Best settings for Donkey Kong Country

[Smokin Kipper]

I've found some great settings for "cartoon style" games such as Mario and Mega Man but anything like DK or Mortal Kombat that uses pre-rendered 3D graphics look terrible.

What are the optimum settings for games like that?

[Gil_Hamilton]

NTSC filter, s-video preset. Nothing else.
That's my official response for ANY SNES game(and the way my real SNES is hooked up, not-so-coincidentally).

What can I say? I'm a bit of a purist.


Edit: Whoop, thought this was the other board for a second.

[Smokin Kipper]

I'm all for the authentic look but Pre-rendered games look worse than they do on the actual system. I'm not really sure how to post a screen shot to show you what I mean but trust me it looks bad!

Which settings can I try out to improve their quality?

As I said the only games I'm realy having issues with are the DK country series, Killer Instinct and the Mortal Kombat series.

[Gil_Hamilton]

I'm all for the authentic look but Pre-rendered games look worse than they do on the actual system.

I can't think of any reason this should be.

Might try the NTSC composite preset, or the old gaussian blur filter.
I seem to recall DKCountry having a lot of dithering, and those will both help to hide it. NTSC composite will simulate the 3-RCA connection you probably used to hook your SNES up originally(assuming you weren't the godless heathen using the RF adapter).

[Smokin Kipper]

I'm trying to make them look their best though, I'm not really going for the authentic look

[blackmyst]

The authentic look IS the best, because these games were made for an old TV screen. There is nothing you can do to make the sprites look any better than on the original system, all you can do is get as close as possible (i.e. NTSC filter). HQxX upscalers and other such bullcrap don't work, because they simply don't "understand" game pixel art the way the human eye does, and will always fuck up like 90% of the pixel details, no exceptions. Not even cartoony looking games escape the fact that the filter just makes wrong looking vector blobs out of perfectly good sprites. "Oh but at least it's high resolution, right?"

Even that one vector upscaler we saw a while ago, the one that's so advanced it's too processor intensive to even be used for realtime gameplay, never actually captures all the details the way it should.

If you really want to make them look their best, don't rape them.

[Smokin Kipper]

But even with the default settings and no filters or anything DKC is incredibly "pixielated", on the opening screen with Cranky Kong you can't even make out his face because it's so distorted. The NTSC filter helps a little but scanlines are VERY noticable (I'm in the UK using a UK monitor if that makes any difference?). How can I post some screen shots to show you the problems I'm having because it's difficult explaining. Every other game I have looks fine, filters or not but games such as DK look terrible either way.

[Gonzo]

How can I post some screen shots to show you the problems I'm having because it's difficult explaining.

There's a couple of ways you can get a screenshot. The easiest way to get a screenshot is inside zsnes. if you press F1 it'll bring up a menu and you can save a snapshot of what's happening in the game. The file should be saved either in the same folder where your roms are, or in the same folder that zsnes.exe is in(I think it's with zsnes.exe, it's been a while since I've taken a screenshot).

Two problems I used to have with this method were that it doesn't take into account the filters you are using in the screen shots, so the picture will probably look different to what you are seeing in zsnes(basically it'll look like none of the video filters are turned on). The second problem I used to have was I found these pictures pretty low res.

You can also take a screenshot of your entire screen using a shortcut key that will copy it to your clipboard and then you can paste it into a photo editing program(preferably photoshop, if you've got it, but anything like coral draw or even Microsoft paint should work). Then you can crop out any unnecessary stuff in the picture if you have to, and save it as a, jpeg,bmp,png, whatever(if you use ms paint, what file type you export it is going to effect the quality of the picture, I can't remember the best way to export from paint, I haven't used it in years, so just play around with it).

The shortcut key you're going to use depends on your operating system. I'm assuming you're using windows, so if you have a PRINT SCREEN (PRTSC or PRTSCN on some keyboards) button on your keyboard, just press that, and you should have a screen grab saved to your clipboard, so you can now paste it into a program like I was talking about in the previous paragraph.

Note
Some keyboards or mobile PCs that don't have the PRINT SCREEN button might use other keyboard combinations, such as FN+INSERT, to take a screen capture. Check the information that came with your computer or the manufacturer's website for more information.

Once you've got a picture you can upload it to the net using any number of free image hosting sites. Just do a google search for one.

[paulguy]

I think the idea is that it looked like hell originally, but most TVs sucked ass, so you didn't notice, because it was crap on top of crap, but it was expected to look like blurry, fuzzy crap. Also, i was one of those heathens to use RF, because the TV had no composite jacks. It was also daisy-chained with the genesis rf modulator. :p

Anyway, NTSC filter with no scanlines or light scanlines and composite mode should work for you.

[grinvader]

The second problem I used to have was I found these pictures pretty low res.

Original res. "Not a problem".

[blackmyst]

But even with the default settings and no filters or anything DKC is incredibly "pixielated", on the opening screen with Cranky Kong you can't even make out his face because it's so distorted. The NTSC filter helps a little but scanlines are VERY noticable (I'm in the UK using a UK monitor if that makes any difference?). How can I post some screen shots to show you the problems I'm having because it's difficult explaining. Every other game I have looks fine, filters or not but games such as DK look terrible either way.

Ok, simple question - how close are you sitting in front of your screen? If you're putting your face only a few inches away from it, like you might with a pc game, ask yourself - would you do the same with an old CRT television?

You wouldn't, because you'd get a headache. Also the game would look like crap. If you have a controller, just roll your desk chair or whatever away from the screen and try to view the game from a distance as you would an oldschool TV. If you're playing on a keyboard... well, then that's a problem in more ways than one.

[Gonzo]

The second problem I used to have was I found these pictures pretty low res.

Original res. "Not a problem".

Yeah I hear what your saying. What I should have said was it was a problem for me because I was finding the pics too low res for my purposes.
Namely ripping sprites from snes games and then green screening them into films I'd shot.

[grinvader]

It's still much cleaner to rip the original res sprites and scale them afterwards...

[Gil_Hamilton]

But even with the default settings and no filters or anything DKC is incredibly "pixielated", on the opening screen with Cranky Kong you can't even make out his face because it's so distorted.

I think that's what I was talking about.
Lot of speckles of color? That's dithering, and no pattern-recognition filters will handle it well.

[Gonzo]

It's still much cleaner to rip the original res sprites and scale them afterwards...

Really? Ok you've got me intrigued now, I'm going to run a little experiment, be back soon with the results.

Alright:


http://s18.postimage.org/mso0pge9z/experiment_1.jpg


So if I do a screen grab of something it is a higher resolution then if I capture it in zsnes directly.

But:


http://s13.postimage.org/5v38s7pxx/experiment_2.jpg


If I blow the image up to match the size of the screen captured stuff it looks better.

Then:


http://s15.postimage.org/fuugx41zt/experiment_3.jpg


If I blow them all up even more, the one that is captured directly from zsnes looks better.

So you're right again Grin, you bastard

[kode54]

Good job posting those thumbnails without linking to the full size images.

[Gonzo]

Good job posting those thumbnails without linking to the full size images.

Yeah sarcasm fucking noted. I couldn't get anything but the thumbnails. I did have the links in at one stage, until I realised they weren't working properly, they just linked back to the main site. I then couldn't be bothered uploading through another site to get the images working right. I'll fix it up when I get a chance.


*EDIT*

Ok, I've added the links.

[grinvader]

You're "blowing up" the original res sprite with bilinear. If you use another algo, obviously you'll get different results (on par with any quality taste).

For instance, the hq filters exist as standalone (and have for a while). Most others as well.

[Gonzo]

You're "blowing up" the original res sprite with bilinear. If you use another algo, obviously you'll get different results (on par with any quality taste).

For instance, the hq filters exist as standalone (and have for a while). Most others as well.

Ok let me reword this, I realise I've explained my definition of 'better' very poorly(especially considering different people would argue which on of the three images look's 'better', based on their own personal preference.).

I was under the impression that if I wanted a sprite from a game, it would yield better results for me to grab a screenshot of the whole screen and just edit out the sprite as opposed to using the screen shot function inside of zsnes. That's because, as you can see in the first pic, the image I got from zsnes is about a 10th the size of the other two. I would have thought that taking a pic that small and then scaling it up to match the other two, which is about the size I want, would pixelate the shit out of it and leave it an unrecognisable smudge. What surprised me was that it doesn't. It looks on par with the other two. And then when I took all three samples scaled them up even more, the one that I captured from zsnes still holds up fine.

So basically I now know that if I ever need to rip a sprite from a snes game, I'll use screen grabs taken from inside zsnes, because the results will be about the same, but it'll save me a few extra steps.

[paulguy]

There are plenty of other scaling algorithms you can use, too, if you don't like the blurry filtering. I've been experimenting with shaders a good bit and have gotten some nice results, and seen some (usually way better than mine) sttuff other people have done, too.

[badinsults]

All zsnes is doing when it scales up is use a nearest neighbour interpolation. If you want to post-process things, you need to use that. That is why your test failed.

[grinvader]

A thing to keep in mind, only use nearest neighbour with integer scales, like 2x, 3x... Any fractional scale will crap out horribly with NN. That's what real filters/shaders are for.