Possible to mod a PSone's video output to remove dithering?

I apologise if this is a daft question - I was a Saturn fanboy in the 90s and didn't play much PSone except at a mate's place on occasion (running via RF or composite video to a small TV). I've only recently started gaming on a slim PSone and have noticed that games with 3D assets seem to be dithered on-screen, almost as though the game renders it internally at 16-bit or 24-bit and then pumps it through a filter to output it like a GIF and dithering the output. I'm not talking gradient dithering like on 8- and 16-bit 2D game assets, but like there's a filter over the whole screen in real-time.

I'm assuming this is the norm for the PSone?? On emulators I never noticed it, but having the console hooked up via s-video to my CRT it's all there. If it's normal and can't be modded that's fine, but just in case this could be modded (or if I should grab an alternative model PlayStation) to sort out I thought I'd ask.

Again, apologies in advance for ignorance

 

This might not have anything to do with it, but are you using a third party s-video cable? A lot of them simply have composite hooked up to the s-video port, which produces awful looking video like you're describing.

 

Dithering on PlayStation and PlayStation2 are hardware based. Cannot be disabled with modding.

 

...but could it be disabled with a software hack?

From looking at an old PSX GPU document it seems that the GPU does have control registers where dithering can be enabled or disabled during shading which means it could at least be possible for some clever person to write software to run in the background and access that register to keep dithering disabled or maybe hack the games themselves instead. I just wish that I had enough ability to do it myself as the dithering on some PSX games looks awful when upscaled on a HDTV.

 

@adimifus: It's a third party cable, but I'm confident it's doing the right thing as its razor sharp, whereas composite will murder the picture in comparison. That's part of the problem I guess - the extra clarity from the s-video cable means you can see the dithering more!
@l_oliveira: Thanks for the answer and confirming the details. As a Saturn fanboy, on some level this makes me smile as the Saturn didn't suffer from this (mind, it suffered from many, many other issues to make up for it, but it's still my favourite console!).
@kel: If that were possible, that would be all sorts of awesome I just figured that the dithering is there so the GPU didn't have to work so hard (and thus removing it would cause problems) if it wasn't related to some unusual way the encoder rendered out the video output.

Perhaps I just have to give it time to grow on me, kind of like the Saturn's muffled sampled audio, the blurry output and and low-res textures on the N64, and so forth

 

That's a different story. Anyway who's willing to hack games for just that ? You know dithering is there to make the games look better on CRT TVs.

Now with LCDs and Plasma it makes the image worse instead.

 

I still say, check the s-video cable. Adimifus has a valid point.
A badly wired s-video cable will not produce a less sharp image so much as it will produce an ugly and all grainy image.

 

I'll give it a double-check, but the s-video output's still razor-sharp with none of the usual artefacting I get with composite video on my CRT. On games where the dithering doesn't kick in it looks fantastic (memory's fuzzy, but Castlevania: SotN looked snazzy, as did Asuka 120% and a few others), it's just that the clarity offered by s-video (and by extension RGB if I went down that road for my PSone) shows up the dithering that got hidden with the smeary nature of composite video.

 

I had a bunch of cheap third party s-video cables for some of my consoles, and for the longest time I thought that because s-video was a better connection than composite, it was just showing stuff that composite was hiding. When I learned that some cables are made incorrectly, I started making my own, or adding s-video ports to my consoles. It makes a world of a difference.
Again, it may be totally unrelated to your problem, but its worth checking, I think.

 

@Mangledleg. Just a precision, when adimifus said that composite was hooked to s-video, It does not mean that you will get composite video through the s-video connection. You will still get some kind of S-video signal but it will look like crap.

I actually made a thread about that last year.
http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...cted-to-Composite-Video-on-Snes-s-video-cable

 

The dithering is there to remove banding during shading, because the framebuffer is only 15bit.