Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Nestopia hqX combined with NTSC emulation

Would it be possible to have a filter option that combined hqX and NTSC? I like them both, and so the obvious question is, can we have our cake and eat it too? Sure it wouldn't necessarily look accurate, but I honestly think that there is a chance that such a hybrid filter would look better than both hqX and NTSC emulation on their own. NTSC emulation does great things for colors, dither patterns, etc, while hqX does great things for sharp lines.

Is there such thing as too much of a good thing?

I don't think you're understanding. hqX is intended to "enhance" emulator graphics. The NTSC filter simulates the distortion most of us remember from playing NES on a cheap mid-80s television set. They are completely orthagonal things, even though they may appear similar to the layman.

Use the Mac version, which allows you to do that (only because the NTSC filter is supported by the Nestopia core which then passes an image to my shell code which has all the blitter modes built in).

I'd be pretty surprised if the result of that wasn't amazingly ugly and/or unplayable, especially with NTSC going first.

Um... The Mac port of Nestopia is currently at v1.2.4, and the NTSC filter was added in v1.2.5, so the latest Mac release predates the filter (unless I missed something).

I was thinking of hqx first, followed by NTSC. The other way around would definitely look strange at best. I realize that NTSC in ways makes the graphics worse (though more accurate), but blargg has posted, at Nesdev, screenshots showing how NTSC emulation can make things look objectively better. See his posts starting 3 posts down in this thread:
http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=1195

This is to be expected because games were designed for the Famicom's RF and the toaster's composite. Artists designed various pixel and color patterns with the NTSC distortion in mind. Hence some pixel patterns look bad without NTSC emulation, and they blend resulting in the artist intended gradients, colors, and shapes when NTSC emulation is on.

I figured that the end result of a combined filter would look like a less pixellated NTSC filter or a more accurate hqx filter, since hqx effectively increases the resolution, leaving dither patterns and the like alone. While NTSC emulation would blur dither patterns and the like, resulting in a nicer looking image.

You did. I develop it. The latest version hasn't been released yet. Be patient

It is.

http://www.bannister.org/hqxnes.png

It's in the shell code though, and I see no reason to remove a feature common across the board that's already there.

Some developers had a hardware/software combo where you press a hotkey in DeluxePaint II DOS and the current image is sent to an attached (S)NES/Genesis and displayed on it's TV. So from that point of view, NTSC filtering (and only NTSC) is really mandatory to make games look like the artists intended.

I remember seeing more or less the same argument about correct aspect ratio on snes9x's boards sometime ago, I don't know if it has been fixed yet (I mainly use uosnes, I know, don't start that argument)
kega offers both correct ratio and stretched ones, and everyone is happy.

My humble opinion is, the option to enable or disable x or y thing, doesn't hurt anyone, as long as it's not much of a hassle for Marty to add it to Nestopia.

anyway, blargg made a truly kickass work on the ntsc filter.

thanks blargg