Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts
I'm sorry to be the bad guy here and point this out, but ... this article is completely wrong :/<p>An emulator outputting 100% perfect RGB pixels onto an LCD screen is very different than running an analog RGB output to a CRT television.<p>I have a PVM-2530 CRT, and a hand-built Multi-AV to PVM-CMPTR adapter board ( <a href="http://i.imgur.com/EgCX2EJ.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/EgCX2EJ.jpg</a> ), and the colors still blend perfectly fine in his example of Kirby's Dream Land 3, as well as the more odious test case of Jurassic Park's translucent menus.<p>CRTs don't have an "official" horizontal resolution .. the number of RGB columns is dependent upon the tube and its size, and there's never an exact match against the analog nature of the RGB output from the SNES to the columns on a TV. So the colors naturally bleed together and produce the desired translucency. Maybe just a touch less severely than composite, but well more than enough to achieve the desired blending effects -- without all the horrific composite video artifacts.<p>Further, my SNES emulator simulates this effect as well, by choosing "Video Emulation -> Blurring." It doesn't quite work the same way as a CRT would, but it simulates the effect very nicely. It's not yet connected for my Genesis emulator, but that's only because it's very new and has more pressing issues to address, but it'll be there in time as well.<p>I can't speak for how these effects look on an XRGB-Mini (I haven't tested these types of translucency tricks on mine yet), but I would venture a guess that it would not even look close to as 'pristine' (striped) as the emulators output: it's still having to use an ADC on the RGB lines, and that's always going to be lossy to some degree.