This little detail pretty much turns me off of the whole concept right there. The FPGA emulating the functionality of a more or less complex chip lends itself to one of the same problems that turns me off of emulation. That is to say the ever present possibility of a game or a certain section of a game not looking right.leonk wrote: He's probably using a much faster FPGA to emulate the NES PPU, but output digital video (as the NES PPU can only output analog composite video)
In any case. My biggest concern with this novel idea is the video quality. Yes, it will be HDMI, but at the end of the day, he's emulating the PPU. His mapper emulator isn't 100% accurate (there's many games, some common, that don't play perfectly on it).
I know his solution can be updated to fix any incompatibilities discovered but that really just defeats the purpose of playing on hardware in my opinion. Playing using actual hardware and cartridges should be plug and play with no worries of glitches and inaccuracies.
I guess with the NES you just cannot win. The PPU swap trick gives you colour inaccuracies, and the HDMI solution is bound to cause emulation inaccuracies, and regular composite just looks horrendous for the most part.
Is there any known mod to improve the video output quality of a Toaster NES? Can one do anything at all? I have a PAL NES, I need to hook that up and see how it compares to my NTSC NES in terms of image quality.
I am guessing the PAL unit should put out a cleaner video signal since it at least does not do that trick shifting that NTSC systems do to avoid dot crawl. Someone explained the exact nature of NTSC shifting a while back in another thread.
