Motion Blur Issue on Analogue Mega SG

[Skippy B. Coyote]

So I finally got my Mega SG in the mail today and after updating it to the latest firmware I tried it out with a bunch of different games. I played Splatterhouse 2, Mortal Kombat, Samurai Shodown, Lightening Force, Virtua Racing, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

 

Every game looked fantastic and played beautifully, except for the three Sonic games. All three of them had washed out looking color pallets and massive amounts of motion blur on everything except for Sonic himself whenever he started running. Just to make sure I wasn't imagining things I tried out the three Sonic games on my Genesis Model 2 on a CRT TV and they looked fine with no motion blur at all, but on the Mega SG hooked up to a 1080p Vizio HDTV they look pretty awful.

 

I scoured all the video options menus on both the Mega SG and my HDTV and couldn't find any remedy to the problem, so I was wondering if anyone else here has had the same issue with motion blur in all the Sonic games on their Mega SG?

[Steven Pendleton]

I've not seen this at all on mine. You say latest firmware, but is that firmware 4.7 or 7.7? Also, what are your video settings, including interpolation and filters? FPGA thread might be a good place to ask, too, as that's basically the official unofficial official Analogue thread.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

31 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I've not seen this at all on mine. You say latest firmware, but is that firmware 4.7 or 7.7? Also, what are your video settings, including interpolation and filters? FPGA thread might be a good place to ask, too, as that's basically the official unofficial official Analogue thread.

 

Stock firmware 4.7, and my video settings are all stock aside from disabling V interpolation which does seem to reduce the motion blur a little bit. No filters in use.

[Steven Pendleton]

14 minutes ago, Skippy B. Coyote said:

 

Stock firmware 4.7, and my video settings are all stock aside from disabling V interpolation which does seem to reduce the motion blur a little bit. No filters in use.

I don't remember what the stock settings are, unfortunately. Sonic games run in 320 pixel mode in the normal gameplay (Sonic 2 and CD special stages run in 256 mode, as does the title screen in CD, and the split screen in 2 runs in 480i, of course). Try setting your height to some integer scale (not the default 4.5X height, but an even 3X, 4X, or 5X) and your width to match and see what happens. It's not the correct CRT aspect ratio (and neither is stock, I think), but it might not be all blurry.

 

And disable 320 h interpolation with the square pixels as you won't need it. You do need it for proper CRT aspect ratio in both resolutions, though.

 

And I forgot something else. You can highlight the height and width settings and press start to cycle through a few presets so you don't have to sit there and wait to get to those presets. You do have to do them separately, though. Do the height first so the width presets will adjust themselves accordingly. There are presets for square pixels, I think. Try that and see what happens.

Edited March 14, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[Skippy B. Coyote]

9 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

I don't remember what the stock settings are, unfortunately. Sonic games run in 320 pixel mode in the normal gameplay (Sonic 2 and CD special stages run in 256 mode, as does the title screen in CD, and the split screen in 2 runs in 480i, of course). Try setting your height to some integer scale (not the default 4.5X height, but an even 3X, 4X, or 5X) and your width to match and see what happens. It's not the correct CRT aspect ratio (and neither is stock, I think), but it might not be all blurry.

 

And disable 320 h interpolation with the square pixels as you won't need it. You do need it for proper CRT aspect ratio in both resolutions, though.

 

Thanks for trying Steve, but unfortunately none of those settings reduced the background blur when moving in the Sonic games at all. By default the system is set to 320 pixel mode in 4:3 for 16:9, and changing it to square pixels with H interpolation disabled and an even 4x or 5x scale didn't reduce the motion blur at all. 

 

I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's not the Mega SG at all but my HDTV not liking the system, though it's weird that I only get the background motion blur in Sonic games and none of the other games I've tried with it, even other fast paced games like OutRun and Virtua Racing. Everything looks great except for all the Sonic titles. It's a real head scratcher!

[Steven Pendleton]

5 minutes ago, Skippy B. Coyote said:

 

Thanks for trying Steve, but unfortunately none of those settings reduced the background blur when moving in the Sonic games at all. By default the system is set to 320 pixel mode in 4:3 for 16:9, and changing it to square pixels with H interpolation disabled and an even 4x or 5x scale didn't reduce the motion blur at all. 

 

I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's not the Mega SG at all but my HDTV not liking the system, though it's weird that I only get the background motion blur in Sonic games and none of the other games I've tried with it, even other fast paced games like OutRun and Virtua Racing. Everything looks great except for all the Sonic titles. It's a real head scratcher!

Interesting. One last thing I might suggest is trying 720p if your display supports that. It looks really nice at 3X for all games and you'll get a larger image than 4X in 1080p and you'll still have everything visible, unlike in 5X mode. Not as sharp as 1080p, but it still looks good. Try some other game with really fast scrolling. Gleylancer (yes, I know I talk about this game a lot) stage 1 and 2 have some really intense parallax scrolling that look super blurry on my Nomad, so test that one as well if you have it.

 

And try CRT aspect ratio with interpolation, as well. Other than that, I have no idea what could be the problem other than the display itself!

Edited March 14, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[+-^CrossBow^-]

The issue is that your LCDs refresh rate isn't the best it would seem. You will get that motion blue effect on LCD displays with low refresh on them. My PC monitor has a 1ms refresh so pretty much zero blur in most instances. I do notice some blur with my Sony bravia I use in the game room, but itsn't as bad as the blur I had from my Isignia or Samsung displays I was used prior. 

 

So the issue is your refresh on the LCD and that is why you don't see it on your CRTs. You only see the background blur because sonic is actually static in the center of the screen during those speed runs and the background is in full motion. The more that has to be drawn like that, the more noticeable it becomes. This is why some gamers (I'm not yet one of them...) will spend major bucks for gaming grade LCDs in their game room. Although I've heard some good things about lower priced LG LCDs in the 49" range that I need to look into.

 

[Skippy B. Coyote]

4 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

The issue is that your LCDs refresh rate isn't the best it would seem. You will get that motion blue effect on LCD displays with low refresh on them. My PC monitor has a 1ms refresh so pretty much zero blur in most instances. I do notice some blur with my Sony bravia I use in the game room, but itsn't as bad as the blur I had from my Isignia or Samsung displays I was used prior. 

 

So the issue is your refresh on the LCD and that is why you don't see it on your CRTs. You only see the background blur because sonic is actually static in the center of the screen during those speed runs and the background is in full motion. The more that has to be drawn like that, the more noticeable it becomes. This is why some gamers (I'm not yet one of them...) will spend major bucks for gaming grade LCDs in their game room. Although I've heard some good things about lower priced LG LCDs in the 49" range that I need to look into.

 

 

 

Hmmm, that would make sense! My HDTV is a Vizio E32-C1 from 2015, but the only info I can find on the refresh rate says it's 60 Hz and I can't seem to find anything about the actual millisecond timing of the refresh rate. It's just weird that I've never noticed this sorta blurring of the background in any other fast paced games, like Horizon Chase Turbo or Doom 2016 on the Switch that I have hooked up to it, but I did find one more game that exhibits this behavior on the Mega SG!

 

It's Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure, which is a Sonic-esque 2D platformer where again the character centered in the middle of the screen stays crystal clear but everything else starts blurring when he gets moving at all. So maybe for some bizzarre reason the refresh rate on my modern TV just doesn't like fast moving 2D platformers?

 

Edit: I just tried out Sonic Mania Plus on my Nintendo Switch and it does the exact same thing where the character centered in the middle of the screen stays crystal clear but everything else starts blurring as soon as they move. It does this on both my HDTV and the Switch's screen in handheld mode though, so I don't know if that means that both my TV and the Switch's screen have a low refresh rate or what exactly is going on here. Modern technology is confusing >_<

Edited March 14, 2020 by Skippy B. Coyote

[Punisher5.0]

Definitely sounds like slow pixel response time. Its most prominent in 2D side scrollers. You might have an option on your TV to lower the delay. 

 

Ive grown to not like most LCD screens because of this issue. Even a 3ms screen cant touch a CRT in response time.