Why did the PlayStation 1 have so much Dithering? | MVG 

No surprise there, and more than likely it's coming from people who don't understand how things actually work.

@Know Thy Enemy Emulation is not suppose to make things look better, thats just something people have done. Emulation was about making software that can emulate hardware 1:1 including the bad aspects of the system.

@Know Thy Enemy as @Enigma776 said, it is intended to emulate the system as accurately as possible, you can turn it off and render in 32bit if you really want to (which is what PCSX2 has done until recently)

@Know Thy Enemy In addition to the other comments, an emulator can only do so much if a Developer found ways to do shortcuts to make their game run on actual hardware. CPU work on internal buffers for instance. Or per-game hard baked values. HD Remakes, being ports, can at least hand tweak things to account for modern graphics systems. But an emulated PS1 game can't just insert a light into the rendering pipeline that wasn't there in the game code and data.

@Know Thy Enemy it's not terrible because the textures are 32bit, so if we emulate a 32bit buffer it looks fine, though the colours look lighter (in GTA SA at least), but yes the banding looks very obvious in some games without dithering

Terrible Coughing Is feaures the sequel to gaiares

feaures

I had recently the same idea, i think it is totally crazy to have all these powerful processors 32 and 64 bits and an old Motorola 68000 13 MHz! Carmack said it was the main problem : Replace the 68k with another 32 bit RISC, add dynamic cache to it and give the blitter at least a small buffer. He claimed that with these changes, the Jaguar would not have matched the performance of PS1 or Saturn but would have been “competitive”.

Many other channels have covered this

I second this notion. Sure other channels may have slightly covered it, but I'd love to hear MVGs take on that matter.

It's also heavily relied upon in comics. It's more noticeable in older issues, due to lower print resolutions.

It's probably a big thing to set the aesthetics of manga as well. It's said that those used to rely on halftone paper to make up all the gradients. Though nowadays it can be done completely digital and the process can be omitted altogether. We do lose the chance to have unique dither patterns, though. (I mean, manual and auto dither happening at the same time would be the worst thing ever)

Techniques from the printing industry also were used for making circuit boards and microprocessors. It's really cool the overlap.

before I went to university I worked in an office where I was tasked with print- and digital media design and it was really confusing at first how different the color works out on these different media. Like how resolution is measured in dots per inch and stuff and how its not simply possible to translate RBG to print devices etc. now that you point it out it makes sense that some sort of dithering is being used for this...you never really think about these things normally^^

This is quite honestly one of the most interesting threads Ive read in a good while.

Not to contradict you, but the dithering on Metal Gear Solid was noticeable even on a CRT through composite.

@@DarthEquus it depends on the TV you used. on a cheap consumer TV with a smaller tube it was harder to spot in my experience

@@ModernVintageGamer Of course. That little 14-inch Panasonic I gamed on probably had a very good comb filter.

Reminds me of some older projects taking advantage of ghosting on monochrome LCDs to fake 3-5 bit color just by toggling pixels every frame.

Composite video tends to blur pixels together so the dithering effect works really well to simulate a higher color space. But the more you are able to tell the pixels apart, the more the dithering becomes apparent.

Well, Spyro on a CRT on an LCD (probably)... 😉

I've been playing spyro on my crt all morning just picked up a bunch of ps1 and 2 games :D it really does stand the test of time

I played Spyro for the first time a couple years ago when I started getting back into console gaming. I had just finished it when MLIG did a piece on it, and the remake was coming up in the news, etc. It really is a noteworthy game from that era. But the PS1 had *so many* to pick from. :-)

Yeah I miss that. Even when it came to games. Each game in the same genre has a distinct look. Now everyone is going for realism which means everything will end up looking the same. I appreciate what Nintendo does, but I just wish their system had more power so we can see the true beauty of their games

@@p0pimp2004for sure, i think everything being made with the same engine adds to this trend.

@@marksnethkamp8633 precisely. Even with the same engine, they could make the games with their own special look. I like the hyper realism of certain games but ever game doesn't need to do this as, by default, every game will end up looking the same. A game like GEARS looks realistic but it still has a distinct style that sets it apart. I appreciate that.

Nice seeing the PC-98 games get soem love

@@mjdxp5688 It's not the first time I've heard him using PC98 Touhou music in his videos either.

Finally! Someone else noticed this! He did the same thing with the UltraHLE video. Ultra taste!!!

Because like he said in the video, we couldn't see the dithering back in the day. Most people look at an old 2D sprite game and go "Yep, that's exactly what I remember". Most people look at an old 3D game and go "what's all this dithering? this isn't how it looked when I was a kid!"

Do you remember when the PS1 came out? Do you remember what the contemporary hardware was capable of? It’s not “cheaping out,” it’s about making an affordable console that didn’t also require a large chassis with active cooling. We were all playing SNES at the time, or on a PC in DOS and Windows 3.1, with software rendered 3D at the same resolution, in 256 colors. The PS1 came along with actual hardware 3D, CD audio and CD quality audio sampling, wavetable synthesis almost as good as professional synthesizers, and FMV. It was a groundbreaking system. All the others that released at or around the same time flopped because of price and/or the compromises they made. And anyway, it may have been a casualty of cost-cutting to have a 15-bit buffer (which, again, at the time, was still a pretty decent spec) and integer math (see: 486SX), and whatever else, but IMO, the compromises were entirely reasonable ones, retain the fidelity of the source data so that it’s possible to render in HQ now, and the quirks bring me back to the days of playing the PS1 when it was new and being blown away at how amazing it, and its games, were. The one time Sony went for the gold and made a console with all the hardware they could cram into it, we ended up with the launch PS3: A PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, CD player, SACD player, DVD player, Blu-ray player, memory card reader, network streamer, and Linux PC all in one - for the low low price of OMG nobody can afford this... It sat on shelves. I remember vividly. I wanted one, but couldn’t name enough games to make it worth it, and didn’t have an HD TV to make it worth buying as a BD player.

@Snails40 Yeah, Kurosawa was just cheaping out by shooting in black and white. Took him way too long to switch to colour.

@Snails40 You would have probably loved deciding between a new Neo Geo AES game or your bills to pay back in the day eh?

@@nickwallette6201 This is the best post I have seen this year. People complaining probably started gaming in HD televisions.

Dithering isn't as immediately noticable on CRT since it always looks kind of dithered and the glass screen in front of the color filter kind of blends the colors slightly. However on a LED television where every pixel is indeed an individual point dithering is much more noticable.

Though cause of it's limited texture cashe the N64 used colored models a lot more.

@Porfirio Rubirosa this is why i try to play ps1 games on original hardware as much as possible. I try not to be a purist because emulators mostly manage to look so much better most of the time but ps1 games just look objectively worse when emulated with "enhancements". Sadly I can't buy too many ps1 games these days without busting the bank.

​@Porfirio Rubirosa On original hardware, sure. But he says the textures are stored as 24-bit. So there's no reason an emulator couldn't just use the 24-bit textured directly, without downsampling them at all. No need for dithering or banding. And, of course, if that fails, they could add an option to smooth the textures. The right kind of smoothing could even keep edges and features sharp while smoothing out the dithering.

@@NickGoblin it's not really about the hardware. You would see the dithering on like an HD TV pretty sure, not that a PS1 is meant to be played on that

@@Valientlink I understand that you can use an emulator on a CRT and it'll probably look fine but at that point it's just too much effort.

@Porfirio Rubirosa If you are using RetroArch you can turn of dithering and then force the color pallette to 32 bit. Making dithering unnecessary. Although it will cause some issues when fading to inventory etc for some reason...

Yes, the 3Dfx one was pretty good. It was for the 16-bit color output, if I remember correctly (not 15).

The N64 did have a higher color mode and also with it's limited texture cash it used colored models a lot more. A lot of times the player character in a N64 game was made up of colored objects with the only texture being the face.

Even back then, Sony was lying. These days they lie about 4K rather than color depth, but Sony, Sony never changes.

I can only show 24-bit static images or streamed video. The 3D hardware can’t render into 24.

referral madness actually there are much more, but 24-bit RGB is reasonably close to the amount of colors and relative levels of brightness a human eye can resolve. 15 bits are very obviously insufficient.

@@mjc0961 Still, over the years PlayStation delivered the most enjoyable consoles with the biggest libraries. Ps2 is still the best console imo

Perhaps not a triple-A studio but just the amazing fans like the guy who managed to port Sonic to the GBA way better than Sega themselves did or the developers like Velez and Dibail duo who made some of the most impressive 3d games on GBA. Look up Asterix XXL gba to know what I mean. It look nearly good enough to be a ps1 launch title but it's a GBA game. Retro City Rampage also started as a demake of GTA3 for NES. Check out this video where the developer takes the final game and just show every step in shrinking it down so that it run on actual NES hardware. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Hvx4xXhZMrU.html It shows an open world GTA like game back in 1985 would have been possible.

Look up "Death Stranding - PS1 Trailer" by Hoolopee

Well, to kind of answer your question - but not really tho - indie dev have been putting amazing stuff out there for retro consoles. A Brazilian guy created a port of the original Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog to the SNES. We are living an indie developer renaissance.

Do you mean homebrew through emulators, exploiting the power of modern rigs? This is possible.

Better knowledge of the hardware/tools would enable them to extract a little more out of the hardware, but the bottom line is always going to be mid 90's hardware and any inherent limitations of the PS1 design. Ever hear the expression, "you can only squeeze so much blood from a stone"? Even with clever programming, there's ultimately only so much you can do on a static piece of hardware.

if you used an "advanced scart cable" that had RGB output, and you had a decent enough (read; big enough) tv, you'd just see it on that screen to... especially in europe, since PAL tv's have more colors & sharpness then NTSC; though ntsc games run faster (60hz, where pal was 50hz), but i gladly give those 10fps for a much better image quality.

@@BoGy1980 To each their own, but as a proud citizen of Freedom Land having been born on the 4th of July, I'll gladly take a smoother frame rate over a higher resolution, and older consoles not looking great on newer displays without mods, and/or expensive upscalers is why I still keep my curved glass 27in Panasonic CRT from the early 00's with component input, and stereo output in the corner of my game room for retro gaming, and I will have it till it till the day it dies, and I can no longer repair it, and yes I have 3 backups being a 19in, & 24in JVC I'Art models that also have component inputs, and stereo outputs, along with a basic mid 00's Emerson(Funai rebage) 19in all in climate controlled storage of my shop to give them the best chance of lastling as long as possible.

@@BoGy1980 I never found PAL's better colors to be much of a factor for gaming. The better colors was something more attributable to purely TV and video rather than video games. Most games were built NTSC anyway and the lack of optimization, black borders and poor framerate for PAL games is just a complete deal breaker for me. Also in the sixth gen you had many NTSC games capable of running at 480p, 720i or in some cases 1080i. Which the PAL version of that game would be lucky to just get PAL60. So import games for the win for me. Sorry, but NTSC just has way too many clear advantages over PAL for PAL to even be considered equal for retro gaming. Th only time I ever consider PAL worthwhile is when there is exclusive content for that version or there is something unique about it, or it has better box art than the NTSC version (which is often the case).

@@BoGy1980 NTSC and PAL are actually quite similar, except the *P*hase *A*lternating each *L*ine part means you are less likely to get noticeable dot crawl and artifact colors. AFAIK both have the same range of colors they can display and sharpness should also be pretty similar. I'd rather have a fuzzy monochrome display than a sharp vibrant screen with horrendous 50Hz flicker. 60Hz is really the absolute minimum IMHO.

@@Katana2097 there'"s quite a difference when using the advanced scart cable (which has component RGB and you had to buy this one seperately) compared to the standard scart cable (which only has composite signal, this came with the psx as a little scartbox where you plugged in yellow (composite signal), white&red (audio) cables). for 16 bit consoles the color wasn't so much a difference, mainly sharpness, but the 32bit consoles also had better color reproduction when using component; the image is just a lot crispier

i always preferred my saturn above my psx... if people gave me such shit, i always told 'm; yeah nice for you, don't you need to buy some more hyper-priced memory cards for that console? cuz my saturn has memory in it so i don't need those memory cards..

@@BoGy1980 Memory cards are probably the one thing about old CD consoles I don't miss in modern consoles. I miss just being able to put a game in and play without downloading system updates and patches. I miss the OS not being a massive pile of stupid bloat that's more interested in trying to sell me more products and services rather than being usable and easily navigable. I miss that you could still get loads of unique games rather than almost everything trying to be a copy of a Ubisoft open world or a live service looter (yes I know indies exist, but I still miss unique big budget titles). I miss that games were made in part with fun in mind rather than solely being about how to milk as much money from players are possible. But memory cards? Screw those! Don't miss them even a little. Especially the VMU - the only thing worse than a memory card is a memory card that needs batteries.

@@BoGy1980 Nice retort. I was way too partisan and hormonal at 16 years of age for that. 😂I just knew, that they'd never had anything close to Nights Into Dreams and I always preferred Shining Force to Final Fantasy.

@@mjc0961 You never actually NEEDED the batteries for the VMU. Once plugged in all the benefits were there and there were memory cards without a screen. However you DID miss out on a few nice goodies. Tech Romancer minigames come to mind. Stop Skeletons From Fighting made a great video about those. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Rwp9Mqwu8zs.html

@@nettack Yeah, the VMU was a fine thing, now the N64's Controller Pak on the other hand...

(from the other direction) "Day-TO-NAAAAAAAAA!"

Ridge Raaacerrrrrr, remember that one?

Riidge Racer.... Riiiiiiiiiiiidge Raaacer!

"Woo, that was a great corner. You must be one genius of a driver, you gotta teach me!"

Taking your time, aren't you? What's wrong, engine trouble?

Fascinating, I should do an A/B comparison of some PS1 games running on PS1 and PS2 and see if I can spot that. Also, another thing that the PS2 got wrong was that transparencies on PS1 games often had a black halo around them, as if they were being blended darker than they should be. Any idea what was causing that?

@@Astfgl The black outline typically happens when you set Texture Mapping to Smooth. Where part of a texture is masked, the bilinear filtering blends in the color of the texture from the masked out area.

@@ZacabebOTG It also happens when texture mapping is not set to smooth. I never really liked the smoothing as it causes textures to break up at the edges of polygons and it doesn't look authentic, so I never turn it on. Yet the blackness on transparencies still happens.

@@Astfgl That's common with alpha blending with bilinear filtering, the colour from the transparent pixels (usually RGB 0,0,0) gets bled into the pixels with none zero alpha.

i love mvg but this definitely feels like it took some 'inspiration' from his video. oh well, i prefer mvg's voice lol

I replayed MGS last year and it still looks amazing in design to me.

Same here. My old ass cant stand 32bit graphics no more. It was hard enough back then

@@louiemalvessi well I remember playing on a Gamecube and thinking 'these graphics are great but the resolution is terrible' but i couldn't put it into words like it felt foggy or not sharp and clean, but that was because we were playing on crappy CRT's at a low resolution.

pretty sure it's Shinki's theme, but I could be wrong.

The one used in the opening is the title screen for Lotus Land Story ;)

yep. Went and tracked it down after I watched, my initial thought was wrong.

Yea I was surprised. Like I go "This sounds like a 2ho music or it might be some random obscure pc98 game"

Don't get me wrong they were revolutionary, but the graphics do age a bit

@Porfirio Rubirosa thanks for this info, I'll try it on a standard CRT. I don't mind the dithering personally

@Porfirio Rubirosa The first retro game I ever saw being played on a pro CRT was Zelda Link to the Past. I noticed that Link's hair was pink. Something that was not apparent at all on a regular tv.

@Porfirio Rubirosa Devs definitely used PVMs as reference displays regardless. Just look at any footage of a studio from the 90's and you'll see plenty of PVMs in use, as was the case in broadcasting, editing etc. Now it's also true that the devs would expect most customers to only use composite on consumer CRTs, but even a "consumer CRT" can mean anything from the cheapest piece of crap from the 70's with RF only to a rather nice 30" Trinitron for thousands of dollars that takes both RGB (in PAL territories at least) and component. Devs had to take into account all kinds of CRTs, not just the "average consumer CRT" which in itself is just an abstraction. The PVMs were still the reference with the best image quality. Your argument is like saying BluRays aren't "designed for" the modern $30000 OLED BVMs they're color graded and mastered on, but the $300 shit TVs that cheapskates buy on Black Friday, despite the fact that the professional mastering the movie is looking at the former for reference quality, not the latter. There's also no law that says dithering is bad; some even like it, and vastly prefer a sharp, clean RGB image with dithering over a blurry composite image with color bleeding. I don't think I've ever thought any console game from any SD CRT-centric generation look worse on a PVM than on a consumer TV, quite the contrary. The ultra sharp RGB look of the ps1 with the fat scanlines on my 800 line PVM is really as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned, not even getting into the other benefits of CRT gaming like the lowest input lag, best motion handling, support of any analogue odd timing and real and intended presentation of standard definition resolution. Consumer CRTs offer those benefit, but not as good image quality; a ps1-emulator on LCDs/OLED with 32-bit color depth will give you great image quality, but none of the other CRT benefits (I hate having to choose between 60 hz VSYNC or horrible screen tearing). In that respect, PVM/BVMs really are the best of both worlds. To add to the dithering discussion, the "composite on consumer TV"-crowd never seem to address the existence of dithered graphics on PCs and micros of the 80's onward that were very much intended for RGB/CGA/VGA displays, but still had very noticable dithering. MVG fortunately talks about this in the video, so maybe some of them will take notice. Instead of pushing for blurrier signals to mask the dithering, devs made active artistic use of it. The graphics of the Japanese computers PC-88 and PC-98 have a distinct artistic look because of this that many people admire to this day. While I don't think dithering on the ps1 was given as much care and thought, I do think the devs would be mindful of how the stock RGB signal, available for ps1 owners to use, would look on their reference PVM/BVM and a high-end consumer CRT.

Bill Gates no its beautiful

are you the real one ????

@@wphanoo of course he is

@@wphanoo would bill gates use a sony product lol (ofc he would)

Frankly on the PSP itself, not emulated or running on the PS Vita, it doesn't bother at all (me, that is), but when you move away from the 1:1 pixels at 4.3" then yeah it looks terrible, a PS Vita running Adrenaline without visual filters that simulate the PSP screen for example looks terrible in my opinion, and one reason why I don't use my Vita to replace the PSP.

@Omne Obstat : yeah well a Turd is "JUST" a piece of excrement. Doesn't mean I want to eat one. :-)

The CGA is really a 16-color system, but with weird graphics modes. The tricks using artifact colors to get more than 16 colors work only on composite, but work on any composite display. Any modern LCD TV will display these colors just as a CRT would.

Nearly any console/PC with composite output could. On CGA many older games relied on this. This is a “feature” of NTSC television. There are games on Sega Genesis that rely on artifact color and look wrong on RGB.

I thought it sounded like Copperfield lol

Robert Mcauley I was familiar with some of the names of the Amiga custom chips, like the Copper and the Blitter, but I couldn’t let the joke slide. 😏😂

🤣🤣🤣

It's actually "Blitter fill" though. The Amiga had two gfx chips, Copper for switching colors at the right scanlines and Blitter for drawing lines, filling polygons and moving bitmap gfx around.

Peeks'n'Pokes Makes sense, since blitter usually referred to schlepping pixels around en masse. What did the Copper chip do?

When less means more. Ironic, isn't?

Given that these games often render at 20 or 15 frames per second, the snow visual effect from random dither would be very noticable. Yes the video signal runs at 60 Hz (50 PAL) but the extra color information is already lost when drawing the polygon.

The PSX couldn't do that though the N64 could. Which is one of the reasons on top of the anti-aliasing, mid-mapping and bilinear filters that it doesn't appear very dithered. Even though the actual textures usually were just as if not more dithered to get around the issue of the small texture cashe.

"To dither or not to dither" -MVG

Mesh transparency, yes, but not dithering as far as I remember.

Could be, I never owned one myself, so wasn’t too sure.

What's deteurochromia? I only know of (and could find) deuteranopia (a type of colour blindness) and heterochromia (different colours of eye irises).

You mean colorblindness? Or does it have something to do with seeing checkered patterns? My head ache when I look at small patterns :/

@@Xeotroid of course its first, are you halfwitted like I am?

@@RikiZ8 hah, colour one, I just see weird shit at some small patterns, like weird moving or stuff

We dither! Nintendon't.

@@pibe88iTa you'll have to explain that comment for idiots like me

Sebastian Elytron me 2. I am is have stupid.

@@sebastianelytron8450 don't you find the mistery behind a comment fascinating?

displaced gamers did this video first, it isn't original