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Old 26 June 2012, 01:48   #23
Mark Wright
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Hove, actually
Posts: 218
WARNING! DIATRIBE AHEAD BUT I WANTED TO WRITE THIS...

I think it's amazing that, after all these years, there remains those among us (like me) who rightly notice the inevitable tearing/jerking of anything designed to scroll horizontally at 50hz (like 99.9% of Amiga demos/games) running on a non-50hz display.

And the others (seemingly the majority) who absolutely don't. And who can't be convinced of the issue no matter how much it's pointed out. And (frustratingly) don't seem to care either way anyway.

Which, I suppose, explains the effortless and unstoppable rise of LCD/plasma TVs, all of which (in my experience) exhibit this issue.

Which, again, I suppose is why TV broadcasters (certainly BBC/ITV in this country) insist that production companies don't run programme credits horizontally at the end of shows, but vertically or page by page (the closest thing we get to demo techniques in the broadcast world ;-) just to mask how awful it looks.

When I first started using UAE (DOS) and later Fellow (this would be 1997) I was astonished by how capable the emulators were, but immediately noticed the juddery scrolling. And with all of the massive advances of WinUAE over the past 15 years, this fact hasn't changed under Matthias Ortmann, Brian King or Toni Wilen. Because it can't. Figuring this problem out effectively remains an impossible holy grail.

Perhaps those who don't notice the issue weren't gobsmacked at how impressively silky-smooth and awesome an Amiga demo looked on a CRT TV or CBM monitor back in 1988/1989. Programmers used to battle to make their games and demos run at 50 frames per second, endlessly chasing raster time, just so the end product looked alive and vibrant.

I still can't find a way to recapture that using an Amiga with an LCD or WinUAE through HDMI or SVGA... even though my TV is supposedly 100hz. It's the same for many videotaped UK TV shows (even live broadcasts) that just don't have the same characteristics that they used to.

At this point, can I say: IS THERE REALLY A MAGIC BOX COSTING £25 THAT WILL MAKE THIS HAPPEN!?

For those still reading...

In 1997, it wasn't yet possible to watch movies/TV shows on a PC (DVDs didn't yet exist and online streaming (which was still in its Real Player infancy) was expected to look terrible) so UAE was all I had to go on and just assumed it was an issue with the emulation. Then I realised MAME was the same. And Frodo, and in fact anything that sought to emulate something intended to originally run on PAL/NTSC 50/60hz.

In 2003 I bought a 100hz monitor thinking that as it's 50hz divisible, WinUAE would finally look great - but it didn't. And nor did it running on a 100hz LCD TV a couple of years later. It still doesn't. And believe me, I've tried things like Powerstrip and also ruined an ancient monitor that was supposed to scan down to 15khz, etc.

* * *

And now, as my admittedly increasingly bizarre and rambling post draws to a close, we reach its point...

PLEASE *DO NOT* GUARANTEE OR RECOMMEND SOMETHING THAT PURPORTS TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE based on your own experience - use the facts! I have been looking for a way to consistently achieve what is being claimed in this thread for so many years that (as you have seen) I am particularly passionate about this subject.

For those who essentially claim. "yeah, it looks just like an Amiga used to back in the days of CRT TVs and it's 100% perfect, etc." Just run an intro before game and examine the scrolling before you left-click. Or a demo that horizontally scrolls text (I can't think of any examples there - but there must be at least one!) and... and.. and..

<uses inhaler>

I probably should go to bed now.
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