Saturn game quality

Gallstaff

Established Member
Most of those hard to find saturn games that I normally can't get a hand on I get off of the ftp's and jut for fun i was looking at some screenshots of resident evil for the saturn and I noticed that they seem to be a LOT more crisp then the ISO+mp3 rip that I got. Or maybe they just look better because they're screenshots. Are games that are copied into iso+mp3 usually of a lesser quality than the real thing?
 
My guess is that you're running a resolution that's higher than the max res the saturn can output, that makes the screens smaller than what they actually are. At the same time it sort of artificially bumps the quality up. Also, depending on the source of the screen shots, they may have been taken using full rgb(though that costs a lot of money for the kind of computer equip you need to do it), not composite like most people use or even s-video. That could be the difference you are seeing. If you goto gamesx.com and look at the video primer, they have sort of a side by side comparison of composite, s-video, and rgb and you'll see what i mean lol.
 
Well, there's always the possibility of some of the quality of the game being lost when someone tries to compress the game (but I guess that only happens with movies).

But I think that this difference you noticed is because the screenshots you saw were taken from an emulator, and I've heard that they can make the graphics look much better (I can't test it for myself because my computer isn't fast enough).
 
The only compression you really see on games (that isn't done by the creator) is to be able to fit it on a smaller disc type (won't go into the reasons for this, though I'm sure most of you know them
wink.gif
). That's not really an issue with the saturn so I dun think that's why it happens (on the other hand sometimes audio gets compressed into mp3, but that wouldn't affect video quality, just sound).
 
Well if you have ever played resident evil for saturn You will notice that the graphics dont seem all too crisp and I mean crisp by saturn standards. Even Jill: The master of unlocking
wink.gif
Seems kinda blocky but screenshots I have seen show her like fully rendered. I will post a screenshot and then a picture I take of mine and you can tell me what yous guys think.
 
Simple explanation: TV settings differ from PC monitor settings, and TV's have far higher dot pitch (built-in "blur filter). So basically, if you looked at those screenshots on a PC with TV-out, it would look more or less exactly the same on the same TV as the Saturn.

Alternate possibility: The Saturn version could be using a deliberate blur filter to hide aliasing (jaggies), and the screenshots were taken from a prerelease build that didn't have the filter enabled yet...
 
Back
Top