NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?)

[lilbud]

@darknior Waifu2x is sometimes down, so it could be unreliable.

[Used2BeRX]

@darknior said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@darknior Hey man,

I'm not real knowledgeable about file types. I know I needed to make the carts PNG so I could have transparancy, and that overall the filesize for my carts are about 3 times as large, but I'm wondering why they actually seem to load up reasonably quick on my Pi Zero without even resizing them down at all?

JPG is always smaller because more compression. I always use 80% compression for the covers. Files are smaller with it.

I know the file size is smaller. I'm wondering about the speed at which RetroPie displays the images though. Even though the PNG images are quite a bit larger by file size, they seem to load quicker on the Pi Zero than the JPG images of the same dimensions.

I hope that question is clear this time, because I'd really like to get an answer on this one. It's kind of a big deal when it comes to me making my Pi Zero artwork set. It's actually the difference of a few Gigabytes of space if it's better for me to go with PNG for the boxes just for the sake of loading speed.

PNG, no really compression and transparency support, images are always better than JPG if you have a big source file. But for me it's not important, i think covers in JPG are enough on HD TV.

To compress PNG for my RVGM theme, and not loose any quality, there are some software really cool like this one i use. Try it on your Logo and Carts and report to me, you will love it :)

PNG Gauntlet : https://pnggauntlet.com/

Thanks man. Now that I'm using PNG for cart images, the size of that folder is about 3 to 4 times higher than it was at JPG. Anything I've tried makes the PNG look bad. I'll give this one a shot and see what happens. It's on my to-do list. Probably won't get to this for a while since I'll still be adding games.

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@lilbud Thanks bud.

Anyway... Here's the original again:

And here's what I made with your label:

You really make a good work on your carts, i love it ... and only with Paint.Net !!! Incredible.
So bad for you, you don't use Photoshop ... you can make some better things with it ...

On this Cart, why don't you remove the ZELDA title to replace it by the Chinese ?

I have an other MAGIC option for you @Used2BeRX ... i discover it last month, and in some case it can save the life and help to have a good stuff with a big size to work on :)
I don't use it for my final result, but to up-size an RAW image size, found over GOOGLE, and with a little size. With this soft i make the image bigger, and after i can clean it and redraw the missing parts :)
Because the problem with an little image is to up-size it without having so many pixel. This software up-size your image without any PIXEL !!! It use machine learning. Use default settings, MEDIUM and x2.
Try it and report me, you will love it too ;) :p

Waifu2x image resizer : https://waifu2x.booru.pics/

And now after 10 minutes of Photoshop work to hide (fast) the bad logo and let you paste the Chinese one :)

Wow. You can't even tell that you blew that image up! I've never seen that before. That's going to be a huge help for me, even on images I don't intend to fix up on my own. When the sets are released, I'm going to be making all of the images for each type the exact same size. That's why I've been going for "pixel perfect ratios" when doing all of this work on them. The ones that were smaller than the desired size for the system that will be displaying them I was just going to blow up with Paint.NET. I'll be using this program for that now. Thanks for the link. :)

Oh, and about that Zelda cart... If you look at the super small actual image I found, you can see that the "Zelda" logo is on it, and there is chinese writing to the left of the sword. Chances are there is chinese writing below the word Zelda instead of "The Minish Cap" as well, but I can't tell.

I think it's really impressive how you can remove the logo like that and what was behind it still looks so good. I have no clue how to do that kind of stuff, so I'm rather limited in the touchups that I can do.

[lilbud]

@used2berx have you tried gimp?

[Used2BeRX]

@lilbud said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx have you tried gimp?

I did. It was too complicated for me. I'm an idiot. I just surround myself with smart people. :)

I like things to be simple. Whenever I've needed anything that Paint.NET didn't natively do, I was able to find a plugin and instructions on how to use it.

Maybe Gimp can do some more artwork magic than Paint.NET can do, but I'm no artist. All I'm really doing is some technical stuff, and when I can I make some fixes to the damaged boxes in areas that are basically solid colors. I wouldn't even touch the artwork stuff if I didn't have to. I'm glad that in the last 10 years since I was away from the scene that the overall quality of the art available online is better by about 10 fold. I'm hoping my luck holds out on that statement whenever I move to the next system I'm going to work on.

[darknior]

@used2berx Really i think you must lost some time, hours, days to learn how to use Photoshop (the best for me) or Gimp.
Yes you will lost some days, but after that you will save many more when you work on your images.
All is explain on Youtube with video tutorials ...
I'm sure if you understand how to remove a logo in 10 minutes you can use it many time and make a better work and work faster.
Same with video filters, light filters, etc.
On this cart you can now paste the zelda logo, remove the "Minis caper" and replace by Chinese title. And add the other logo we can see on top right. And release a perfect update of the original card.

[lilbud]

@used2berx Ok, if you need help, feel free to ask!

I do have some NES carts if you want pics of them.

[Used2BeRX]

@markwkidd Hopefully I'll have some time in the next few days to try uploading some things to github. Even if I'm not close to an actual release it would be nice to have this stuff backed up somewhere else. I'll let you know if I run into any problems. :)

[Used2BeRX]

@lilbud said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx Ok, if you need help, feel free to ask!

I do have some NES carts if you want pics of them.

I have carts for all of the games in the collection now. Currently 2,020 of them. Most of them are very high quality. What type of cart images do you have?

[lilbud]

@used2berx off the top of my head:

Mario 1
Gyromite
Ninja kid
Pinball
Centipede

[Used2BeRX]

@lilbud Oh. I read that wrong. You mean you have the actual physical cartridges. Lucky dog.

After I moved out and my younger brother went into the army, my youngest brother traded in our entire video game collection we had growing up for new games until all he had left was a PS2 and one or two games for it. Then he had to get a job to support his addiction.

Some times I want to strangle him when I think about that. Especially with how inflated the prices of all those old games are right now.

[lilbud]

@used2berx I'd strangle him too. If my brother sold all my games, this is how i'd feel.

[Used2BeRX]

@lilbud said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx I'd strangle him too. If my brother sold all my games, this is how i'd feel.

lol :)

What kills me is that the time period he was selling them, they were at about the lowest price point imaginable. He probably got 2 new PS2 games for our entire NES library of around 100 games. Some of those were fairly rare too, because we had this great swap meet around us where this guy sold all sorts of carts you'd never find at Toys R Us or the video game stores. We had games like Baby Boomer and Chiller and one of the Dizzy games and a few of the other Codemasters Quatro games. I'm thinking he got about $0.25 - $0.50 per game in credit when he sold them. :(

We had NES, Super NES, Atari 7800, Atari 5200, Gameboy, Genesis, 32x, Sega CD, TurboGrafx 16, and the Virtual Boy, and literally hundreds of games in total.

When I found out he had done this, all that was left was the Virtual Boy. Nobody would buy it from him. Sadly, that didn't even work anymore. :(

I took the PSX and N64 with me when I left since those weren't gifts from my parents and I outright bought them. I ended up giving the PSX away with a few of the crappy games I never played to somebody I worked with who had a pretty tough life, after I got the PS2. I gave my N64 to my good friend's son. Me and his old man used to play the hell out of Mario Kart and Goldeneye 007 with a bunch of other friends back in our day, and I thought it would be a cool way for him to bond with his kid.

I'm hardly a purist though. When emulation works, I'd much rather have a small unit that can play few thousand games with all of the artwork and stuff combined like I'm putting together. It is a shame that we've never gotten perfect 007 Goldeneye emulation on the XBox for multiplayer. Hoping that it works on a Pi 3. I only have a Pi Zero now so I haven't been able to try it.

[Used2BeRX]

Next part of the project is to enlarge Action and Title screenshots and standardize them. The images from the 1.0 release were very small because most of them were taken in MednafenX which takes super small screenshots. Many others, however, were either taken with different emulators when a lot of the games still didn't work in MednafenX or were taken off the web, so the pixel ratios can vary wildly.

As it turns out, this job won't be as bad as I had originally thought. I thought I would have to re-take every single Title/Action shot in an emulator that takes larger pictures. I will only have to re-take those that have a non-standard ratio. In order to re-size the rest without degrading the image quality, all I have to do is increase them by a percentage of 200%, 400%, 800%, etc. using the "Nearest Neighbor" filter and you end up with a pixel perfect image that is double or quadruple or more the size.

The strange thing is that MednafenX takes two dimensions. They are 256x240 and 256x224. (These are also common ratios found in online searches for NES images) I have a question into the guy who works on the emulator to answer that one for me. My plan is to increase all of these images by 400% using this method. The 256x240 images will be 1024x960. The 256x224 would be 1024x896.

We will probably have a nearly 50/50 split of these two image sizes because I think this different ratio happens for a good reason. There is no way to "force" the ratio of one to the other size after the fact other than simply cropping pixels which is obviously not an option. If you try to force the different size with a filter you get a blurry mess.

This project shouldn't take much more than a few days hopefully. Definitely not going to be as bad as the Cart project was. :)

Updates to follow.

[Used2BeRX]

Hmmmmmm...

It seems that MednafenX didn't make all of those images. It only puts out 256x224. Many of the images I have however are 256x240, so I must have gotten them from another source. I can't remember that far back since it was about a dozen or so years ago that I did it.

Mobygames has a list of accepted screenshot image dimensions for all gaming systems. For the NES the only two accepted image dimensions are 256x224 / 256x240 png/gif

Anybody have any thoughts on what the ideal size should be? I've seen a ton of forums about this issue regarding not just screen shots, but the aspect ratios that should be used when emulating games. It seems like there is a ton of arguments about it and no one side is "right".

I want them to all be the same, so I'm probably going to do them all 256x224 and then enlarge them since that's the easiest for me to do on my rig.

[Used2BeRX]

Nope... That's no good. The 256x224 ratio is bad. It gets there by removing 8 pixels from the top and bottom of the image.

RetroArch and Nestopia EU take garbage screenshots as well at 320x240. They're extremely blurry.

The only good way to get them seems to be from NestopiaX at 256x240 pixels, although there are problems with that which would make it take a long time for me to get all of them.

I'm going to have to think about this and talk with some people who know more than I do about it before I start working on this.

lol... nothing is ever easy, is it?

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

RetroArch and Nestopia EU take garbage screenshots as well at 320x240. They're extremely blurry.

320x240 is the native 4x3 resolution for those games. To resize the images to a larger size without blurring, you need to select the option in your image editor for 'Integer Scaling', sometimes named 'nearest neighbor'. Just make sure that the larger size is always a factor of 200%, 300%, 400%... etc to get a perfect scale.

Edit: I see now that you're saying they come out of Nestopia blurry. I have no idea why that would be outside of poor scaling from the core.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul

Yeah. I meant "Nestopia UE" (Undead Edition). It's a PC version of Nestopia that is still being developed and basically lets you play the RetroArch version of Nestopia without going through the hassle of installing RetroArch on your PC.

The images on the RetroPie come out blurry, but I'm assuming that is because how RetroArch takes them. I don't think that the emulators themselves take the screenshots. All of my games are set up to use quicknes first, then Nestopia or finally fceumm if neither of the others work (because I'm doing all of this on a Pi Zero).

When I took some screenshots on my PC using Nestopia UE, I got the same 320x240 images and they were just as blurry.

The problem is that they're forcing an aspect ratio (basically doing what you said not to do when you said make sure the larger size is always a factor of 200%, 300%, 400% etc.)

The true ratio should be 256x240. NestopiaX on the XBox takes the images at this size, but only allows for 1 image at a time and if you take a second one it overwrites the first one. This would mean that I'd have to start hundreds upon hundreds of games and take a title shot, then FTP these titles to my PC, then restart those same hundreds and hundreds of games and take an action shot. Not really something I want to do.

The 256x224 that MednafenX on the XBox does, and some other PC emulators does is also wrong because it is just cutting off the top and bottom 8 pixels. Not noticeable on most images, but on certain title screens where the title was too close to the top edge part of it is actually cut off. The Smurfs (EU) is a good example of this.

Incorrect 256x224 image from MednafenX:

Correct 256x240 image from a Google image search:

I don't have a screenshot I took of that game with Nestopia on RetroPie, but here's a screenshot of Super Mario Bros I took with it.

You can see how blurry it is if you zoom in, where a 256x240 image will not blur when zoomed. Increasing it by 200% or 400% using Nearest Neighbor will show the same blur as zooming does.

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

without going through the hassle of installing RetroArch on your PC.

I haven't installed RetroArch on a PC in some time. What is it that makes it such a hassle?

The images on the RetroPie come out blurry

This shouldn't be the case. Are you sure you don't have 'smoothing', or some other filter enabled?

The true ratio should be 256x240

Very true. My attention was divided when I first read your post and I thought you may be questioning where 320x240 came from. Of course, 256x240 is the pixel aspect ratio and 320x240 is the display aspect ratio. While PAR will always look somewhat strange to those who played on a television back in the day, PAR is gonna be the best bet for maximum quality as you enlarge. You could use integer scaling to achieve a 4x3 DAR result, but it would never be perfect.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

without going through the hassle of installing RetroArch on your PC.

I haven't installed RetroArch on a PC in some time. What is it that makes it such a hassle?

Don't know. But that's why Nestopia UE was created, at least according to a few "best emulators for windows 10" articles out there. I'm not a huge fan of RetroArch, and I'm definitely not a fan of any emulation on a PC when you can do it much better on the XBox and the RetroPie. I didn't want a huge hassle. Just a simple emulator to take pics.

The images on the RetroPie come out blurry

This shouldn't be the case. Are you sure you don't have 'smoothing', or some other filter enabled?

I think I probably did put video smoothing on almost a year ago, now that you mention it.

The true ratio should be 256x240

Very true. My attention was divided when I first read your post and I thought you may be questioning where 320x240 came from. Of course, 256x240 is the pixel aspect ratio and 320x240 is the display aspect ratio. While PAR will always look somewhat strange to those who played on a television back in the day, PAR is gonna be the best bet for maximum quality as you enlarge. You could use integer scaling to achieve a 4x3 DAR result, but it would never be perfect.

Would the 320x240 DAR from the screenshots that RetroPie makes without smoothing turned on be "perfect", or you're just saying that nothing you do is going to be perfect?

My memory must just not be good or something. I grew up with an Atari 5200, 7800 and then the NES and 256x240 looks just fine to me. I think that some people are just more sensitive to this issue than others.

[mediamogul]

@used2berx said in NES RessurctionXtras 2.0 Project (thread previously titled: Does anybody work on Emulators to fix broken games here?):

Would the 320x240 DAR from the screenshots that RetroPie makes without smoothing turned on be "perfect", or you're just saying that nothing you do is going to be perfect?

Maintaining the pixel aspect ratio with no filters applied is the only way to achieve a perfect result in upscaling from the native resolution. That being said, I have all my emulators set to the display aspect ratio of 4x3 for nostalgic reasons. Even though it's not perfect, it's the aspect ratio I grew up with and I simply prefer it for that reason. Most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference of how the pixels are affected, but as you say, some are more sensitive than others and it would likely stand out like a hand full of sore thumbs to them.