Maybe the MAME emulation isn't as solid as that for the Megadrive (I know there's odd complaints that the Mega Play version jitters a bit more than the original). The same blurrier sprites seem to be evident on all screen formats too. I have to say it's a shame Time Attack is so limited, because trying to climb up the leaderboards is extremely addictive. I've managed to get up to rank 30. By the way did anyone notice the occasional Flicky art in the game intro? A hint to what may be in the works later?
I spent a week with Sonic 1 while away from home and I have to say while the base game is nothing new and the time attack sucks because it's just one act... the mega play score attack has me hooked! it's really fun, I spent 3 nights straight working out a good route for score to reach first and I can still see ways to get another 100k score if I get the perfect run. So so so much fun, also nice that mega play removes marble and labrynth as much as I like those areas, removing them feels right, perfect game lengh of about 20 minutes without them.
I know what you meant and can see the difference. I don't know what's causing it however unless it's just a bad conversion process.
It looks to me like what happens when you stretch a low resolution image horizontally. I'm expecting the Sonic 2 Special Stages to look like this too...
M2 are correct - they're converting a 256x224 image to 320x224. I get a similar result when I do this in Paint.NET: -> Unless you were to invent some crazy deep learning algorithm to work out where the new pixels should be, this is probably the best way to emulate the stretching process. MAME doesn't really cope too well with games that change their screen resolution during play (at least, with the default settings). Rather than stretching, it will render vertical borders (which is both right and wrong).
Here's the thing: they are stretching 256x224 to 320x224, THEN scaling up to fit in the box on the larger 720p screen. This two-step process is not really ideal if you want the appearance of nearest-neighbor scaling. One can achieve much cleaner results using other methods, such as by nearest-neighbor scaling to a high integer multiple and then scaling down bilinear at whatever factor is needed to achieve the desired size. This technique is similar to supersampling and is what's used in the "sharp bilinear" shaders available for some emulators. You get some soft lines between original pixels, but nothing nearly so bad as what's been achieved here in the AGES shot. Even something simpler, like upscaling both dimensions to the desired vertical resolution and then an added bilinear stretch horizontally to fix the aspect ratio, would still produce better results than what we've seen here. They are doing their scaling in the wrong order, plain and simple.
M2 have still got it right. Or at least more "right" from my perspective than what you might perceive as "right"... but still wrong. If you force a Mega Drive to run on a 1080p screen, the horizontal stretching will occur before the TV attempts to upscale. So it is emulating what a real Mega Drive would do. However, it's the age old saying - these games were designed with old CRTs and composite connections - when you start having super crisp pixels you lose all the semi-transparency and colour trickery - the trees in Emerald Hill Zone won't be see-through anymore. So what you really want is a Kega Fusion-style composite filter.
We may have some graphical problems if they release some proper arcade titles then (we've at least got to the point the Megadrive emulation is solid now).
Well, I mean... there weren't square pixels on CRTs back in the day. You could have 256 pixels on a scanline, or 320, and, true, none of them would be crisp, but it wouldn't be like 256 stretched to 320. It would be native 256 with wider pixels. As such, having these in-between colors so big... that's not really authentic at all.
Covarr is right, first you rescale the whole thing and then you stretch it so that you won't see those thick inbetween pixels that aren't supposed to be there. That's what MAME does when converting every resolution out there to 4:3. M2 is doing it backwards.
I doubt this will stand as #1 for long but I clipped my high score mega play run, it's addictive. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/316416979
First time hearing about Mega Play, definitely have to try that out someday. But blurry pixels are giving me headache, why can't they just zoom in on the games and the rest stays unchanged?
At least it's only affecting the Mega Play splash font, not the whole Mega Play ROM. It's an annoying touch, but after the title screen it's ignorable.
With sonic at least you can use 'dot by dot' which is the game scaled up perfectly, then you can select a black frame and it's about as good as it can get without filters. I personally like the teal looking background, it's a nice colour and much nicer then the default frame.
One thing I'm curious about is what method are they using to patch in the spin dash? These are emulations, right? So inside the game files, does there exist an official patched rom? Or is it being patched in on the fly? I'm curious how these are working. One thing I'll say is these Sonic emulations have merit in conjunction with the taxman ports. I feel like those are almost more like enhanced remakes, with extra content though aren't always 100% accurate to the original in favor of a more modern experience. The SegaAges stuff tends to be more preservationist and accurate to the original experience (well, so long as the emulation is decent.) I feel like they both have their places. In the end, I'd love to have both ports, but that's just me. I do wish the SegaAges stuff did have more scaling options though, like 5x scale.
My only major qualms with SEGA AGES right now is: 1. While their emulation right now is pretty accurate (at least for actual Megadrive stuff) some of their modifications feel a bit half baked. In Sonic 1 especially, the spin/drop dash have clear bugs that our site's own guide to coding the Spin Dash check lists through, and Time Attack is only for ONE STINKING LEVEL. Compare this to the Taxman remakes that put nearly EVERY possible extra and bit of polish possible into them and even some of our community's own amateur projects do with ROMs. 2. Emulations obviously can't do widescreen unless the original ROM allowed it. Of course both these complaints are only compared to what other modified versions of the game do, and compared to the usual 'as is' ROM releases (usually with some less than perfect emulation) this is still a very nice package.
When I first tried to spindash and found that it had issues the first thing I thought of was along the lines of "why is this not as good as the stuff I've seen on sonic retro" M2 step your game up!
