Dithering is a technique to fake transparency, most famously used in Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn consoles. When CRT attempts to display a grid of pixels, it blends them instead, producing the desired effect. Waterfall from one of the Sonic games is a famous example, although I never liked Sonic, so I’m not sure which of the games had it. Streets of Rage 2, on the other hand, is a game I like, and the bar scene is another famous example, so I decided to test it.
The problem with capturing artefacts though, is that they are, well, artefacts, side effects. Famously trying to record a CRT using a camera produces Moire pattern, that isn’t visible to human eye.
Raw
Retro Crisis GDV-NTSC MegaDrive Dirty
This is the optimistic impression
Retro Crisis GDV-NTSC MegaDrive RF100
This is the pessimistic impression
This is the “reality”, same emulator on CRT:
There are a few issues with the “reality”, though.
Even though the picture is 200M, there’s the lighting in the room, and how my phone camera reacts to it. Then there’s the natural curve and reflectiveness of the CRT TV, and the fact that I can’t hold my phone absolutely level. Then there’s also the fact that this is a PAL TV, so it has to either underscale or overscale, because it’s a weird 720×576 resolution, but MegaDrive outputs 448 lines, so there are 64 blacks pixels at the top and 64 pixels at the bottom.
I don’t own a MegaDrive, but I do have a Dreamcast with SCART cable.
So let’s try again on the Sega Smashpack Volume 1 for Dreamcast that has Streets of Rage 2.
Raw:
Emulator on CRT:
Hardware Dreamcast on CRT:
