Better Res Saturn Games

slinga

Established Member
Hey what's up?

I was testing out Guardian Heroes on one of the emulators and I was amazed at how good it looked. Is there anyway to make a regular saturn look anything close to that? How about an RGB cable on a HD TV?
 
The saturn hardware is capable of doing HDTV internally. The problem is that the output chips don't have the connections for it. Of course there still isn't any way to modify (well not easily) existing games for hi res.
 
well, I recall browsing throught the VDP2 docs and reading it was just a bit of bit-twiddling to enable 31khz mode, which is supposed to work with HDTV
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Originally posted by AntiPasta@May 28, 2003 @ 06:41 PM

well, I recall browsing throught the VDP2 docs and reading it was just a bit of bit-twiddling to enable 31khz mode, which is supposed to work with HDTV
cool.gif

The problem is that the chip that converts the output from the saturn chips into composite, s-video, etc doesn't work in those modes.
 
All the graphics chips' features don't work in HDTV/31kHz modes, they don't seem to be added with gaming in mind.
 
Perhaps one could use the Saturn's RGB output and feed it into a scandoubler?

These devices will actually take a TV (15.75kHz) signal and "upsample" it to 31.5kHz so any VGA monitor (capable of a 60Hz refresh rate) can display that signal, and it will do so progressively rather than interlaced. Scandoublers were popular for a while during the Amiga's lifetime... I don't know whether they exist in some universal form (non-specific to the Amiga), though.

EDIT: when I said interlaced, that was of course referring to games using high-res modes, such as Radiant Silvergun. The more common low-res modes would already be progressive, only each line would be drawn twice in succession, therefore giving the "squareness" of the pixels more definition and making them look blockier. You know what I mean if you ever play low-res games on an emulator on the PC...
 
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