Dithering on the Sega Genesis with Composite Video

I wonder if Dithering is the cause of why the Sega Genesis is extremely blurry, when connected to a Modern LED TV, even when using a Retrotink upscaler. Because NES 8 bit Consoles on Composite looks 300% clearer then any of the Sega Genesis 16 bit Consoles on the same Composite. And their is no reason. the texts are so bad! and I even Checked online and see. My console IS NOT the only one, their all that way. UNLESS you use RGB, S-Video(MODDED), ETC.

...and all this time I've been striving to get the sharpest possible picture from my retro console set ups

im curious. i wonder if you use a small crt like a 9 inch with RGB will you still get a blend of the color details. this came to mind because is almost impossible to play ps2 games on one due to the the size of the presentation makes the text blurry and small. ive seen another vid of a user modding his 9 inch tv with rgb but with vga. i feel my observation goes to the edge of the debate on shadow mask vs aperture grill. anyone know the result if this could happen??

It's no coincidence that the SEGA Nomad used a composite signal for it's LCD and the image was cropped in a similar way to a 1080p 5x vertical scaled picture.

I always thought hand-drawn backgrounds and sprites of EWJ were impressive, but I never considered the dithering they had do too, probably by hand because I'd imagine algorithmic dithering wouldn't have looked as good.

The last one hurt my eyes

am i the only one that likes the sharpness of the pvm/bvm? i dont care the waterfall isnt transparent, everything looks sharper, and better in my opinion.

can someone please tell me why the hell I DON'T see much dithering with composite? Is it because it's Model 2 or a PAL console?

Fuck composite. I haaaate it. Never EVER tell me it's the intended look.

Companies used composite to their advantage even before the genesis. You can actually see "added details" in Metroid and Mario Bros 3 compared to an emulator. These devs knew what they were doing.

Does this apply to LCD TVs?

It is bad that the screen of a VGA PC monitor was never blurry like the TV screen of the time, it was not easy to hide the limitations of the PC games without dithering during the developments. I'm thinking in particular of the light from the ceiling lights in Halloween Harry, even on a VGA monitor it's easy to see that the light is just a set of white checkerboard patterns. No, these VGA PCs should be able to be connected to a CRT TV.

I dont care about the dithering! I consider it to be cheating by the devs, they used the horrible blurriness of the TVs back then as a trick to make colors blend together.... i much rather have sharp and nice looking pixelart for old games!! (instead of blurry washed out pixelart that happens to be better at smearing and bleding colors together lol

Composhitters are mentally ill

And now we can detect and blend that dither with upscalers. What a time to be alive

If you're playing on an HDTV, plug the RF connection into an antenna amplifier then connect that to the TV. It looks better than the (famously bad) composite output.

The Atari ST programmers/artists used dithering a lot too because it had the same 512 color max palette like the Genesis.

Great video! Thanks for all your excellent work.

Fun fact- while most say the GENESIS can only do 512 colors with 64 per line, you can actually get 160 per line with a special trick and up to 192 per line using the hilight/shade sprite mode.

25 year video geek pro here. Completely agree. We created graphics for composite video. RGB component or even SVID clarify the picture past what the creators intended.

CAN U HELP ME! MY TV SONIC WATERFALL LOOKS LIKE THE ONE URS LOOKED LIKE I THE END WITH "TOO MUCH CHROMA". HOW DO I ADJUST IT

I'm a dither guy, as I grew up playing such mentioned games. It was always a cool effect seeing this on TV. However, emulation soon made me understand what was going on underneath it all and so I started missing the dithering. This is one instance where dithering smoothing might be necessary for games. Systems like the NES and SNES or even the PC Engine/TurbografX 16 can get away with the crispness of PVM and RGB and YPbPr, but in my eyes systems like the Genesis simply cannot do without the dither smoothing.

Mayhem in Monsterland(1992) for Commodore 64 takes this a step further by using palette cycling at the full 50Hz on solid colour monsters to create colours not possible. It obviously also uses dithering, but also has "fringing" on some background parts. It all looks really terrible(even seizure inducing to some folks) on emulator, but on a CRT over RF you'd never know it was happening.

The developer said that it expanded his colour palette from 16 to 27.

Interesting note is that in PAL it seems to be horizontal lines that blend, rather than vertical. I dunno if that's just a developer choice or a difference between systems, but I know Apple 2/CGA composite colour doesn't work on a PAL TV.

I picked up a Japanese Mega Drive today with a composite cable and was blown away by how great it looked. This video explains why - thank you!
I usually go with s-video cables for my consoles but the Mega Drive doesn’t have that option, however after learning about dithering I’m more than happy to be stuck with composite for the Mega Drive. Great video - thank you!

I have a model 1 and a model 2 sega mega drive, both hooked up to a crt tv. Model 1 is connected with RF cable and model 2 with rgb scart cable.
i honestly prefer the RF picture in most games.
Got to find me a composite scart some time.

Thx for the video.

So...no need pvm. Just old crt? As more blurry....better experience. Right?😊

freaking awesome

Thanks a lot for this very well made explaination and demo!

I have become so used to pixel perfect pixel images that to me dithering has become an artstyle beyond it's original technical use.

Now there are great CRT filters such as "CRT Royale" that blends the pixels great and simulate a CRT very well. It even fixes the waterfall issues in games.

It's a really good video, but my opinion is that the lure of recreating the composite video effect is one born of nostalgia and if you're going to try and introduce a new generation to the beauty of 2d pixel artwork, i don't think you'd do it with a blurry shadow masked mess that they have no attachment to. While it recreates an effect that was once present, it can also mask some of the beauty in the details. Crisp pixels can be intricate and appealing and show the artist's skill too.

Edit: PS1 and Saturn is a whole other ball game though

I agree that certain details are lost when not using composite, but I think the benefits of everything else except for those few things looking insanely better outweighs it.

I would highly recommend the gdapt shader in retroarch. It properly dithers pseudo-transparencies while keeping everything sharp. I have tested the Sonic 1 waterfall, the Shinobi 3 pools and waterfalls, and the Streets of Rage 2 bar lights and everything looks great. Recently, retroarch added a new feature that lets you combine multiple shaders into your own custom shader, so it would be possible for people who want to simulate CRT stuff like scanlines to make a shader that accomplishes both. I would recommend applying gdapt before any other shaders.

For the record, I'm using CRT emudriver to output retroarch on component video from my computer to a consumer-grade CRT. It looks great but is too sharp to display Genesis pseudo-transparencies properly. That is, until I discovered gdapt, which fixes everything. I would not recommend gdapt for other consoles besides Genesis. NES and SNES had poor results.

Hello Jon, would you ever consider reviewing other Sega Genesis that use shadow and highlight mode; or point out games that would greatly benefit from the feature?

Have you ever thought of doing a Behind The Code video for Hard Drivin' for the Genesis? I'm amazed that the Genesis was able to do real 3D without a chip like Virtua Racing did, even if it was clearly in over its head trying to do so!

Are there actually people who prefer composite to RGB? For me RGB is significantly better and it’s not even close. I don’t even think it should be a preference or an opinion. If you prefer composite you’re just flat out wrong and not being honest with yourself 😂

Genesis Model 1 also had by far the best sound quality.

Truth has been spoken. For those older consoles that rely on dithering heavily (even the ps1) pursuing RGB is waste of time. If you want a better picture while retaining intended look, use S-Video at most. RGB is overrated.

i switch between scart and composite on the megadrive depending on the game

Such a great video. Personally, I only use RF signal for all my old retro consoles. Simple hook up, inexpensive, and looks like ass just the way I like it. Plus natural stereo sound.

Is this dithering present if you component video via an emulator? Still used on a crt television

I only really knew about these chrome and luma issues from the perspective of VHS and the issues you pointed out with dot crawl, etc. I had no idea this was being used as an intentional strategy in the digital realm. Man alive the creativity of people working with these kind of limitations is always so inspiring and fascinating

i am sorry man but you are wrong about the dithering on purpose by the creators of sonic or shinobi .They built the game on a pc and the rca signal was never meant to be the top quality on screen for the games .In europe we had rgb peritel signal for 50htz pal tv ,which had a better result for each pixel on screen compared to the poor rca . Pixels on the waterfalls and shadows melt with each other on rca ,while on crt or lcd screens with rgb peritel they appeared clean and separated from each other. Oshima and other sega creators never created those waterfalls on purpose with realistic effects since it was created on pc in studios with clear screens ,not rca signals.
You did a very good job about filters and color used on screens by the way.

Okay I've got a crazy question. Just started playing with a genesis model 3 on a crt. My crt is not high end just has composite. I have a nes, snes, n64, and a playstation. Hooked up to this tv by far the genesis looks the worst i've adjsuted my tv settings and I think I have the best setup at this point. I think I have jailbar issues ghosting behind some sprites and some sprites pixels seem to stretch vertically I looks worse in some games more than others. I have ordered a new cable hoping this will clean up my signal. If not my reseach has come up with the genesis is a noisy machine video signal picks up alot of noise on board. The solution to this is the triple bypass which adds rgb. Now like I said earlier my tv in not rgb I may mod it one day. But until then can I use the triple bypass then used a retro hdvision component cable to a component to composite adapter then off to the tv. Will my awful picture be improved? Is it worth it?

Love this. It's really hard for people nowadays, who grew up without analog/composite video signals, and only know HD, or quickly moved on to upgrade their TV to HD. graphics were made the way they were for dithering reasons, but to most people, it just looks "pixelated". When I first started messing with emulators, my default set up used scanlines to get a more accurate simulated arcade effect. MAME now has a video setting HLSL to simulate everything a CRT monitor can do. It looks a thousand times better, and more accurate. I own about 20 arcade machines and I try to keep original CRT monitors in them.

🤯

all the retropies be like wuhhh

Dithering is a lost art and that is why I use a composite connection with my Sega Genesis. I think Disney's The Lion King is another great example of how dithering on the Sega Genesis can produce more colors, especially on the title screen. Thanks for the video. Dithering also helped with full-motion video colors on the Sega CD.

Great video, goes to show how these old games really did "look better when we were kids"
A bit of fuzziness to smooth everything out makes just about any game made before 2000 look more natural and it's very much the expected way to play them.
You miss out on a lot by running old games at high resolutions where all the flaws and the tricks become painfully obvious and hurt the look of the game.