EQX pro 8 SegaCD

[fonzievoltonov]

Hi, I wanted to share my lastest improvements over my Equinoxe Codec and Player

EQXPRO8 is a 8fps up to fullscreen FMV encoding/decoding method that takes advantage of the megadrive VDP. It handle from 1 to 4 palettes (15*2 to 61*2 colors) Sound is 16khz

The bitrate is variable, from 8 to 112KB/seconds. And it doesn't have any software decompression allowing lot of user-free cpu usage.

I wasted lot of time to get shadow hilight + 4 palettes working without blocky aspect... Sadly, it is always perfectible.

Current demo (28MB of pure pleasure ;P )

http://www.genny4ever.net/system_ext/downloadwork.php?file=eqxpro8_yatta

Previous demos here:

http://www.genny4ever.net/index.php?page=works#megacd

Thx for your interest

 

[Raster]

That's pretty amazing.

Does it run on real hardware also?

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Thx

I run on real hardware but i had a little seeking slowdown that cause the cdrom drive to read too slowly at some points... I added a fix in this demo but I did not check if it fix all... sorry.

 

[vbt]

I tried it on gens it works fine. The picture quality looks close to the official videos we can see on games. When the foreground is close the result is really good but a little less for far foreground. Is there still a way to increase the number of colors ?

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Yeah, i can add 61 more colors (190 max)... however... i'm a bit lazy to implement for now... since most fmv games are 16colors, i don't mind

I know what you say about "foreground is messy" ... I dont know how to fix... It have something to do with the preparation of the movie... increasing contrast maybe?

Btw: thx vbt the the news-poping up

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Well, i just tried it on real hardware... seems there is again reading speed problem... I don't know what to do to fix it...

CD read speed isn't enough fast... damn, I should be able to reach 96KB/second, isn't it? Seems i can't

 

[vbt]

Yeah, i can add 61 more colors (190 max)... however... i'm a bit lazy to implement for now... since most fmv games are 16colors, i don't mind

The yatta vid seems to have more than 16 colors on emu it's something between 30 and 60.

I know what you say about "foreground is messy" ... I dont know how to fix... It have something to do with the preparation of the movie... increasing contrast maybe?

Not really, the problem is for picture having many thing inside. See in the two files attached but it's harder to get a good result with the number of colors displayed.

I'd say on some case you display white when you don't need to change the color, see the blue on the see in one of your picture and one on mine.

Btw: thx vbt the the news-poping up

It deserved a news. It's almost as good as the videos on commercial games.

I hope you'll continue to improve your codec.

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Thank you.

I see the white dotting problem... It was partialy corrected by the GRAYFLEX technology but appear randomely due to a bug in the Floyd Dithering code?. I hope i can fix it.

About the color counting, having 190 colors or 32 don't make much difference, it is so pixelisated ;P

Btw, i did a 100% fullscreen demo with yatta using rasters, the file size is even lighter It don't look so bad

Thank you for your interest

 

[IceDigger]

Those pictures are kinda disturbing.

 

[Mark30001]

Those pictures are kinda disturbing.

I agree, yet, congrats on the release!

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Thx EQXPRO8 has been fixed for real hardware today

http://www.genny4ever.net/temp/yatta_eqxpro8.mov

Who's ready for EQXPRO10 ?

 

[Mask of Destiny]

So what did the problem turn out to be?

 

[fonzievoltonov]

Haha, it wasn't a problem... it is just that the segacd drive cannot seek enough fast between 1second video chunk if the bitrate is over 50KB/sec...

So i fixed the bitrate to 75sectors per second And let the drive read max speed. (with lot of dummy, that's why i plan to upgrade to 10fps instead of 8).

 

[vbt]

Well it's an old thred but I've seen some Megadrive games using something like videos, the games are Coolspot goes to Hollywood and Sonic 3D, the quality seems to be good and close to Fonzie's encoder but in was on ROMs (which is small). What kind of encoing was used and is there more MD games using (real) video ?