NES Comparison: RGB vs Composite 

I prefer to use the "Natural" palette selection, which is taken from the Nestopia emulator's "YUV" palette file. I've actually been working on a custom palette that will mimic how the real hardware looks when directly hooked up in composite. Tim (the designer of the NESRGB mod), has agreed to put it on a board for me. Very excited to get that going as none of the 3 palettes on the public boards are accurate to the original experience.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is a great example that shows how they designed with RF/Composite in mind, as opposed to the transmission of pure RGB values. The sky actually looks like a real sky (color-wise) via Composite.

Everyone always trying to make their real NES look better. Meanwhile I'm over here trying to make my nice clean emulator look worse to match the real thing.

I never did care much for the dot crawl on the old NES NTSC signal.

Colors don't look that bad on a real NES and a CRT, I think you have the brightness, contrast and saturation settings all jacked

Can anyone do a comparison of an RGB modded NES using retrovision HD cables via the component vs a direct RGB connection? (depending on your pinout, the cables are supposed to work unofficially). In Mario 2, Mario's sprite has a TON of dot crawl and it just bugs the hell out of me... I've seen it on direct RGB and the dot crawl is gone entirely, but what about retrovision's component cable?

How do you truly get RGB out of a NES without modding it? Also, is this true RGB or is it just either component or SCART?

dont know.. most of the time it looks bad in my opinion.. is´s like developers used the color blending in composite video to actually achive certain look.. and RGB destroys it

Fortunately, scart is rgb And again fortunately, I live in Europe And again fortunately, Europe uses scart

composite wins

Man I love RGB

Contra: composite comes closer to producing realistic skin-tones

RGB breaks the shading on the hills in Kirby's Adventure. It looks like a hatch shade on the composite because of the muddy signal, but you just get a sawtooth pattern dither on RGB because it's too clean. It's like how you lose the rainbows in the waterfall in Sonic 1 because the colors are too separated from each other. Or like how every case of dither transparency on the Sega Saturn breaks completely. Man how I wish there was a way to make the signal sharp and clear while still retaining those things, but because they specifically rely on the imperfect signal it's impossible. Oh well.

sounds like you need an audio mod

My composite doesn't look that bad. But it is being upscaled through a framemeister.

I think RGB looks clearly better. But one could argue that the games were designed for Composite, and thus RGB doesn't represent some visual choices that the developers had in mind.

À 0:11, par exemple, on dirait qu'il manque des pixels en composite, tellement la qualité est basse! Et c'est juste tellement plus facile pour les yeux que de pouvoir regarder les couleurs mieux appliquées dans la version RGB, tout au long de la vidéo. Par exemple, 1:11, la composite fait mal au yeux tellement les contrastes sont trop blancs et trop noirs, tandis que pour la RGB; "quoi? Mario est rouge? Y'est pas supposé être gris-brun?"

Great video!

Yeah, I think this is why most Americans think old NES games and the like looked utter shit back in the day (especially when they see that crappy NTSC composite footage of them on RU-vid and the like) and I don't. I come from the UK, where I always had my consoles connected up to PAL TVs via SCART whenever possible, and they just looked far better than 99% of the footage I see of them online supposedly show us direct footage, especially once we got into the 16-bit era of SDTV gaming.

The color looks off through RGB

question: what tv are you using? are you also using any converters?

C'est juste complétement fou la différence. C'est probablement la console qui bénéficie le plus du mod RGB et qui est encore pertinente aujourd'hui. Merci pour cette vidéo!

Looks like the aspect ratio is off in the "improved" palette. It's too narrow.

Rgb has no flickering when scrolling, awesome!

Paradoxalement,le composite est plus lisible sur la vidéo

Looks miles better

That RGB video quality tho.

À 0:58, pourquoi à gauche, c'est écrit "(C) 1988 Nintendo", mais pas à droite, en-dessous de "Player 2" ?

In the 80's composite video was like the 4K HD of today,but these day's composite is very outdated now,with rgb you can give your nes a second live with games looking fresh & new as if you playing them for the first time.

J'ai une question qui me travers l'esprit depuis tout à l'heure. Est-ce que le mod consomme beaucoup d'énergie? J'imagine que oui mais j'ai entendu des rumeurs comme quoi que le fil servant d'alimentation (d'origine) pouvait lâcher ou ne pas démarrer la console s'il était sur le bord de rendre l'âme. Je voulais aussi savoir (TRÈS IMPORTANT POUR MOI SI TU CONNAIS LA RÉPONSE) si une cassette Everdrive N8 sur NES + ce mod pouvait rentrer en "conflit" et demanderai trop d'énergie pour que la console s'allume... ou encore que ça endommage la console ou la cassette. Si tu ne sais pas la réponse, merci quand même et ce n'est pas bien grave, j'ai bien aimé ta vidéo! :P

Is RGB component? Or is it like a hd mod type thing?

I'll always side with Composite, it looks "right" if you know what I mean

To all people complaining about rgb quality, in fact RGB video level is 16(black)-235(white) and needs to bee converted to 0-255, doing that will make blacker black and whiter whites. In the video, the conversion wasn't been done, that's why it looks washed out. Moreover, RGB is the standard in term of PC and console connection, the D-Sub (VGA if you prefer), the DVI, the scart and the HDMI (it can use RGB and YCbCr) are RGB. RGB is the perfect signal, the raw data of computers and consoles, you have truest signal. So saying that composite is your preference is like you prefer eating some piece of ground when you have the most complet food 5 meters away... Composite is electronically crappy, RGB is the best.

I don't care if you like RGB... composite is better

I assume this comparison was done on modern hardware? I just turned on my CRT and popped in SMB3. Mine looks like the "RGB" palette in this comparison (actually better). But I'm using an AV Famicom (composite). So what's the deal here; is this showing how bad vintage hardware looks on a modern setup? Because composite doesn't looks like that on a CRT.

Meh, I still prefer composite. I want my NES to function as an NES should, not like an emulator.

i want to see SCART RGB vs Component (on the same system, simply doing scart first, then using retrovision component cable after). On my old computers, I noticed using RGB direct gives crisp text on an RGB modded TV, but on that same TV, through the component, the text is just a little fuzzy, annoying like you can't unsee it... like a dead pixel annoying... if it's the same case with NES, I might just consider a true RGB mod instead of simply modding the NES and using the retrovision cable.

I hate it when people say RGB spoils the intended look of games as developers took advantage of composite's flaws. A sharp looking game was what the developer intended as the PPU of many consoles processed in RGB therefore being what the developers programmed the graphics as. I also dislike it when people say the difference between S-video and RGB is small. It's bigger than the difference between composite and S-video IMO.

Am I the only one that likes composite Kirby more? xD

I side with composite video. The colors in the composite signal for Castlevania 3 and Contra in particular are WAY better than the RGB colors. And the XRGB mini frameister already helps to improve the signal somewhat. The scanline option on the framemeister, combined with 720p output for better scanlines, can help hide aome of the composite noise, as well as correct TV settings (mainly game mode of available).