Is this pronounced Hydro City or Hydrocity like velocity?
Sub-struggle:
CRT vs LCD? Those waterfalls used to look really different, and took advantage of the color bleed of old CRT monitors to mimic transparency
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I won't struggle over this but I am deeply fond of the CRT bleed being leveraged to add a nice softness to some pixel art backgrounds.
But on the other hand I like crispy character sprites.
Ah fuck I'm gonna self criiiit.
Many older games were designed with CRTs in mind, and the colors and shapes don't look so great on modern monitors without some shaders applied.
I love CRT displays, but I think an LCD is still fine, and it's definitely the more reasonable option. CRTs are inefficient space-wise, use far more power than an LCD, and are slowly becoming a collector's item. Plus, if you are using a CRT TV, you need to either own the actual consoles plus either the games themselves or a flash cart, or go through a lot of effort and potentially need special equipment to output a 15kHz analog signal from a computer/modern emulation device. I think a good shader to mimic scanlines and an analog signal like in your screenshot is the ideal compromise, but ultimately it's fine to just leave it to personal preference.
That being said, if you do have the ability to play these old games on a CRT, for sure go for it! No shaders can mimic the look of a CRT in motion, and games like Sonic where the screen scrolls very quickly especially benefit from it a lot imo.
There are some pretty good CRT shaders out there. The ones used in Sonic Mania get pretty close!
Right so like, if you played Sonic 1 on a mega drive/genesis using its native s-video out on a consumer shadow mask set, what happens?
I don't believe that any hardware edition of the mega drive/Genesis has native s-video out. The only way to get that would be to emulate it on a Wii or OG Xbox.
I had to check and sure enough, the thing can output s-video but there was no cable or w/e originally. The console can do RGB natively though and used SCART in pal territories soooo...
If that's the case, there's a good chance some hobbyists have made a hob for the hardware that can do it.
As for your first question, I don't know A/V stuff that well so I have no idea. What's a shadow mask?
A shadow mask is a type of CRT television :)
The point of my smartass question is that the Mega Drive, and also the Saturn for Sonic Jam ofc, can display video that doesn't have the awful composite video artifacts that cause the dithering transparency things. The Mega Drive was SCART originally, right?
I guess I'm just not convinced about the whole, dither-composite-transparency thing, and I actually have an old CRT plus a real Genesis. It's such a weird thing people fixate on, like why make the video output look awful for one goofy visual effect? Plus I'm not convinced that the devs did these things assuming NOBODY would ever see their games in better quality than combined chroma/luma... (composite)
Of course they didnt assume everybody has the same setup. But they likely did make things to appear a certain way on an average setup or a range of setups that only looked good on the top 1% of monitors.
And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad. It makes one specific part look really cool and the rest just looks like a sonic game, which is to say absolutely incredible in CRT and mediocre on a modern monitor.
Looking at the color choices on old sonic sprites alone, the artists at sega would have to suck to make those decisions knowing how they look without the assumed artifacting of an LCD. And that's not getting into the decisions they made that make the pixel grid obvious and deacrease the apparent resolution of the sprite. The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor. The only reasonable explanation is that these artists knew what they were doing and took into account the display media that the end user would experience
And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad.
No, it really does. Again I have a model 2 genesis (the one with better video than the model 1, lol) and its composite video is still basically atrocious. It's probably some of the worst composite this side of the NES, it looks incredibly soft and is full of that rainbow fringing and whatever. When you could instead be playing hooked up via component or RGB or something, why trash the video sigbal for a single visual effect??
And while it's true that the majority of MD/Genesis systems were hooked up via RF, even, (awful, I die) Sonic 1 was also commonly seen in arcades, which would have been an RGB monitor in a Sega approved release...
The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor.
Really? I never considered the spritework to be a point of criticism in the Sonic games... also do LCDs have artifacting? Plus iirc Liquid Crystal Displays did not exist at all in 1991, the first ever LCD TV was introduced by Sharp in 1992 (for the Japan only MUSE system) and they wouldn't become affordable until the late 1990s. By contrast all PAL TVs had SCART basically...
As a bonus shitfact, the Sega Terradrive, a combo Mega Drive/IBM PC, also had an RGB connection to its monitor ✨
I'm talking about CRT vs modern monitors. You, I think, are talking about the video feed? S-video and RGB and RF cables and all that can and did still feed into CRT monitors. And while theres a world of difference between a low ejd and a high end CRT, there is still color bleed on all but the crispiest displays, and all of them have scanlines and other CRT elements, as well as a different relationship to color than modern displays.
Pixel art has inherent limitations that can lead to artifacting issues. Take a look at this image:
See how the middle and right-side examples have these apparent vertical lines that run through them? This is called "banding," which is a partocular example of the moire effect (or screen door effect). It makes the lines look like giant removedy pixels and increases the "apparent resolution." Or to put it another way, it makes the pixel grid more obvious. And that can look very different on a CRT or an LCD display because of how they render images. Looking at the art of Chrono posted earlier, there are places on that image where the natural blurring of a CRT makes an otherwise poor choice look amazing. That's because an artist made that image intetionally to look a certain way on the CRT medium.
That's because an artist made that image intetionally to look a certain way on the CRT medium.
Yeah but like... it doesn't, though? As in, the added shading, banding, stuff you're talking about is native to composite video itself. A proper YPbPr video feed into any decent CRT has a very small amount of colour bleed, on account that the colours are separated at the cable. You can get really sharp images off a CRT...
I've seen demo images of like, Guardian Legend and how much more detailed it looks on a CRT! and they were using a Famicom hooked up via RF. I just don't have a face for stuff like that. Like, a decent YPbPr or RGB feed going to a decent (so like 20"+) consumer set is not going to be that "naturally blurred", or else playing Sonic 1 on the Wii's GenesisPlusGX over component would produce exactly the same "blurred" dithering you get with composite... right?
What I'm saying, and again correct me if I've misunderstood or something, is that only the lowest quality analog connections to a TV will produce the "blurring" that makes the "otherwise poor choices" of the dithered Sonic 1 waterfall or whatever "look amazing". And at that point you're getting such a degrated image (combined chroma+luma lmao) that why bother? The allegedly intended way to play them is through the worst video hookups possible?
The vast majortiy of people were using RF cables or RGB until like the 2000s. Most people were not rocking state of the art stuff.
RGB is pretty good, dunno...
It is always disheartening to remember that every console up until like, the Playstation was sold with an RF box thing as standard. Just why? I mean I get it, common TVs, but goddamn.
Hydro City 
Level music started bopping the second I opened this image
WHY IS SONIC THE HEDGEHOG'S MUSIC SO DAMN FUNKY?!
fr sonic 3 & knuckles is one of my all time favorite albums
You might enjoy this then: https://ocremix.org/album/9/sonic-3-and-knuckles-project-chaos
fuckin stank face glued on
this is the shit
it fell off
True I wish Sega made more sonic music like this
There's a section of my brain that's just a constant loop of Chemical Plant Zone playing.
Crazy how much of a bop it is
Megamind moment
#rare
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
megamind should be the only persom to rhyme it with velocity
I think the background evokes an underground city, so my vote is Hydro City
As a wee lad in the 90's I called it Hydro City, so it just stuck with me my whole life. It's probably Hydrocity like velocity tho like you said.
Yeah I'm team Hydro City but I feel like Hydrocity makes sense cuz, y'know. Gotta go fast.
I've been calling it Hydro City all this time too. Considering we almost ended up with a level called Genocide City in Sonic 2, it's probably just an English(-sounding) word that's meant to be cool.
Considering we almost ended up with a level called Genocide City in Sonic 2
I remember reading some shitty creepypastas about this lol
It’s both and neither