List of PS1 games that natively run in 480i

[D]

Come to think of it
Mr Driller G
both ps1 and jamma pcb run in 480i. (on the pcb it can toggled between 240p and 480i via a dip switch)

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Come to think of it
Mr Driller G
both ps1 and jamma pcb run in 480i. (on the pcb it can toggled between 240p and 480i via a dip switch)

The Namco jamma pcb of Mr. Driller 2 runs both in 240p and 480i modes as well. The fake high-res mode looks great on a dedicated 15.75kHz low-res arcade monitor setup indeed.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[ggvicviper]

Hey, bumping this up. I haven't seen Crypt Killer/Henry Explorers listed here. I have a copy that is very clearly running in 480i. It's got the blocky resolution of a standard 240p game, but it's interlaced. No one has ever mentioned though.

I'm wondering - is it something off with my copy, or is this one that was just missed?

[D]

Hey, bumping this up. I haven't seen Crypt Killer/Henry Explorers listed here. I have a copy that is very clearly running in 480i. It's got the blocky resolution of a standard 240p game, but it's interlaced. No one has ever mentioned though.

I'm wondering - is it something off with my copy, or is this one that was just missed?

That would be very interesting. Why would that even run in 480i though? It is a 240p game. No higher resolution me thinks
arcade hardware seems to be basically a playstation https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=576
I want to try it to see for myself

[ggvicviper]

Hey, bumping this up. I haven't seen Crypt Killer/Henry Explorers listed here. I have a copy that is very clearly running in 480i. It's got the blocky resolution of a standard 240p game, but it's interlaced. No one has ever mentioned though.

I'm wondering - is it something off with my copy, or is this one that was just missed?

That would be very interesting. Why would that even run in 480i though? It is a 240p game. No higher resolution me thinks
arcade hardware seems to be basically a playstation https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=576
I want to try it to see for myself

I checked my copy, and a local retro game store's copy of the game. Both checked on a CRT with an original gray PlayStation. It's definitely a 480i game, or at least the NTSC-U version is anyway. PSXDataCenter also has this as the only version of the game for the region (SLUS-00335).

[Xan]

I just started playing the Torneko game and I think what happened is they wanted 480i to better convey that stop motion aesthetic from the intro. This actually looks good for the town sections, those backgrounds don't look flickery from a normal distance, but too bad all the interior sections use SNES-style assets and those parts look rather horrible in 480i. I'm not sure why they didn't just mode switch like other games did.

This is one that would certainly benefit from a patch to mode switch or at least make the entire thing run in 240p. Though, it has been mentioned earlier in the thread that it does mode switch, but that is not what I am seeing. I'm playing the Japanese version however, maybe that's the reason? There was a year between this and the NA version (which incidentally is horribly expensive, too).

[ZellSF]

Gamera 2000 might be another interesting one like that, at least I seem to recall it running at 480i and others have told me it does. It renders at 240p.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Squaresoft's iS: internal section tube-based shmup (with a nod towards atari's classic 1981 Tempest arcade game) runs in 480i mode as usual.
I'm sure it'd be awesome if it ran at 480p mode though.

PC Engine fan X! ^_~

[Sumez]

The Namco jamma pcb of Mr. Driller 2 runs both in 240p and 480i modes as well. The fake high-res mode looks great on a dedicated 15.75kHz low-res arcade monitor setup indeed.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

Mr Driller G is basically an "updated version of" Mr. Driller 2. They clearly just took the same game and added more stuff to it (more characters, the North Pole, and a new block type), so it's no surprise that all the technical stuff is the same.

480i isn't "fake high-res" though. It's a proper 480 vertical resolution, and what CRT monitors were designed to display in the first place. The phosphors retaining the scanlines makes the image look fairly stable the way we were used to from television at the time.
It's really 240p that's the "fake" mode, abusing the interlaced mechanic to draw over the same lines on every field at a doubled frame rate, to create a completely stable image at a lower resolution, with the additional "drawback" of visible gaps between the scanlines (an aesthetic many of us have come to love )

[Xan]

To me, fake high-res just refers to games that don't leverage the higher resolution. I suppose in that sense one could call the 3DO a "fake high-res console".

In the case of Torneko, the save room with the 3 books is where everybody should be able to see that it's not looking as it should. The game also tends to have these vertical juddering artifacts that you would see from a bad deinterlacer, or a video input that can't tell 240p apart. Worst output I have seen on the Playstation by far. To be fair, this was with the NTSC-J version on a modded PAL console and there may be a slight chance the small output rate difference to a real NTSC console could mess with a 60fps 480i game.

[Sumez]

Mr Driller 2/G does fully use the 480 resolution though

[Bassa-Bassa]

I can totally understand the usage of "fake high resolution" for 480i, lol. Even if technically mistaken, display-wise is a perfect way to describe the technique - the picture is drawn in freaking halves, after all.

There's a 3DO with 240p out, btw.

[Xan]

That's not the full story because the phosphor decay time on CRTs helps to smooth things out, and in the end deflickering blurred the lines between 240p and 480i, literally. I suspect that if the term was ever used in that sense, it would be by someone that did not grow up looking at 480i or 576i.

60 FPS games on 480i is where things get more interesting though because now you are going beyond video standards (new information every field instead of every two fields), so in theory movement could cut your vertical resolution in half. In practice I could only spot it on fast moving menu animations where if you look closely, you can see the scanlines on a PVM.

[Bassa-Bassa]

That's not the full story because the phosphor decay time on CRTs helps to smooth things out, and in the end deflickering blurred the lines between 240p and 480i, literally. I suspect that if the term was ever used in that sense, it would be by someone that did not grow up looking at 480i or 576i.

Pretty sure myself the PC Engine Fan X guy was born before the 90s.

"Deflicker", "smoothing", "blur"... you name it - in the end the picture is not drawn at once and needs artifacts to try to mimic its hypothetical progressive counterpart. It's a faking process in regards to the picture's nature stricto sensu.

[Xan]

I don't know for sure that he meant to use the term in the sense of talking about the 480i video standard itself.

Another thing is, fake hi-res would imply the result is trying to be better than the established standard in some way, yet 480i was simply the norm itself and never considered high definition (maybe in the 30s, but whatever). But in the video game sense, the established de facto standard was 240p, so 480i would go beyond it, doubling the vertical resolution (for still frames) - but if you just output the same framebuffer as you would in 240p, but in a 480i signal, that is fake hi-res. N64 expansion pak games would do at least 360 vertical (not counting the letterboxed modes) and therefore qualify as not fake hi-res.

That is my reasoning why only the video game sense of that term has any point to it. To sum it up, a 480i signal itself isn't fake hi-res because it isn't any kind of hi-res, it's simply what they came up with to transmit a video signal within the limits of 15 kHz hfreq/60 Hz vfreq. Saying it's fake in comparison to 480p is as arbitrary to me as saying that a 1930s car is a fake car because it doesn't go as fast as a 1980s car.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Another thing is, fake hi-res would imply the result is trying to be better than the established standard in some way

"Fake" just means "pretending to be what it is not", there's not necessarily an implication like that there. Interlacing was a thing because progressive at the same resolution could not be possible/feasible, though they virtually tried to approach that (and failed, depending on you ask). So I don't know, there's little arbitrariness in using "fake high res" for it, though obviously the term "high res" needed to be invented first (and for that, the corresponding idea needed to exist as well).

Anyway, I find your definition perfectly fine too. It all comes down to which meaning for "resolution" everyone's thinking about, as it's not just one.

[Unseen]

60 FPS games on 480i is where things get more interesting though because now you are going beyond video standards (new information every field instead of every two fields), so in theory movement could cut your vertical resolution in half.

That's not "beyond video standards", that is exactly how interlaced video is intended to work: Full resolution for static parts, reduced for fast motion. When it was invented - almost 100 years ago now - storing half of the lines of a video frame to send them out as the next field was not practical, electronic cameras used tubes that scanned the image with an electron beam and sent out a voltage corresponding to the "live" brightness of each scanned point.

[Xan]

I guess you're right, I was thinking purely in terms of movies where the source is 24 FPS and so you just get the 3:2 pulldown to NTSC. I don't know if ways other than video games to produce 60 FPS video with 1 field per frame were that common, with consumer camcorders being 30 FPS/2 fields per frame.

[Sumez]

"Deflicker", "smoothing", "blur"... you name it - in the end the picture is not drawn at once and needs artifacts to try to mimic its hypothetical progressive counterpart. It's a faking process in regards to the picture's nature stricto sensu.

I don't know if this is a gonna be a revelation of sorts to you, but you know, 240p/480p images aren't drawn all at once either.
Interlaced and progressive scan images are all drawn line by line, and drawing a complete frame takes almost as long as the duration for which the frame is actually shown. Without the phosphor decay retaining the picture, these would all be constantly moving and impossible to look at.

The big advantage 480p gains over 480i isn't really that it's not drawing half fields, but that it's able to draw at twice the refresh rate, giving you a full 480 line image at 60fps, which is of course a really big advantage for video games. Less so for movies already recorded at 24 or 30fps.

but if you just output the same framebuffer as you would in 240p, but in a 480i signal, that is fake hi-res

Yes, this is how I understood the statement. But it could be interpreted in a few different ways

Going back to where we come from, that's why I said Driller G isn't "fake hi-res", because it definitely uses all 480 lines to display more detail. It's more obvious on the more zoomed out stages, of course. The "easy modes" might look less distinct.

[Bassa-Bassa]

By "at once" I meant "progressively", as it comes off quite obvious, I believe. "Giving you a full 480 line image at 60 fps" and "not drawing half fields" are the same thing, as 30 fps isn't even a feasible option for video games.

[orange808]

I think people should try out deinterlacing with modern gear for problematic games before they decide to go down a rabbit hole for 480p. If that's not good enough, follow the rabbit. True progressive is better than guessing, of course.

The good news is, faster refresh rates have already driven down the latency penalty of using a full frame buffer for deinterlacing with the right external video processor. You can get the deinterlacing penalty down to ~4ms of additional latency at 240Hz (output from the video processor to a low lag display) with a ~60Hz source.

Higher refresh rates on future panels (with future high bandwidth HDMI) will push that down even further. Right now, that means just under 21ms of total time to "scan out" a ~60Hz source signal--versus about 17ms to scan out a native ~60Hz interlaced field on a CRT. That works out to around 4ms of true latency penalty to fully display the "current frame" using full frame buffered deinterlacing (versus a CRT displaying interlaced fields).

In the past, full frame buffered deinterlacers used to add an eye watering additional ~20ms of additional latency before we sent the signal up the wire to the display (in the final hop). These days, we can get the processing done and transfer the frame information up the wire in about 4ms flat. RT4K and 240Hz output deinterlacing is a frame faster than Framemeister! HDMI has gotten faster with newer standards and video processors are able to get their "processing" work done quicker.

That means full frame buffer processing and sub-frame additional latency, because the signal can be transferred up the wire and scanned out very quickly--after the deinterlacer (RT4K) has the frame buffered and processed.

I would encourage people to try simply plugging their 480i game into their Retrotink 4K with a 240Hz display before you go down a rabbit hole trying to get 480p. True progressive output will be absolutely better, but it's not always going to be worth it for every person and every game. The days of crazy lag penalties for deinterlacing are gone. Try the deinterlacing and 240Hz output first if you can. It is guessing, but some may find the guessing is good enough. If it is, you can get it without a ton of lag. That wasn't the case before.

[Xan]

I'm lost at "trying to get 480p", as the thread is only about PS1. Or did you mean to post this in another thread?

But yeah, tech has advanced. Though can't help but notice that you are casually recommending an almost 1 grand device+240 Hz monitor (that hopefully doesn't have terrible black levels) where just a couple of years ago the solution would have been "pick up any old CRT TV".

[orange808]

I have no control over prices.

Beyond that, I have refrained from lengthy discussions or recommendations of *truly* expensive or very rare gear. I've mentioned unaffordable or extremely rare gear, but I genuinely try to avoid the subject. I've also misjudged how hard some gear would be to get. For instance, I overestimated the amount of Calibre HQV machines in the wild. It turns out the last generation of those machines weren't made or sold in great numbers and there's nothing to buy used. So, yes. I posted about a good machine there that was expensive and hard to get. Sorry. It happens.

In the larger world of A/V enthusiasts, the RT4K and OLEDs are bargains and a dream come true. What you think is "expensive" really isn't terribly expensive at all. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ For decades, the A/V crowd spent thousands of dollars on machines and displays that underperformed comparably cheap modern solutions that are available right now.

By the way, the is the shmups hardware forum and I remember when the majority of the CRT recommendations here involved used professional monitors.

[Bassa-Bassa]

^I guess not many Europeans participated in the discussions?

[Xan]

I have no control over prices.

Beyond that, I have refrained from lengthy discussions or recommendations of *truly* expensive or very rare gear. I've mentioned unaffordable or extremely rare gear, but I genuinely try to avoid the subject. I've also misjudged how hard some gear would be to get. For instance, I overestimated the amount of Calibre HQV machines in the wild. It turns out the last generation of those machines weren't made or sold in great numbers and there's nothing to buy used. So, yes. I posted about a good machine there that was expensive and hard to get. Sorry. It happens.

In the larger world of A/V enthusiasts, the RT4K and OLEDs are bargains and a dream come true. What you think is "expensive" really isn't terribly expensive at all. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ For decades, the A/V crowd spent thousands of dollars on machines and displays that underperformed comparably cheap modern solutions that are available right now.

By the way, the is the shmups hardware forum and I remember when the majority of the CRT recommendations here involved used professional monitors.

The thing is that I would rather play the PS1 using composite on a CRT that wasn't perfect than use any type of flat panel, simply because that's the technology that the games were designed for. I was certainly not thinking about how they would look upscaled to 4k on a widescreen display that's the wrong AR for >99% of games on the system when I played PS1 back then. So the notion of those products being expensive only comes up because they would be less to my liking than any 13" CRT anyway.

Over the years I've seen a lot of people bash the graphics on that system and just assumed that these are people who only know emulators, using a PS3 or whatever. I think people underestimate how good the system can look on a CRT, especially any RGB one, not even necessarily a PVM. The same goes for the other 5th gen systems.

[orange808]

Sure. We've touched on that a lot over the years. Certainly nothing wrong with using a nice consumer CRT. Depends on the person and situation.

[austin532]

Hello everyone, it's been awhile since I posted anything here. I don't hang around here as often as I used to. Good news though, the list has been updated with the latest submissions.

Also, I can't believe this list is over 10 years old now. It often gets linked whenever someone is talking about 480i PS1 games. I'm glad people appreciate it and are still contributing all these years later.