Why I Think Game-on-Demand is the Next Big Thing

Firstly, I did not say that nobody used such terms; you're clear evidence to the contrary.

More to the point, in my experience only people who don't know better use such outdated and worthless means of identifying console generations. Don't include yourself in that group, I know you know the difference. If everyone and their dog uses such terms, then they do not know what they are talking about. At the risk of repeating myself, you should know better than to use terms that you also know are incorrect.

Since you asked, if I want to refer to the PSX generation, I say "PSX generation". If I'm talking about the SNES generation I say "SNES generation". The former is inclusive of the N64 with a 64-bit CPU, the latter includes the PC Engine despite it's 8-bit CPU, and everyone knows what rough era I'm talking about without me needing to make an obvious mistake. Preferrably I would just talk about the console I want to talk about, and assume other people are aware of the associated era, avoiding generalisations altogether. This really is not relevant to the thread though, so let's move on.

So your point is what? That people are going to buy the PS3 because it has 7 3.2Ghz Cell cores instead of the 3 3.2Ghz PPC cores in the 360? And you say that I'm talking absurd?

No, then you're right and I'm wrong, and I'll publicly admit I'm wrong. You're being melodramatic, and you're avoiding my point, which (as you well know by now) is that a crash isn't coming in five years, it isn't coming in four years, or three, and personally I'm highly doubtful it's coming at all. You have yet to convince me (or, I hope, anyone else) otherwise.

 

Ok, I'm going to close the rant since is just way offtopic.

Back to the point: I don't like GoD, and since I don't work in any company related to it I've no reasons to protect that.

What I tried to say with this thread is simple: GoD may or may not come, but if it does then is already inminent and is better to be alert. Is one of those things that starts somewhere else were you don't care, but and when you're aware of it is already there and you've to learn to live with it, like what P2P did to the record labels status quo...

 

Judging from the thread topic, it sounds like you're saying, "it will definitely come".

 

Well from the bussiness standpoint is coming, and things like ninty's virtual machine and Live arcade are only the prelude to a much more advanced system. Plus is one great way for companies to cut down costs. A CEO must be retarded if he doesnt at least sets a R&D group on the GoD idea.

But on the other hand it may meet a hostile market, so it wont last much...

What I say is just that we must be careful about any events in this area.

 

Which is exactly why I don't pay for them. The only way I'd ever dream of it if it was a monthly service, and they were at least as good of quality as the originals. Neither Xbox arcade nor Wii can claim to be 100% accurate ports. I play so few games these days, I can be a dick about the quality (development, port, and gameplay) of the ones I do play.

 

Excuse me a bit. I'm somewhat lacking in the video display area. Why is it exactly that these Live and VC games aren't 100% faithful to their original console counterparts? I'll hazard this guess:

Native resolution being upscaled: example) SNES games were 256/224 resolution. The Wii displays at 480p. So games must already be up-rezzed, and as a result, they look softer (like crap).

ALSO: Since when were NES, SNES games interlaced? PC emulation leads me to believe otherwise, especially when I take screenshots. Is this all the refreshing at work?

Amirite? Am I missing something? Please answer my questions..

As for my thoughts on GoD. It's an idea I really want to like, but there are a few hurdles. In order for GoD to be successful, games from it need to have "properties" like physical media. Namely, I want to seamlessly take a game from my house to a friends house, possibly on a hard drive. I want to OWN the game, and if it is somehow erased, I would like to be able to redownload it. (Don't they do this with Live?)

Otherwise, I still like tangibility. Physical copies can be resold and traded, something you won't be able to do with GoD. Might we also say goodbye to extras and physical preorder bonuses too? (As a personal preference, I enjoy all my Gamecube games because I CAN hold them and admire their boxart and the amount of data on such a small disc, but that's straying a bit.)

My hope for the future is that we combine the best of both worlds for gaming media. Optical storage stores loads of data at low cost, but nobody likes loading times, no matter what the benefits. ROM carts always gave you instant gratification at the expense of CD-quality audio, FMVs, increased textures and whatnots. Solid state media is the way to go, but I doubt we'll have it cheap enough to carry games on. What about hard drives then? Gah, it's all too much. Optical media seems to be the best compromise, but we'll someday all move away from that.

To the side:
You know what I'd like? A device that plugs into my SNES and PS1 and stores games on a card/HD. No, I'm not looking at this so I can go and download/"borrow" games without buying them like some cheap person. (I understand if your country's postal system loses 50% of its mail though.) Games I own, as well as unreleased ones, would surely rock without having to deal with a mass of carts and discs.

 

I dont like GoD, but the problem is that companies are more than willing to use it so they can reduce costs...

For example soap companies could buy dies from graveyards and use to make cheap soap like in fight club, but would you buy human-fat soap?

GoD is only real if we let it be....

 

The output of those consoles is interlaced naturally. That they run in progressive scan when they run through emulation is one of the reasons why it looks wrong, to my understanding - almost all PCs for the last 20 years back have used progressive scan instead of interlaced, TV's have been a lot slower to catch up. There's also stretching and upscaling, as you pointed out.

When you run a PC NES emulator in 1024x768 you're generally getting a badly stretched, fully upscaled (so none of the original scanlines present), progressive scanned image. Very different to the original. It never used to irritate me, but these days I can't stand it.

 

It still doesnt bother me to play upscaled classics, unless some interlace-specific effect is messed-up. I see no reason to be picky about a convenience such as emulation when you can always hook it via S-video (or go RF if u wanna be hardcore on a black n white TV) and enable interlace.

 

Exactly. Regardless of how much time they pour into the emulator, it will still look inferior to the original. Which is sad, b/c emulation of Famicom can actually look better than the original, due to it's lack of RGB signal (w/o a serious mod).

Errr... this is only partially true. The standard SFC resolution (same as PC-Engine I believe) is 256x224 progressive. I believe interlaced signals are available for higher res games, but don't know which ones, if any, actually use these modes. I think that's more applicable to the next generations of consoles (Saturn & PS).

Here is some good reading on the subject.

This is very valid for those that aren't nitpickers for quality. But as I stated before, I don't play "just anything" these days. I generally play about 4-5 RPG or long action games (in the 20-30 hour range) and the rest of the time I play short-burst games, mainly shooting, and usually sticking to one every 1 to 2 months (I played ESPGaluda II for about 8 months). I used to play anything and everything I could get my hands on. Just can't do it anymore, so I'm an ass about how my handful of games look.

Now you're missing the point though. Interlacing is the enemy, not your friend. A 16-bit emulator on a computer w/ a 'normal' monitor (31khz) will look better as it's able to enable fake scanlines. Not the real thing, but a nice substitite. I can only assume that a video card w/ S-Video out is interlacing an already upscaled output. The only way to play through emulation and keep it at it's true output, is with a video card that outputs 15khz, non-interlaced signal. The only cards that do this out of the box are Ultimarc A-VGA, or I hear a few other Radeon cards can w/ a Bios hack. I was eventually talked into getting one of these with an RGB monitor. It's unbelievable. I can never go back to S-Video, Xbox emulation, or anything else for that matter.

 

In terms of video signals, be it RF, composite, S-Video, RGB etc it's all interlaced when we see it. Right?

I'm certainly no expert, it was just my understanding that once I see it on my TV, it's interlaced. Being what the developers expected us to see, etc.

EDIT: talking about home consoles, obviously.

 

No, they're not all interlaced. If you wade through the link I posted above (it's actually a pretty cool read, and talks about how you can de-interlace an interlaced game, with pretty decent results, apparently) you'll get descriptions of low-res progressive signals.

The PS2 is a great example to look at how to do a port properly, and improperly. Again, this almost always applies to 2D games, and unfortunately, only a few of them are running at "proper" resolutions.

One of my favorite games, ESPGaluda in TATE mode, runs at it's native PCB resolution. I don't know the numbers, but it is a 15khz progressive signal. You can tell by the scanlines. If you put it in YOKO mode, it's now interlaced (no scanlines).

Mushihime-sama is a great example of laziness. Both YOKO and TATE modes feature interlaced output. You can see a sort of "shimmer" as the background scrolls, and of course, you will not notice any scanlines. I own the PCB, and it is much less taxing on the eyes...especially w/ those damn purple bullets, not to mention it looks sharper. Note that Mushi's graphics also have some type of filter applied to them, which makes them look even shittier. The sad thing? Cave themselves did the port, whereas Arika did the ESPGaluda one.

Why don't these games support their native resolutions? There's lots of theories. The most prominent one being that flat screens suck cock at doing the upscaling. By having the game hardware do it first will look much better than having the LCD upscale the 15khz progressive signal. You can try it yourself if you have an LCD, one low res game, and one interlaced game. You can translate that anyway you want, but it seems that casual gamers with flat screens that are way more prone to buying new, flashy 3D games are inadvertantly throwing out features us older diehards want.

Here's a thread which talks about what games run at what resolution on the PS2. I remember how I used to shit all over the PS2, but it is clearly the choice for retro gaming. The Xbox and GC (and Wii, according to Nintendo) can't even output non-interlaced signals. Wii, to me, is the biggest question mark. They have strived very hard to not impress anyone. No low-res (despite having VC), and no HD. They even said the majority of their customers don't have HDTVs... which would mean they DO have TVs that would support low res signals, and thus, would make the VC games be undiscernable from their cartridge versions.

EDIT: For you guys in the UK that have a SCART TV and an extra 400 GBP to spend on a relatively cheap PC + a Digimarc, I'm telling you, do yourself the favor. Assuming the emulation accuracy is there (which is for hundreds of MAME games, as welll as thousands of console games) then you can't tell the difference. I of course buy originals still, but some old machines don't natively handle RGB (PC-Engine, Famicom) and others are a pain in the ass to get the cables (for us, anyway).

EDIT2: Another link which explains all of this quite well, by Recap.

 

Yeah, I was totally wrong, so 1080peter, disregard my older post. Well worth reading the linked article (and kudos for manually underlining the links, GP - hopefully the forum standard can be changed in that respect soon).

I need to read more before I post.

 

Nah, honest mistake. I wasn't that informed on it until recently, although I did read up on what PS2 games used what resolutions before buying them. The shitty part is, once you get anal about it, it becomes a bit harder to enjoy some of the games. The latest Iris no Aetelier, a series which has traditionally had amazing high res sprites, now has filtered (or just low-res) pixel-based backgrounds, and doesn't look nearly as good as it's predecessors. Capcom & Konami's latest collections both don't support their native resolutions.

I'm not going to try to re-educate the gaming population, but I don't doubt that it would be nice if everyone did care.

One last thing. The recent Sega Ages games (Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box is one) have 4 display modes:

low-res interlaced
low-res progressive
high-res (31khz, for HDTVs)
high-res w/ fake scalines (of course, 31khz as well)

Wish all games came like this. It's obviously not too hard to do, as this seems to be the standard now for all 2D Sega Ages games.