I hate it!! I wish emulators never had the damn feature. I think it makes a perfectly fine looking game look crappy. Yes it's a neat feature and does make 'some' graphics look better, but not all (prime example -- Score / Time / Rings in Sonic games). I don't know why people don't just play these ROMs with the look they were intended to have. Am I alone out there or does anyone else find 2xSAI, OpenGL, and other stuff like that slightly annoying when applied to classic games that weren't meant to use it? EDIT: Sorry for posting in the wrong forum. Thanks to whoever moved it!
As long as the option to play without filters is there, I'm fine. Forcing the player to put up with smeary crap is unacceptable, and Mega Drive games on XBLA suffer from this ridiculous design decision.
On that note, I don't understand what Microsoft classify as "HD" in their descriptions for arcade games, as Sonic 1/2 are at max double the MD's resolution w/filter, then stretched. Does being able to stretch an MD game over an entire 1080p screen = HD in MS's eyes? And yeah, I prefer being able to see individual pixels then ugly SAI or any other filters.
No, you're not alone. I hate that kind of filters, and I always disable all of them in all my emulators. In fact, I actually disable EVERY kind of smoothing, including the one in Acrobat Reader. Raw graphics are always the best.
Text is where I make an acception. I rather like the way Windows for instance can smoothen out fonts. And it can make a nicely constructed document look even better!
I always have games rendered with no filtering whatsoever. (Unless you count just making it larger by 2x or 3x) I also use the correct aspect ratios, even the retarded ones like 8:7 for the SNES.
For me, gens is set to render double, nothing else. All emulators that have a 2x option has it set. Otherwise, no filters.
Yeah, for example macs have this thing where if a image on a website has a set width or hight it stretches the image like any platform would but it blurs instead of seeing the pixels. The same happens with Pixel joint, I really hate it and would rather see the pixels than a smooth blur.
That's almost like what Microsoft did. They had the image shrink on as default in IE6 when it first came out if I remember correctly. Thankfully they decided it was best turned off, but I remember hating that thing because of how it distorted images. Plus, some images I WANT to be big like that.
To me it depends on what I want. For emulators I usually use HQ2x if it's avaliable. For the most part it produces tolerable results, but in some places it looks like shit. Maybe someone should try to find a compromise between the different algorithms? A smart algorithm that can recognise when it needs to smoothe edges or textures and can handle dithering properly would be great. Also, the reason I use filters is because I don't like pixellation. That and the fact that I like to play things in full screen (so nothing can distract me). I'm near sighted so I have trouble seeing small images (and my CRT monitor is slowly becoming crap), but seeing pixels up to 3 or 4 times their normal size isn't pretty, either. Hence the filters. The only time I want things to be pixellated is when I want to see how things were drawn or when I'm drawing something.
I use filters like that during fullscreen play as well... I'm not a big fan of giant pixels, either. I try to get as close to how the game would look on a regular TV screen, really. Unfortunately, my computer is a desktop, so I can't really use the magic of S-video whenever I want - it'd be too much hassle. I don't see why it would be necessary at all to use any type of filter (other than maybe anti-aliasing for 3D games) on a game that's already on a television screen. That's kind of like, duh.
I use HQ2x for anything that looks good. I've got a friend who plays ALL his emulated games with scanlines on, and it drives me fucking mental. He likes it though, but it means I can't play emulated games at his house without fucking around with the config before & after I play.
I use the filters if the games look good in them. And if my computer allows for it because using it does really slow down my computer sometimes.
I also dislike filters. I play in Gens with the "Double" rendering option. I once found an emulator based on Gens in which I couldn't find a way to disable filters; I didn't use it much :P. I <3 big pixels.
I only accept unfiltered multiples of original resolutions. I usually add 25% scanlines for TV look (I'm on RGB, and with my kick ass CRT TV, it looks like emulator in fullscreen with 25% scanlines) but that's all. Any smoothing, filtering, interpolation, blurring (or other ways they're called) look bad, and with my not so good PC, there's always a nice performance hit when something is enabled.
I only use filters if nessacary - the SNES annoys me so, so I use zsnes' 3x filter. On the MegaDrive I prefer the original pixels though.
I don't even like cleartype, so you can imagine where I stand on this. What's kinda funny is how some filters make pixilation, if not worse, at least more noticeable.
I don't like 2xSAI at all, and never use it. That said, I'm not opposed to the idea of filtering. A lot of Mega Drive games made extensive use of dither patterns, because when you're running on a TV, those pixels really do completely blend together. Just have a good look at the starting area of the first level of Aladdin and you'll see what I mean. When you look at patterns like that on a TV, you get a nice, soft colour. On a computer monitor, you get large dots. A lot of games simply don't look as good in an emulator without some kind of good filtering. Unfortunately, 2xSAI isn't good filtering. The RF mode in Kega does the best job I've seen.
RF with 25% scanlines? that's tasty. apart from that, NTSC filter with mednafen, I won't use any others. I can understanding filters to emulate a TV screen, but when they're filters to make everything rounded, it just completely misses the point of emulation. I like seeing things how they were designed to be seen; not seeing things mutilated
