If I recall correctly, Silent Hill 3 on the PS2 has one option available in the display settings which toggles screen sharpness on-the-fly. (One question comes to mind, is this related in some way to the 'display outline sharpening' option of the DVD player?) I wonder if this graphical effect is software driven and exclusive to Silent Hill 3 game, or rather, a hardware feature which can be turned on or off by setting a specific register. If so, could it not be user-controlled via GSM, for example? I suspect some games would benefit from this.
Didn't Silent Hill 3 simply blur the whole screen and a hidden option allowed you to disable said filter? In that case there's no sharpness at all.
Do you mean the 'noise effect' ? I think it's two separate things, the instruction manual actually refers to the second as a 'display mode' option to adjust the screen sharpness. But it would be a disappoitment if it actually worked the other way round, blurring instead of sharpening, so that when blurring was at minimal picture would look "sharp" (stock sharp).
Interesting, perhaps it's a hardware feature after all. @root670: I have never played those games. What do you make of the sharpening option? The visual effect is noticeable? Would you say it improves the picture quality?
I think it's unlikely there is a "secret" screen sharpening register that can be enabled on all games that makes them look better. Even if it was a secret and Silent Hill 3 developers found it, then all games afterwards would have it. I don't know for sure, but my guess is you will be disappointed. I don't think it's related to the DVD player, which is likely just upscaling through an algorithm that introduces new detail.
Sadly, konami has let me down a bit on the previous entry (silent hill 2) with their new sound technology called S-Force. No matter the type of speakers I used I could not achieve the announced audio marvel. I am hoping this one may have something more than meets the eye.
The blurriness is rather simple to create, even original PlayStation games did that to simulate heat effects and distortions. You would take the current framebuffer, use it as a texture and blend that in while shifting by one pixel.
I'd quite like the opposite - to be able to enable edge anti-aliasing or other softening effects to smooth out those jaggies!
The hardware Edge AA is quite expensive. Only few games use it on select geometry. If you were to force enable it on everything, it'd become unplayable. There's also no sharpening settings anywhere. Developers often smoothed their games by some analog measures and sometimes they let you turn that off.
That option changes the video interlace behavior. It changes how the graphics chip encodes the video signal (for CVBS and S-Video outputs) and is only meaningful for CRT displays.
