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

[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.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul Yeah... Well I know I'm way overthinking this screenshot stuff. Especially since I've been at it all day and haven't gotten anything accomplished. I can't even imagine that they'd ever get all that much use even by most users that weren't using a Pi Zero. I really just want to make everything perfect. I thought this would be an easy part of the project I could knock out quickly, but unless I come up with a good way of doing screenshots quickly, that's not going to be the case. Most of my images were taken in MednafenX at 256x224 with those 16 pixels cropped. Out of 4,040 screenshots, I'm going to have to replace about 3,200 of them.

Oh well... I'll figure something out.

[Used2BeRX]

Thanks to the guy who runs most of the emulators on the XBox, I got the answer I needed. It turns out that MednafenX defaults the Starting and Ending Scanlines for NTSC games at 8 and 231. On a scale of 0 through 239, that's exactly 224 out of the total 240. It turns out that changing those numbers to 0 and 239 before taking the screenshots will net you 256x240 screenshots :)

Now I only wish I knew to do that years ago before I made 3,200 screenshots that I currently have to replace. :(

It would be nice if I could just replace them with packs that somebody else made, but they don't exist for a reason.

Back to the drawing board. This will probably be a few full days of work at least. But it's going to be done right.

[lilbud]

@used2berx http://thumbnails.libretro.com/Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System/Named_Snaps/

The ones marked USA are 256x240

[Used2BeRX]

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

@used2berx http://thumbnails.libretro.com/Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System/Named_Snaps/

The ones marked USA are 256x240

Thanks man. That looks like it's only action shots though, and I need both action and title. It would still take quite a bit of time to download each of them individually and then rename them to my rom names.

I think I figured out a system to do these quickly, and as it turns out I was just informed that the way we made screenshots over a decade ago with this emulator is the "old" way. It used to just give you snaps named "0001.png", "0002.png" etc. in a folder with your rom name. I'm waiting on instructions how to edit an ini file to change this and I'm hoping that it will greatly speed up the process.

If it will name them something like "Super Mario Bros (1).png", "Super Mario Bros (2).png" instead, then all I would have to do is run a bulk rename or two on all the images and they'll work. That will save a TON of time from having to copy and paste the rom file names over the screenshot names.

This probably won't be as bad as I was imagining it would be. I'm glad I did all of this research and reached out to people before I just went and did a whole bunch of work the wrong way. :)

[Used2BeRX]

Sweet. The new way is great. Puts all of the Title shots in the Titles folder and the Action shots in the Action folder with the file names of the roms. No renaming necessary. :)

Now I just have to figure out how to change palettes so I can get some better colors. I just think something is off about the MednafenX standard palette. I want to try out this guy's palettes here: http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html

He claims to have put up to 30 hours constructing a single palette and really seems to know his stuff. I really appreciate that type of dedication and eye for detail.

[lilbud]

@used2berx They got title too: http://thumbnails.libretro.com/Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System/Named_Titles/

They also have box art

[lilbud]

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

I want to try out this guy's palettes here: http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html

That guy does a lot of crap for retro game resolution and scaling. As well as custom palettes.

[Used2BeRX]

@lilbud Hey man. If I sent you some screenshots of the games you had listed, would you be able to compare them to your actual NES games on a CRT and tell me which one is the best? You'd have to be pretty confident that the monitor you're seeing the screenshots on was accurate too.

My TV and PC show them differently. I have no way of knowing if anything is accurate, so I can't really decide what is the "best" palette to go with. I don't want to make a few thousand images and end up regretting my choice after the fact.

[lilbud]

@used2berx Sure, but it'd probably tomorrow or Friday until I have some time. I'll probably take some pics of my screen as well.

Games I have:
Gyromite
Double Dribble
Dr Mario
Q Bert
Millipede
Pinball
Ninja Kid
SMB1/Duck Hunt