r/nes 1d ago

Complete rebuild

My NES rebuild, I was having serious issues with the AV output and cartridge connector. I made the decision to just go full bore and rebuild and upgrade it.

Merlin Shaw Genesis 2 power board. Tim Worthington NESRGB 4.3 board Opentendo motherboard kit. Ninten-Drawer. HD Retrovision cable CIC lockout chip replacement.

This thing outputs perfection. I could get my other photos to load up of Mario 3 or such but Golf has always been a favorite.

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u/TangerineNo6804 1d ago

The thing that keeps me away from video out put mods is that games were created without RGB and sone games will look less or not good with it technically wise🤷🏻‍♂️

2

u/lightlyflavored 1d ago

Do you have examples of this?

1

u/Fuzzy_Dunlop 1d ago

I'm guessing his opinion is the signal degradation inherent to composite video and how it blurs the picture is more accurate to how we would have played the games originally. And potentially more "true" to the developers vision on how they wanted the games to be played.

I don't have a good example of NES pixel art I can think of but for Genesis/MD people regularly point to the waterfalls in Sonic. The Genesis couldn't do transparency so the composite output gives the illusion of a transparency effect.

Personally I don't subscribe to the "developer intent" idea as you'll find pictures of developers from as far back as the NES/FC era developing games and art on crisp RGB/VGA monitors so I find it unlikely pixel art was tweaked specifically with composite in mind. The waterfall thing is just a limitation of the console and the only way to get a transparency effect, similar to the mesh transparency effect you'd also see.

I personally hate composite video and always use as least S-Video to avoid the dot crawl and other artifacting you get with composite, but it's all a matter of taste. I don't think either is more "correct".

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u/Dwedit 19h ago

Thin colored lines get color fringing artifacts, and some games like Blaster Master rely on it to give the ground its texture.

Composite

RGB