So there were blank lines in such cases? What was the point? I suppose reduce flicker at the cost of looking stripy.
About the PAL and NTSC difference in games.
If I remember PAL output allowed higher "resolution" but couldn't refresh as fast as NTSC at full screen. So it was either black boarders and identical framerates or slower but full screen, but never black boarders and slower framerate. Correct?
Also what was the theoretical resolution of CRTs? I don't remember ever seeing any reference to interlaced resolution on any specs. How did games interlaced modes work on each CRT if each CRT had different resolutions?
If I remember PAL output allowed higher "resolution" but couldn't refresh as fast as NTSC at full screen. So it was either black boarders and identical framerates or slower but full screen, but never black boarders and slower framerate. Correct?
Also what was the theoretical resolution of CRTs? I don't remember ever seeing any reference to interlaced resolution on any specs. How did games interlaced modes work on each CRT if each CRT had different resolutions?
PAL was fixed at 50fps, higher resolution. Letterboxed output was the same resolution as NTSC but it still ran slower. You could also have a wrong aspect with 448 lines being stretched to 480 or a 4:3 aspect being letterboxed into a slightly shorter vertical.
I expect modern tech would enable very high resolutions.
CRTs were analogue, so the resolution was determined by the frequency you could change and scan the electron beam. On a monochrome display, an oscilloscope (the origins of the CRT display), you had effectively 'infinite' resolution in terms of illuminatable points and producing perfect resolution lines. The Sony FW900 achieved 2560x1600 @ 75Hz on input, but it couldn't resolve that perfectly.
I expect modern tech would enable very high resolutions.
Halves the frame buffer size.
Actually, halves the memory required is probably a better description.
Yes! You can easily see it by eye alone.
That is why i said the step up to 480i also helps image quality.
But you can get that with interlaced 480i. A 640x480 60 Hz display could show interleaved 640x240 fields. You can either update those 60 fps, or 30 fps and just double up the lines. Heck, the very first home computers and consoles had well below full TV display resolution but output a full screen image with chunky pixels, so innate upscaling was clearly possible and happening.
How common were 240p displays to be targeted and used this way?
Do not know if I got you right here.
You mean a montor displaying only 240 pixels vertical resolution?
That is not what I meant.
At the time of Saturn and PS1, you usually used your TV set that did 480i max (or 576i PAL), but the image was displayed at what would later be called 240p/224p almost all the time.
It looked like this if you went close to it:
You definitely saw the black lines.
There were a few games in High Res mode Like Virtua Fighter 2, some N64-games with RAM-Pack, the examples I mentioned earlier and a few more that displayed double the vertical resolution in interlace mode, which looked great and pretty much like this:
(But of course you got that slight interlace flickering, as you had when watching a TV broadcast, which I cannot recreate on a screenshot here.)
I highly recommend trying Tobal 2 on the PS1 on a CRT TV from back then (not a CRT monitor)!
The image quality you get is phenomenal.
Memory at the time, both working and storage, was a real cost bottleneck. So think of it like a form of compression. You draw the image as if it's 480 and then throw half the lines away. You then let the natural blurriness of a composite signal trick your mind into filling in the gaps like it does with impressionist paintings. And there was no scaling, it's all done with the timings on the analogue video signal.
If you went with a 480i image, you'd still need to store your graphics as if you were using a 480p display otherwise everything would look half height.
The recent popularity for pixel art is a nostalgic look back at a time that never existed. You never could see sharp pixels.
Things were a little sharper in arcades where the connections were generally RGB, but the tubes used were the lowest quality possible and the driving electronics weren't the best. We all crave Sony PVM/BVM CRT monitors for that authentic arcade look, but arcades never looked that good.
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