Has anyone ever thought of...

[Cap5750]

I was flipping through the ol' boob tube the other day and saw Call For Help on Tech TV. I was a repeat as I had seen part of it before however they were on a section where they were discussing emulators. (They even showed Atariage as a place to get stuff for the Atari.)

 

Anyway, while they were talking about ZSNES, they mentioned the authors had done something to enhance the graphics and made them look better then they do on an actual SNES.

 

I've seen similar things done with other games...Doom comes to mind as one that someone did.

 

So my question....

 

Has anyone ever thought of doing something like this for the Atari? Obviously, we want the one and only original, but it could be fun every now and then to fire up a different one (emulator) in which we see some kind of enhanced graphics.

 

Cap

[Ze_ro]

They're probably talking about graphical filters like Scale2x, 2xSaI and SuperEagle and such. The main point of these are to smooth out the graphics on a higher resolution display. There are also RGB Effect filters... although those usually serve to reduce graphical quality (the point being to try to reproduce the "RGB Triad" effect that TV's and arcade monitors give).

 

These algorithms are all freely available I believe, and are implemented in a number of emulators already. I'm sure these could easily be integrated into Z26 or Stella... the Z26 guys are a litle busy porting the code into C at the moment though.

 

I'm not entirely sure how well this would work on a 2600 emulator though. Since most of the graphics in 2600 games are very low resolution, filtering them like this might not work as well as it does for higher resolution systems like SNES and arcade machines.

 

--Zero

[+stephena]

These algorithms are all freely available I believe, and are implemented in a number of emulators already. I'm sure these could easily be integrated into Z26 or Stella... the Z26 guys are a litle busy porting the code into C at the moment though.

 

The current CVS version of Stella has OpenGL support, and with it the ability to use bi-linear filtering (basically trades blurriness for sharp edges). It also has the ability to change the aspect ratio to a more squarish picture (like the original Atari). AFAICT, both z26 and Stella in software mode are 'wider' than they should be.

 

I just wish I could find the time to get the sound problems fixed and do a release (real-life job is quite hectic ATM).

 

Steve

[Avid Fan]

I played Activision Anthology on a GBA emulator with one of those filters. I didn't like the results. However SNES looks fantastic with those filters