[Try4ce] For those curious about some of the more obscure games featured in the episode... since these mods are installed in a Super Famicom, I thought it would be fun to challenge myself to use every Japanese cart that I own in the making of this video. Some games were off the FX Pak Pro, and some were American carts, but I'd say most clips were recorded using my actual real Japanese carts... the list of which can be found here: backloggery.com/games.php?user=Try4ce&search=&console=SNES&status=&unplayed=&rating=®ion=1&own=0
Thank you for clarifying the games, it would be super cool if you added the title of the game while it is featured. Also why did you remove that sticker???!!!!! cheers and thanks again for this awesome episode!!!!
Thanks so much for featuring my upcoming modifications for the SNES! This has been a labor of love and wouldn't have been possible without people such as Furrtek, Mike Chi and Ste Kulov. I'm looking forward to releasing this so that EVERYONE can have sharp pixels without having to hunt down a 1CHIP SNES!
Need to haul my SNES down from the attic to see how many chips are in mine, this is so awesome. Stellar job Voultar, and stellar video of course Try4ce.
@@StephanieHua availability info was at the end of the video. Initially it's only available through Voultar's install service. At some point the boards themselves will be listed for DIY installs, but there is no release date currently.
I appreciate all the effort in capturing from everything from the Framemeister to the Tink 4k and then CRT comparisons. Excellent work and thank you! Very impressive what Voultar has achieved and the effort put into making these mods work. As it stands right now, I could order these boards and be completely happy with the results. Though, somehow I also get the feeling that he'll take the feedback as a challenge and if it's possible, future revisions will be near identical to 1CHIP in all aspects.
[Try4ce] I'd be curious to hear his thoughts on this. If you noticed that one pic I showed of his in development process, he over-sharpened to the point there were halos! So my takeaway from that is that this may be the best balance. I'm not sure if you can get quite to the 1CHIP without replacing the PPU with an FPGA, in which case you lose part of that original hardware appeal. Either way, I feel the differences between models now is so small that the small clarity advantage to the 1CHIPs is mostly an academic difference at this point. It's there, and I wanted to point it out for those who really can't compromise on it so people have realistic expectations going in.
I am definetly in the "those pixels are not supposed to be sharp" and "composite on CRT or go home" camp and even though I mostly play through emulation these days it is always via CRT-Royale filter. 😁 But I am still always excited to see how much extra people are managing to extract from these old hardware. 👍
@@roboticd And i suspect that blur from the original Snes systems may have been intentional and used to hide some dithering patterns even in an rgb set up.
My thoughts exactly! Even if I prefer the CRT look that blends things you can't help but admire the work that people are able to do in modifying consoles to look how they want. Also kudos to the amazing camera and editing work from the video's creator! Such high production value that a lot of channels could take notes from
The work you put into your videos is insane. I love it so much. Every one is so high quality and thought through, I am in awe 100% percent of the time with your thoughtfulness and rigor.
That power switch sticker was added when Nintendo removed the power interlock and redesigned American cartridges to defeat it. Supposedly you could blow a fuse but enough people were breaking the console anyway that they calculated there would be fewer returns for blown fuses than whatever was happening with the oafs who couldn’t handle the interlock!
My original 1-CHIP console, combined with an rgb cable from retro gaming cables and a sony trinitron CRT was the way to go for me! Amazing image quality, vibrant colors with no ghosting whatsoever.
Voultar was literally the first person I ever saw refer to the 3-chip consoles as “2-chip.” Someone asked him about it and he said that this is what the community has always called them but I think he is confused with people referring to dual PPUs. Regardless, referring to all non-1chips as 2-chips seems to be catching on now. Still, from my recollection the earliest consoles were always referred to as 3-chip or 2-PPU with “3-chip” being a commonly-understood retcon referring to the ones with discrete PPU and CPU chips. It’s all semantics now and I much appreciate his work. :)
worth noting that doing all the mods to the 1chip will lively introduce a few flickering scanlines to the top few lines of the display. I noticed it constantly happening in Street Fighter, and it was one of the things that pushed me to the MiSTer instead of the endless headache of maintaining old hardware
I don't mind a bit of blur. It helps mask limitations in pixel design and can aid in achieving the illusion of smooth animation. But each to their own, maybe you want all your games to look like 3D Dot Game Heroes.
Video capture and streaming seem to benefit most from pixel sharpness, tbh in regards of enjoyment of actual gameplay nowadays, the video image being supersharp makes zero difference to me, but I do know that most CRT fans like a little blur to their screen also to gift the picture with more authentic results.
This video cleared up a lot of questions I had for this mod, thanks a bunch! I primarily play my SNES on my CRT so this mod seems to not be in dire need for me at this moment but if my setup ever changes I will definitely be in the market. Voultar does great work!
This is really fascinating! I used to be super obsessed with video quality and watched your videos multiple times for fun, but as I’ve got older I’ve moved on from that and just use my recently acquired consoles over composite so I won’t have to pay for expensive hardware and cables, but nonetheless this was a greatly entertaining video and it’s great to see new developments in this field. This issue has been around for so long and I’m glad someone finally solved it!
You cannot appeciate this older consoles graphics without composite video. Most graphics and games were designed around composite video and crts from the Nes, Snes, Master System, Sega Genesis/MD, PC Engine, Sega Saturn, Play Station, N64 and even the Dreamcast, Ps2, Gamecube and original Xbox era.
Everyone who works on getting the most out of these classic consoles and making them look their best is doing an amazing job. Also, I think MLIG has done fantastic work over the years since RGB101 in explaining what can be confusing and very technical details in a way that makes sense to us non electrical engineers, so thank you!
Great video. Always top quality. I would like to make a suggestion though; I would love it if you guys started putting titles for the games on screen as you show them. Every one of your videos I watch, I always see games I think I would like to try, but can't identify them.
I love how much work you guys put into these videos. It's been my favorite retro gaming channel for years, by far. It's very interesting to see the differences between all these mods, and how sharp the image can get, but I have to say: I still prefer my blurry composite cables on a consumer CRT, just because of all that color bleeding and stuff that blends the colors so well. Sometimes, I even put on the RF cable to see more bleeding lol.
Always a good day to get a new video from you guys! I totally get the difficulty in peeling that sticker at the end. All of my Xbox 360 and One consoles still have the stickers under the disc drives. I have a backwards compatible PS3 with the sticker bubbling up from the power/eject button. I don't know why, but I feel like they look like they belong. If I still had my original SNES, the sticker would probably still be on it, in the same condition yours was.
I’ve been a subscriber for a few years now. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your videos. They are so wonderfully filmed and edited. You’re channel has introduced me to such a interesting and welcoming community. Thanks!
Interesting stuff. As a purest, you could say playing these on a consumer CRT, blur and all, is how we experienced it growing up. It is the most "accurate" way to play these games. I'll stick to playing SNES games on the MiSTer connected to a PVM via RGB :)
Oh man, if there's a mod that I've been waiting for a LONG time to become a reality, is this one! To have the perfect compatibility of the OG SNES with the sharpness of the 1-Chip and modded Jr. SNESs is AWESOME! Thanks to Voultar and everybody involved for accomplishing this, and to you guys for always doing an outstanding job with your videos!
Try in 2015: "The good news is, you can get a better video from your Super Nintendo. The bad news is, you might have to get another Super Nintendo." Try in 2024: "So you CAN use your original Super Nintendo but you need to watch this hour-long video first." We have evolved.
Ya know I literally don’t have any retro consoles or clone consoles hooked up, hell my oldest console is a ps2 which is also shelved. So I’m really not the target demographic for these videos and yet I still adore them! Your passion and knowledge is just palpable
It can also be called "we were never meant to see these games with razor sharp pixels" if you think about it. They were meant to be like drawings/cartoons. But whatever people like it's fine.@@Marmite101
Yeah, in a similar line of thought it makes you wonder why people will pay hundreds of dollars for PVM's. The type of scan lines they produce look nothing like consumer TV's did in the 80s and 90s.
I think that retro gaming is now distorted and broken, between prices and people wanting RGB/HDMI, PVMs, or raw pixels, none of that was how we played lol@@andrew7629
00:49 I hereby decree this intro theme to be GOATED! It has joined its peers, NBA on NBC, Fox NFL Football, SCSA's "I Won't Do What You Tell Me", & the like in the pantheon of greatest themes of all time.
I love the effort to get razor sharp pixels, only to then interpolate them and add scanlines effects etc. A lot of classic gaming enthusiasts chase their own tale trying to simultaneously get image quality that's inauthentically sharp AND recreate all the imperfections of old tech to create that subconscious nostalgic atmosphere. Paying to deblur and then paying again to reblur.
Despite being counterintuitive as heck, it actually kinda makes sense. People growing to prefer better image quality and the games being supposed to be CRT-filtered are both true. Going both routes at once is inauthentic, but it often ends up looking better to a lot of people.
This is ideal for me. I acquired a great 2006 Toshiba CRT a couple of years ago, and I've been delighted with what it can do for consoles like my PS2, GameCube and Mega Drive, but even with RetroGamingCables' PACKAPUNCH RGB SCART, I was fairly disappointed with how blurry my SNES looked on it. This looks like what I hoped for. I finally got over my fear of soldering last year, too, so I was quite eager to find a good mod.
It's great we got options to sharpen and clean up the image of these older consoles for play on modern displays, this output in particular looks so much more cleaner for use on a modern flatscreen than a console with it's native SFC signal. I use CRTs and modern style displays Im sure this would make the image much more cleaner on a modern flatscreen :)
It was so much easier in the old days importing consoles from Japan to Europe via the mail order companies in the back of Mean Machine Magazine. With just the basic knowledge that you'll need an NTSC compatible Scart socket on your TV, that was the only thing on your checklist in 1990 and was a big upgrade from the Ataris or home computers on RF only TVs ! Yet the whole decade was flooded with discussions by confused consumers. Choosing a Japanese brand TV pretty much guaranteed you'd be playing Japan's latest hits on arrival. The importers provided the correct PSU and Scart cable. Also another big wave of discussions back then was the holiday makers who brought consoles home from NTSC regions and got no colour.
rgb 100 class: Sampling episode would be really good. I guess I could say 300, but just understanding it better and even potentially how it effects 3D content would be really nice. I really liked that topic a lot
I’ve been looking forward to this mod for ages. I’ve got an early Super Famicom the same as yours. I’ll be ordering as soon as Voultar makes them available.
I always really enjoy MLiG videos, they're a really informative dive into new developments and usually tell me the exact kind of things I'd want to know. I was sad you took that sticker off. Hopefully there's an "Adhesive101" series coming up that documents your attempts to re-attach it!
What a channel. I think if you started s mew channel, and uoaded every video,in a row, 3 times a week, youd be at a million subscribers. Old "big" channels seem to be buried or not have the data attached to them to be pushed the same way newer channels are
Already hunted down a 1-chip, and installed the RGB kit, then installed another RGB kit into my friends SNES Jr. Now I'll be installing this into my 2-chip. Looking forward to the install, and testing it with the RT4K.
Outstanding episode Try, thanks for showing in detail the new mod for the SNES. I'm using a SNES Jr. (btw in Brazil we call this model the "Super Nintendo Baby" ^_^) and its great to know that in the future I can modify my original model and get an even sharper upscaled picture than my "baby" model. Bonus points for showing some very interesting titles on the SFC!
[Try4ce] The Goemon Super Famicom games were the main trigger than got me much more into import gaming! I wanted to use all of my Super Famicom carts in the making of this video, and seeing as how there are a lot of Goemon games on Super Famicom... Goemon gets a lot of screen time!
Well, since I was specifically directed to this video by a particular Genesis troII claiming this blur is some major "flaw" of the SNES (you can see a whole bunch of his rants below in response to my comment here): 39:18 That's because the softness, blur and colour bleed on a Genesis through composite actually hides one of its most obvious visual limitations, which is dithering due both to low colour and deliberately using it for the likes of faux transparency on water and such. So of course a lot of people who love that system likely prefer it viewed that way. Personally, I think composite is the worst possible way to view these old systems and just looks terrible. I prefer my Genesis games clean and sharp now, even if it does reveal some of its limitations at bit more. Also, I'm from the UK, so I thankfully had my retro consoles mostly connected up via I think S-Video or Euro Scart back in the day, and they still looked great even then. And on N64 the anti-aliasing is literally an intended feature of the console to specifically soften the jaggy edges of low resolution polygons and even make those low-res textures look a bit smoother at least. I think N64 games look totally strange all pixelated as if they were actually traditional pixel art or something, which they aren't. Smooth for the win there, which is a totally separate thing from the extremely low-res textures of course. On SNES, it doesn't have to worry about dithering nearly as much as Genesis because the extra colours and much higher colour gamut make subtle gradients easier to achieve (not that dithering doesn't exist on the system), so having the sharpest possible image actually just makes it look even better for the most part. And, personally speaking, I've got a modded SNES Classic Mini running through normal HDMI on my HDTV, and I think it looks gorgeous as is. I play my SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, Arcade/Neo Geo, NES, Master System, GB/GBC/GBA, etc, all through that one system, and I am beyond happy with the results. But, hey, each to their own. If people want the sharpest possible image on SNES, to the point that it literally takes multiples of magnification or sitting an inch away from the TV to see it, all power to them. They now have one more option there. PS. A "flaw" would be more like the left edge display bug on Genesis when you use the column scrolling effects there, like on the early level of Gynoug for example: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-c6U3W-fSkmU.htmlsi=i0h-2ljn_rnh8Fyw&t=67 That's an actual perceptible hardware-level display issue at normal viewing distance during normal play. I'm not sure if SNES, PC Engine, NES, Master System, etc. maybe have similar flaws too, but I've certainly never noticed them in the same way just playing the games, so I expect they're not issues to really bother with at all. In fact, I don't think most people would even care about that column scrolling bug on Genesis either. If people don't even notice it until someone specifically draws their attention to it, I think it's all good. If it's patently obvious and genuinely ruins the experience though, it would be a legit flaw. I personally don't think any of these systems have any real flaws in that kind of context.
This video had absolutely nothing to do with the genesis, never even seen a video such as this type about the system. This video is clearly only about the snes display flaw's, yet your comment makes it all about the genesis for some reason, when you should be addressing the topic. 🙂
What kind of analysis is this? You're entire comment is about the genesis, and you're not even addressing the topic of snes blur that this video is based on. You can't help yourself but make everything about the genesis even when it's clearly about the snes flaw's. You haven't changed your trolling ways at all. 😆
@@inceptional The entire video was about the snes display flaw's. The genesis was only mentioned for a second, yet you decided to make your entire comment about the genesis in an attempt to avoid the video's topic. Typical troll distraction tactic to protect your favorite console. You just won't accept the snes flaw's, so you'll flip the script out of desperation. 😆
@@inceptional I see why bitmap developer pyron banned you, he said you were spewing pure rubbish to him. You turned this entire video about snes blur into a genesis rant. You can't accept any criticism of the snes display so you'll quickly look for a time index to rant about the genesis to protect the reputation of the snes. The genesis has a crispy RGB display, while the snes has to be modded with a new board, what a piece of junk.😆
It’s weird, I prefer the blurry non high definition - feels authentic, plus I hate jagged lines so a little blur masks that. Working on a SFC 2chip rn waiting on some peices to show up so doing my research on things as the SFC is new to my hands but have learned a lot about them so far. Thanks for the content 🎉
Gotta be honest, I know the point of these mods is to get the sharpest output possible, but so much of the pixel art you showcased looks BETTER on the unmodified 2chip
[Try4ce] That's totally fine! I think something is missing though, when upscaling. The blur does mostly look pretty good with CRTs and CRT effects, although the cleaner source can help at times with that too. The problem to me, I think, is that without the context of the CRT element, the blur looks wrong. Basically I see there as being two paths toward the final output - go all-in on crispy pixels or go all-in on the CRT look. The SNES blur on its own is kind of caught in the middle and doesn't satisfy either aesthetic for me personally. But totally, I know for sure some people will really like the effect! Nothing wrong with that at all.
I agree. So much so that I had wanted a triniton for the longest time, until I realized that super sharp pixelated graphics were not a part of the nostalgia for me. I love playing on my wobbly, blurry consumer CRT that I found on the street for free, because that's what it looked like for most people playing these games in the 90s. I still love that enthusiast are doing whatever they can to milk as much enjoyment as possible from these old games, and I realize that looks different to different people, but I am truly happy with my set up as is!
At a certain point authorial intent becomes a thing. Sprite art doesn't look right with giant visible pixels, it was meant to be blurry, both straight out of the system but also by composite input then sharpened by scanlines. Sprite art was meant to look like art not a mess of squares, pixels aren't even supposed to be square anyway. Fixed pixel displays were a mistake.
@@mylifeingamingi have a Super Famicom at my house and a small CRT. This mod isn't really needed. The games look great on the CRT. This is for people who want to get a better picture outside of a CRT
I'm actually one of the few people that enjoys the softer video from the 2-chip snes systems, even in the digital realm. I think a lot of that comes from nostalgia of watching early youtube playthroughs of SNES games into crappy composite converters with blurry video and rainbowing artifacts. Still trying to get something I can play in a modern setting that looks like that but feels great to play
[Try4ce] It would be a whole lot more work (soul-sucking work) than you think. However, I made it a point to use every Japanese cart that I own in the making of this video, and while there are things beyond just those carts, most of the more obscure games are probably from that list. backloggery.com/games.php?user=Try4ce&search=&console=SNES&status=&unplayed=&rating=®ion=1&own=0
Why not just refer to all non-one-chip SNES consoles as multi-chip models? Using one-chip and multi-chip as the nomenclature side steps a lot of the potential confusion.
Awesome mod that I will definitely be getting into. Try, you need to disable Velocity Modulation on your Toshiba AF consumer CRT because it adds artificial sharpness, regardless of your menu settings! Unfortunately the only way to do it on this series of Toshiba is to disconnect the cable to the neckboard, but you can do so with the set completely turned off and unplugged so literally anyone can do it.
Here in Brazil is actually common to find 1-chip snes consoles. There was a factory called Gradiente, who produced the snes here, and I guess all of them are 1-chips.
Can't wait to upgrade my 2-Chip when the kit becomes available. I also have a recap kit I've been waiting to add but I want to do it all at the same time. 2024 is the year of the SNES! 🙂
[Try4ce] The DKC games are actually games where I think the argument for NOT going for full-sharp pixels is the most compelling. While I think they still look great with sharp pixels, a ton of people would say that pre-rendered graphics work best with softening/blending/CRT effects. I showed DKC 1 and 2 with CRT effects and DKC3 on the RetroTINK 2X. They look interesting in all those situations I think, but people will have their preferences.
@@mylifeingaming And then there's me, who lives for gratuitous dithering and shameless colour banding; I've been replaying Final Fantasy VII in Duckstation recently, and can't get enough of all the aliasing and compression artifacts lmao. Ain't hard to tell that I grew up on emulators, eh?
Lots of great detailed information here! I play with a 2-Chip with HD Retrovision Component cables on a CRT, and you're saying I would notice the least amount of improvement with that setup using the mod? Bummer! Ah well. I will still keep playing away as I am now. Thanks for all the info though!
6:20 One thing what is not 100% correct is that Super Turrican crashes because of the 1 chip scpu-n , it’s the APU that caused the crash (S-APU) also the latest 2chip revision s-cpu-apu01 have this APU which combined both the audio dsp and cpu, so not only 1chip is affected, also the game doesn’t crash complete but the sound crashes so brutal with weird sounds that everybody would shut off the game 😁
[Try4ce] I played the game (even after the audio went berserk) for a while to see if I could get a crash to happen. It didn't seem like it would happen, but it technically did happen after I got a Game Over and decided to not continue. THEN it wouldn't go back to the title screen. So technically, a crash, but it wasn't very interesting to look at, so I didn't show that part. Yeah, the worst part about it is the audio going nuts, but I didn't want to demonstrate that for obvious reasons, hah.
I remember when the audio went crazy, the game still ran fine until I got to a new area. The CPU would try to communicate with the APU, but would not be able to, stopping in an infinite loop.
I have an unmodded SNS-CPU-GPM-02 version Super Famicom. It's said that this version has an even worse video quality than the SHVC-CPU-01 version that you showcased in this video. My SF is indeed quite blurry when ran through a Retrotink 2X-SCART using good RGB cables, but it still looks very nice when playing on a CRT. The biggest flaws in the image on a CRT can be noticed with fonts being a bit too blurry. P.S. RIP SNES Power Button Sticker, sorry for your lots.
A little touch of clear drying archival Elmer’s glue will fix that sticker right up. Just use a slightly damp rag or paper towel to clean up the excess and hold it down with your finger for 10 minutes or so. Also, I’d love to see game name captions when you’re showing off B roll. I know the vast majority of US stuff but Japanese ones usually elude me
It does appear to be a design flaw in practice, and there are much better ways to smooth out pixel graphics (playing on a consumer CRT being the most obvious).
