One of the most important things those cables do is bypass the N64s built in blur filter. This was basically a unique thing to the N64 in that generation and it really is just a blurring of the video output, like you've smeared vaseline on your screen.
Maybe it made sense on the already kinda distorted consumer TVs of the day as a kind of primitive anti aliasing, I think it's horrible though.
This is interesting! It sounds from the video like the cable isn't bypassing the filter, but instead applying a deconvolution filter to the final image to reverse the blur.
Deconvolution is super cool. You can use some deconvolution algorithms in Gimp using the G'MIC plugin. There are a few different ones in the Details section under Sharpening, for example Richardson-Lucy [1] or Gold-Meinel. You can play with blurring an image and then using the deconvolution to remove the blur - it's surprising how much of a Gaussian blur can be removed. I've used it in the past to remove blur from some deliberately blurred 'preview' images. Try the different algorithms as some produce much better results than others, but I forget which.
The N64 really is blur central, because of this post-processing you point out but also because of the severe texture limitations (and primitive kinda-bilinear-but-not-really filtering they used) meant that you had small resolution textures stretched onto massive polygons. The fact that cartridge ROM space was also expensive didn't help since few cartridges went above 32MB (I think the biggest official N64 ROMs use 64MB cartridges, but those were pretty rare). Meanwhile a CD could hold one order of magnitude more data at no additional cost.
As a result I subjectively find that despite having significantly weaker hardware, no perspective correction and no subpixel-precision PSX games often end up looking a lot more impressive. And that's got a lot to do with the incredible texture work these games use: https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-stor...
> As a result I subjectively find that despite having significantly weaker hardware, no perspective correction and no subpixel-precision PSX games often end up looking a lot more impressive. And that's got a lot to do with the incredible texture work these games use:https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/243918-vagrant-stor...
OTOH, Vagrant Story came very late in the PS1's life (the PS2 came out like a month later), that's from an in-engine cinematic scene, the texture swimming issues aren't really noticeable in a screenshot, and it's hard to say for sure, but that may be a screenshot from an emulator.
Still pushing the hardware to the max, but games in a similar part of the n64's lifecycle (especially the ones requiring the expansion pak, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark) also look pretty remarkable for the time.
The additional cost was an enormous step up in seek time and read time, which for some games manifested as load times everywhere, and for others meant a herculean effort in managing asset streaming, per the fascinating Andy Gavin talk that Ars published a few months ago:
That's fair, but as long as you packed your assets correctly it was bearable for the time IMO. So much available storage meant that you could duplicate textures instead of seeking all over the disc for instance.
Also streaming assets was rather uncommon at the time, Naughty Dog is really pushing the envelope here. It was especially uncommon because most games streamed the background music in real time straight from the CD, so if you wanted to side-load assets on demand you had to be very clever about it lest the audio got interrupted.
As a result you generally had long loading times at the start of levels but that's about it. Some games were really bad about it though, and had long loading times all over the place (some even when you do something as trivial as opening a menu) but that could generally be attributed to shoddy programming, not a weakness of the console per-se. Overall I think in hindsight the decision to use a disc drive was the right one and cartridges ended up being a rather severe liability for Nintendo at that time, although of course it's far from the only factor at play when comparing the successes of both consoles.
I never owned a PSX, but my impression is that a lot of games did that thing where the actual game content was a few dozen MB at most, and the rest of the disc was either empty or used for background music, FMVs, etc.
The RDP's texture memory (that the RSP had to dma a texture in to before it could be drawn) was 4kb. Yup, with a k.
There were a few texture formats you could use. 16bit RGB was the lazy choice but you could squeeze more resolution if you used 4 or 8 bit greyscale (single channel) and put colors in the vertices.
You could also use palletized textures, with either 8 or 4 bit lookups (eg 256 or 16 unique colors per texture). Unfortunately that split the texture memory in half - the palette was 2kb and lookup was 2kb. If you were doing things right you spent a lot of time tweaking palettes by hand and writing code to best chose palette colors.
Tldr; 48x48 16bit RGBA, 48x48 palletized 256 color RGBA, 64x64 palletized 16 color RGBA, 96x96 4 bit intensity.
OMG, no. That's simply atrocious. It makes your beautiful N64 games look like PS1 ones!
My guess in this debate always has been that those ugly sharp pixels must be an aquired taste of those on the side of the console war of the time who had to rationalize their preference for the look of games on their less capable platform of choice. ;)
I'm a fan of the result achieved with just the HDMI cable in that video - the first pass of processing that's removed by the gameshark hides the dithering, so removing this seems to make things look worse in a lot of cases (and as you point out makes it feel less like an n64 and more like a PS1 - just add some polygon jitter and you'd be all the way there). But the second layer of processing that the HDMI cable removes just adds more blur for no reason.
Edit: actually watched the whole video and realized the HDMI cable is actually doing post hoc image processing to reverse the blur, which is why the dithering is still wiped out but the blur is gone, which is pretty neat.
I'm not 100% sure but I think the final output blur was there to just map the output buffer resolution to the hardware output. If you ran the N64 in 640x480 resolution (with AA enabled) it looked gorgeous. Unfortunately the RDP wasn't fast enough to update more than around 1/3 of the screen before you saw tearing on that mode - so it was really only practical on mostly static screens.
The standard output mode was 320x240 but developers realized you could reduce the buffer sizes and play with the screen borders to try to render less pixels per frame. Dropping resolution was a quick way to get frame rate up, and when your target TV was a NTSC CRT it didn't seem so bad.
The Antialiasing (which the game shark can disable) was what stopped the nasty pixel crawl and jaggies that Playstation games of that era suffered from. It was cutting-edge for the time - it used the 'extra' bit in the 9bit RAMBUS ram (that would have been for ECC in serious applications) to store coverage bits and blend edge pixels while maintaining crispness on interior edges.
I ordered a refurbished one from a specialist shop in my country for christmas, they go for €80 here including adapter, AV cables and SCART converter, delivered neat, clean, well packaged, and working just fine. I see similar prices on ebay. According to Wikipedia, a total of about 33 million have been sold worldwide - still ranking "only" #17 in the list of most sold consoles, but still a respectable amount. That said, if you're interested in getting an N64 at some point but don't yet want to play it or whatever, get a good refurbished one now, they will only go up in price.
I guess it depends on your definition of expensive. A brief look at eBay shows plain ol' gray N64s selling for around $50-75 several times a day, usually including cables and a controller. Some games are a bit pricier, but there are good flash carts available.
The RAD2X being a easy way to get started https://www.retrogamingcables.co.uk/RAD2X-CABLES In combination with refurbishing the original controllers with some new plastic https://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/n64-joystick-gears you and maybe a everdrive you can enjoy the original experience without too much work.
Still.. It can't increase the original resolution like this, this is just gorgeous... And so sharp