes in RGB-based emulators were likely chosen to closely resemble those design-time palettes.
- wk_end 5y ago
  To throw a few wrenches into that: * As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be). * There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used different hardware and software tools to draw their graphics. Nintendo was notoriously crappy to third-party developers during the Famicom years, and Western developers in particular had little institutional support from them. Even if you had the correct palette that Nintendo was using between 1988 and 1991, that's not necessarily what Rare was using in 1990, or what Square was using in 1987, or... * The Famicom was released in 1983, and development on it began in 1982. There was no Amiga, no Atari ST, no X68000, no VGA, no mainstream computers really capable of general purpose graphics editing. Developers often had to come up with bespoke systems for editing graphics at the time, including bespoke hardware - and it's entirely possible these bespoke systems used a similar non-RGB design as the Famicom, or even the same PPU, or were even just editing programs on a Famicom with some kind of serial-out hacked in. * Philosophically speaking, the artists were aware that they were producing graphics for the Famicom/NES. That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it. * I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases: witness, for instance, the low quality of the N64 emulation in the Switch Online Expansion Pack they just put out. The actual people who did the art may be gone or uninvolved in the re-releases; just because they own the copyright I don't think whatever Nintendo slaps together really represents the intent of the artists themselves, in the same way that I don't think, say, the release of Go Set a Watchman says anything about the intent of Harper Lee.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    > That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it. I don't think it's necessarily even very likely that they were looking at rgb from a devkit. These days people associate PVMs and other pro monitors with RGB but they aren't synonymous. Take a look through ebay listing for PVMs and you'll find plenty of composite or s-video-ish pro monitors from the 80s kicking around. And even some microcomputer monitors were composite. If the dev tooling they used was based on a C64 or Apple IIe (which also used 6502 cpus), that'd be composite out for eg., even with a designed-for-c64/appleIIe monitor. And I'm pretty sure I've seen photos of people using Apple IIe or similar for NES dev.
hyakosm 5y ago
In France we had a different color system (SÉCAM), while the other european countries were in PAL, but French TV were required to have a Péritel/SCART entry by law, offering RGB input. So the french NES was basically the european PAL version with an extra PAL to RGB converter.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Don't forget MESECAM and PAL-M and the other crazy things we had to deal with in the bad old days. There was one standard (PAL-M I think) that was not NTSC but the difference from NTSC was so slight that you could slap an PAL-M sticker* on an NTSC recording, and the PAL-M tape machine would play it back just fine. * The power of that sticker was amazing! ;P
  - woliveirajr 5y ago
    Brazil used PAL-M. NTSC on a PAL+M would give you B&W video and it was possible to convert the equipment (the VCR) by changing the frequency offset of the color carrier.
  - SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
    An NTSC tape would play in black and white on a pure PAL-M system. PAL-M was the Brazilian system, created to conform to the 60Hz mains but having the improved colour encoding of PAL. Before colour TVs, Brazil used the American 60Hz System M (B&W predecessor of NTSC), so when it came time to adopt colour they couldn't choose the European PAL because it would not be compatible with current B&W TV sets, and they didn't want to adopt NTSC* because by then it was clear it was an inferior colour encoding, so they slapped a PAL colour encoding on top of a SystemM B&W signal, resulting in a 525 lines 60Hz without NTSC colour distortions (kinda best of both worlds). * Also they didn't want to adopt NTSC because they wanted to prop the national electronics industry, so a home made standard meant local TV makers didn't have to compete with imported TV sets.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Wait what!? There was a French pal RGB nes?
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
What about the Sharp Nintendo Television? According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmhhDvncrFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmhhDvncrFY, the NES has a direct RGB connection to the display.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  That most likely contained a custom NES with a PC-10 chip rather than a standard PPU.
- throwra620 5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
> and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color. The last thing you wanted to see in NTSC was bright red because you'd continue to see it smear for at least 1/4 of the screen to the right. NTSC "Safe" red wasn't really red. Run a broadcast safe filter on 255,0,0 and see how far off it goes. Should be somewhere around 180,0,0 IIRC. The days of looking at vectorscope to see the red point shoot off while everything else was much closer. When it became easier to get digital images to tape, we'd have to adjust the chroma down on the TBC to bring it back into legal limits which would mean the rest of the other colors would get squashed when the client didn't work in NTSC safe color palletes.
- dlsa 5y ago
  laughs in PAL Weren't NTSC somewhat also grainier with more pronounced horizontal gaps between each scanline? Certainly seemed so.
  - scoot 5y ago
    Yes, but at a higher refresh rate - 525 horizontal scan lines @ 60hz vs 625 @50hz. Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency.
    - mrob 5y ago
      >Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency. It doesn't have to be. Japan has a split power grid with 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west, but television frequency is 60Hz on both sides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/media/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/m...
      - smilespray 5y ago
        This explains why western Japan is so much further ahead than eastern Japan. Everything is just faster there.
bennysomething 5y ago
I've got a RGB modded NTSC nes too. I bought it so o could use with an ossc (open source scan converter, bit of hardware that does lagless line doubling to output to hdmi 720 or 1080 etc, though I'm sure you know this others might not). The results are way past what I expected and I'm really happy with it. However the RGB mod I got for my N64 to use with ossc has been really disappointing. I'm sure it would look good on a CRT but on an ossc it's a blurry mess, I've gone back to emulation for the N64 instead.
- batty_alex 5y ago
  For the N64, you'll want to look into mods that remove the blur effect on the N64: https://www.retrorgb.com/n64blur.html https://www.retrorgb.com/n64blur.html
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    Yep it's rim Worthingtons mod I've got an the deblur makes no real noticeable difference to me. I'm convinced I'm doing something wrong but don't have the time to mess with ossc settings properly. Emulation has just worked out better for me
- stormbrew 5y ago
  sibling comment mentioned that you either need to do deblur as a post-process step or mod the n64 to remove blur to get rid of it. Tbh I don't have an issue with this, because the n64 really truly is a blurry mess it's just not obvious on a crt. But of all my consoles the n64 is one I pretty rarely go back to. And yeah, I also got a modded nes to use with an ossc but now there are good retro-console upscalers that'll take composite (notably the retrotink5x, which incidentally does have a deblur filter for the n64 iirc) and it just doesn't seem worth it anymore. I'll still mod my consoles (or get them modded by someone better at it than me) if they actually have a better video signal to steal, but I just don't see the point in faking one in the console instead of outside it. I've been poking at trying to mod famicoms/NESs just for the purposes of getting a cleaner composite signal out of them, but it's tricky and I'm not that good at this stuff.
ArtWomb 5y ago
Upscaling 2.0 seemed to be the hot tech topic at GDC 2022 ;) https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/amd-fidelityfx-super-resolution-2-0-gdc-2022-announcements/ba-p/517541 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/amd-fidelityfx-super-res... What made the NES so interesting? It was the games, pure and simple! I've got probably 20 versions of classic arcade Q*Bert. But the iteration with the "purest" design? My goto to actually play when I want to go for a personal high score? Hands down, it's the NES.
83457 5y ago
Related to this, I never knew just how bad the Sega Genesis composite signal looked until I switched to RGB. It may have the worst composite signal of any system ever. Europe had RGB so I wonder if that was part of the reason the Mega Drive (Genesis) was so popular. The SNES doesn't look (much?) better than the Genesis when both in RGB, but SNES composite is much much better than Genesis. https://youtu.be/tT9OnPjQKWY?t=116 https://youtu.be/tT9OnPjQKWY?t=116
- thedeadfish 5y ago
  I think it might just be the NTSC composite that looks bad. I have never felt any desire to use RGB on my PAL Mega Drive since the composite output looks excellent. On PAL it gives just the right amount of blending to smooth out the dithering, but at the same time is sharp enough to resolve individual pixels, and lacks any sort of rainbow effect which apparently plagues NTSC.
  - 83457 5y ago
    Gotcha. Certainly sounds like it is only NTSC composite then.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  Video and audio quality varies pretty wildly between models of the genesis, so some are better than others. But basically every model has some kind of notorious issue with output fidelity. I think they pretty often need to be recapped in modern times. More so than contemporary nintendo systems tend to need to, I think. In the end most of this wasn't really super obvious on an 80s/early 90s consumer CRT though, and I don't think people were really comparison shopping on it.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
When I was young and would play NES, it was usually on an older CRT TV and the NES was connected via the RF connector. So you had the RF interference, and the fine tuning certainly added things because often it had to be adjusted, and then anything with tint, brightness, etc. was adjusted until it looked good in the room. Some problematic TVs had bleeding colors, etc. or brightness issues, or the antenna connector was broken, causing fuzziness, etc. Take the analog path from NES to TV in that common situation, then the second analog path inside the TV generating the color, then NTSC color/lum separation limitations, and "crisp" or "accurate" is something that couldn't describe the results. On nesdev.com there's at least one thread where quite a few people are discussing about the best way to capture the color palette from video sources, and argument that there really isn't a "golden palette" because each TV was different and NTSC quirks: a pixel sent to a CRT TV could have different colors depending on its position and the colors/luminance before and after. So CRT/NTSC fuzziness is part of the memory and nostalgia. I like the NTSC emulation options in FCEUX which do a really good job of the color fringing and smearing that was on CRT TVs and really make it "look" like how it was when I was young.

derefr 5y ago

Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works. My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the designers — probably working on something like an Amiga — chose when creating the pixel art for the games; and that Nintendo likely has institutional memory, if not hard records, of what that design-time palette was; and so later palettes in RGB-based emulators were likely chosen to closely resemble those design-time palettes.

wk_end 5y ago
To throw a few wrenches into that: * As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be). * There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used different hardware and software tools to draw their graphics. Nintendo was notoriously crappy to third-party developers during the Famicom years, and Western developers in particular had little institutional support from them. Even if you had the correct palette that Nintendo was using between 1988 and 1991, that's not necessarily what Rare was using in 1990, or what Square was using in 1987, or... * The Famicom was released in 1983, and development on it began in 1982. There was no Amiga, no Atari ST, no X68000, no VGA, no mainstream computers really capable of general purpose graphics editing. Developers often had to come up with bespoke systems for editing graphics at the time, including bespoke hardware - and it's entirely possible these bespoke systems used a similar non-RGB design as the Famicom, or even the same PPU, or were even just editing programs on a Famicom with some kind of serial-out hacked in. * Philosophically speaking, the artists were aware that they were producing graphics for the Famicom/NES. That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it. * I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases: witness, for instance, the low quality of the N64 emulation in the Switch Online Expansion Pack they just put out. The actual people who did the art may be gone or uninvolved in the re-releases; just because they own the copyright I don't think whatever Nintendo slaps together really represents the intent of the artists themselves, in the same way that I don't think, say, the release of Go Set a Watchman says anything about the intent of Harper Lee.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  > That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it. I don't think it's necessarily even very likely that they were looking at rgb from a devkit. These days people associate PVMs and other pro monitors with RGB but they aren't synonymous. Take a look through ebay listing for PVMs and you'll find plenty of composite or s-video-ish pro monitors from the 80s kicking around. And even some microcomputer monitors were composite. If the dev tooling they used was based on a C64 or Apple IIe (which also used 6502 cpus), that'd be composite out for eg., even with a designed-for-c64/appleIIe monitor. And I'm pretty sure I've seen photos of people using Apple IIe or similar for NES dev.

hyakosm 5y ago

In France we had a different color system (SÉCAM), while the other european countries were in PAL, but French TV were required to have a Péritel/SCART entry by law, offering RGB input. So the french NES was basically the european PAL version with an extra PAL to RGB converter.

dylan604 5y ago
Don't forget MESECAM and PAL-M and the other crazy things we had to deal with in the bad old days. There was one standard (PAL-M I think) that was not NTSC but the difference from NTSC was so slight that you could slap an PAL-M sticker* on an NTSC recording, and the PAL-M tape machine would play it back just fine. * The power of that sticker was amazing! ;P
- woliveirajr 5y ago
  Brazil used PAL-M. NTSC on a PAL+M would give you B&W video and it was possible to convert the equipment (the VCR) by changing the frequency offset of the color carrier.
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  An NTSC tape would play in black and white on a pure PAL-M system. PAL-M was the Brazilian system, created to conform to the 60Hz mains but having the improved colour encoding of PAL. Before colour TVs, Brazil used the American 60Hz System M (B&W predecessor of NTSC), so when it came time to adopt colour they couldn't choose the European PAL because it would not be compatible with current B&W TV sets, and they didn't want to adopt NTSC* because by then it was clear it was an inferior colour encoding, so they slapped a PAL colour encoding on top of a SystemM B&W signal, resulting in a 525 lines 60Hz without NTSC colour distortions (kinda best of both worlds). * Also they didn't want to adopt NTSC because they wanted to prop the national electronics industry, so a home made standard meant local TV makers didn't have to compete with imported TV sets.
bennysomething 5y ago
Wait what!? There was a French pal RGB nes?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

What about the Sharp Nintendo Television? According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmhhDvncrFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmhhDvncrFY, the NES has a direct RGB connection to the display.

AussieWog93 5y ago
That most likely contained a custom NES with a PC-10 chip rather than a standard PPU.
throwra620 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago

> and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color. The last thing you wanted to see in NTSC was bright red because you'd continue to see it smear for at least 1/4 of the screen to the right. NTSC "Safe" red wasn't really red. Run a broadcast safe filter on 255,0,0 and see how far off it goes. Should be somewhere around 180,0,0 IIRC. The days of looking at vectorscope to see the red point shoot off while everything else was much closer. When it became easier to get digital images to tape, we'd have to adjust the chroma down on the TBC to bring it back into legal limits which would mean the rest of the other colors would get squashed when the client didn't work in NTSC safe color palletes.

dlsa 5y ago
laughs in PAL Weren't NTSC somewhat also grainier with more pronounced horizontal gaps between each scanline? Certainly seemed so.
- scoot 5y ago
  Yes, but at a higher refresh rate - 525 horizontal scan lines @ 60hz vs 625 @50hz. Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency.
  - mrob 5y ago
    >Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency. It doesn't have to be. Japan has a split power grid with 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west, but television frequency is 60Hz on both sides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/media/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/m...
    - smilespray 5y ago
      This explains why western Japan is so much further ahead than eastern Japan. Everything is just faster there.

bennysomething 5y ago

I've got a RGB modded NTSC nes too. I bought it so o could use with an ossc (open source scan converter, bit of hardware that does lagless line doubling to output to hdmi 720 or 1080 etc, though I'm sure you know this others might not). The results are way past what I expected and I'm really happy with it. However the RGB mod I got for my N64 to use with ossc has been really disappointing. I'm sure it would look good on a CRT but on an ossc it's a blurry mess, I've gone back to emulation for the N64 instead.

batty_alex 5y ago
For the N64, you'll want to look into mods that remove the blur effect on the N64: https://www.retrorgb.com/n64blur.html https://www.retrorgb.com/n64blur.html
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Yep it's rim Worthingtons mod I've got an the deblur makes no real noticeable difference to me. I'm convinced I'm doing something wrong but don't have the time to mess with ossc settings properly. Emulation has just worked out better for me
stormbrew 5y ago
sibling comment mentioned that you either need to do deblur as a post-process step or mod the n64 to remove blur to get rid of it. Tbh I don't have an issue with this, because the n64 really truly is a blurry mess it's just not obvious on a crt. But of all my consoles the n64 is one I pretty rarely go back to. And yeah, I also got a modded nes to use with an ossc but now there are good retro-console upscalers that'll take composite (notably the retrotink5x, which incidentally does have a deblur filter for the n64 iirc) and it just doesn't seem worth it anymore. I'll still mod my consoles (or get them modded by someone better at it than me) if they actually have a better video signal to steal, but I just don't see the point in faking one in the console instead of outside it. I've been poking at trying to mod famicoms/NESs just for the purposes of getting a cleaner composite signal out of them, but it's tricky and I'm not that good at this stuff.

ArtWomb 5y ago

Upscaling 2.0 seemed to be the hot tech topic at GDC 2022 ;) https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/amd-fidelityfx-super-resolution-2-0-gdc-2022-announcements/ba-p/517541 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/amd-fidelityfx-super-res... What made the NES so interesting? It was the games, pure and simple! I've got probably 20 versions of classic arcade Q*Bert. But the iteration with the "purest" design? My goto to actually play when I want to go for a personal high score? Hands down, it's the NES.

83457 5y ago

Related to this, I never knew just how bad the Sega Genesis composite signal looked until I switched to RGB. It may have the worst composite signal of any system ever. Europe had RGB so I wonder if that was part of the reason the Mega Drive (Genesis) was so popular. The SNES doesn't look (much?) better than the Genesis when both in RGB, but SNES composite is much much better than Genesis. https://youtu.be/tT9OnPjQKWY?t=116 https://youtu.be/tT9OnPjQKWY?t=116

thedeadfish 5y ago
I think it might just be the NTSC composite that looks bad. I have never felt any desire to use RGB on my PAL Mega Drive since the composite output looks excellent. On PAL it gives just the right amount of blending to smooth out the dithering, but at the same time is sharp enough to resolve individual pixels, and lacks any sort of rainbow effect which apparently plagues NTSC.
- 83457 5y ago
  Gotcha. Certainly sounds like it is only NTSC composite then.
stormbrew 5y ago
Video and audio quality varies pretty wildly between models of the genesis, so some are better than others. But basically every model has some kind of notorious issue with output fidelity. I think they pretty often need to be recapped in modern times. More so than contemporary nintendo systems tend to need to, I think. In the end most of this wasn't really super obvious on an 80s/early 90s consumer CRT though, and I don't think people were really comparison shopping on it.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

When I was young and would play NES, it was usually on an older CRT TV and the NES was connected via the RF connector. So you had the RF interference, and the fine tuning certainly added things because often it had to be adjusted, and then anything with tint, brightness, etc. was adjusted until it looked good in the room. Some problematic TVs had bleeding colors, etc. or brightness issues, or the antenna connector was broken, causing fuzziness, etc. Take the analog path from NES to TV in that common situation, then the second analog path inside the TV generating the color, then NTSC color/lum separation limitations, and "crisp" or "accurate" is something that couldn't describe the results. On nesdev.com there's at least one thread where quite a few people are discussing about the best way to capture the color palette from video sources, and argument that there really isn't a "golden palette" because each TV was different and NTSC quirks: a pixel sent to a CRT TV could have different colors depending on its position and the colors/luminance before and after. So CRT/NTSC fuzziness is part of the memory and nostalgia. I like the NTSC emulation options in FCEUX which do a really good job of the color fringing and smearing that was on CRT TVs and really make it "look" like how it was when I was young.