Color Bleed/Focus Issue (Only On Some Colors)

[slacker]

I noticed on real hardware that some colors have really bad bleeding into the background color or maybe it's just bad focus. I never really noticed this much before I started tinkering around in batari Basic and noticed that the crispness I see in Stella isn't really reflected on real hardware when it comes to some color contrasts (currently still using plain old RF with one of those coax adapters).

 

What's interesting is that some colors are still super sharp next to each other while others become a blobby mess. Is this something that programmers just tended to work around so to avoid it appearing in their game or is my system just starting to show its age and could use a recapping?

 

I don't really remembering noticing this that much in anything but my own batari Basic game I've been working on and there was one screen in the Cave In homebrew that had this happening as well.

 

Attached is a picture to show what I'm talking about. As you can see, F0 and B0 next to each other look terrible but FE and B0 look great. Sorry it's not the best pic. It's a cell phone shot of my TV.

 

 

Hardware used was a Harmony cart in my light sixer.  Program used was Random Terrain's NTS color compatibility tool (Found here:

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[+DrVenkman]

Congratulations - you’ve discovered the mess that is NTSC over RF. 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

These are also shots from an LCD I take it? I've noticed that colors through RF are much worse in blending or bleeding into each other on RF than they are through a CRT. The 7800 color test on the Utility cart really shows this through RF as the lighter colors near the top are fine and still stand out pretty well while the colors towards the bottom start to form into a brown ugly mess and you aren't able to see the actual outlines of the colors well at all.

 

[slacker]

Yep, that was through an LCD TV. I have a CRT in the basement so I gave that a try to see if it would clear the picture up at all.

 

The pics don't do it justice but it's amazing how much better the picture is in comparison to the LCD. That was the picture quality I remember when I was younger. My phone kept trying to lighten the black area while trying to get a shot of the screen so the pics look a bit washed out. In person, the black was black and the colors looked right.

 

Looking at the bottom row closely, you can even still make out the separation between the inner box and the outer box.

 

Does the RGB mod clean up the picture on an LCD TV? I have two 4 switches I have to repair and was thinking about throwing an RGB mod in one while I had it apart.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I'm sure the RGB mod would clean it up quite a bit. So would putting in a solution that provides you with s-video output if you have the means to run that to your modern display through the use of the RetroTink2x etc?

 

But as I stated, I've seen this before and it is something to do with how LCDs seem to interpret the signals through the old RF.