Amiga and gameplay graphics resolution.

[AshtonPete]

Ok, When I owned an Amiga 1200 about 23 years ago I upgraded with an accelerator and 120 meg hard drive, I thought I was a god with 120 meg. However I never did own a proper Amiga Monitor and had to make do with a tv of that era using a scart....As time passed I had to throw in the towel and go PC. Then along came WinUAE, after dabbling with the early versions I gave up; and that ended up on the back burner, the reason was that although technology had moved on in Monitor display I could never achieve any appreciable graphics quality apart from a miserable 4 or 5 inch square on my Apple Cinema 30" monitor which was painful after trying every permutation known to man and monitor. So I recently bought another 1200 off eBay to give nostalgia another crack of the whip, so I then got a 4gig CF and an awesome high end Blizzard accelerator which I set up on a LG Flatron via an Amiga Scart.
Now I watched Dan Wood fit one of those Indivision AGA boards on utube with a DVI connector, BUT I am told that won't enhance my graphics no better than what a Phillips 1080 would back in its day and only sharpens your icons and allows Super Hi res laced. Others have told me I will never improve graphics gameplay sharpness on a modern monitor because of display characteristics like pixel pitch....Am I doomed? is buying a retro monitor my only answer? Ideally I just want to play games with a large screen eg 22 inch which is playable, not blurred with legs and bodies like elevator steps. I cannot see the point in an Indivision at 125 quid if gameplay isn't enhanced.
I hope this all that made sense.....

[ajk]

It doesn't entirely make sense to me, but I will try to answer. Almost all Amiga games use a resolution of 320x256 pixels or thereabouts. If you view this on a big screen, it means the pixels will be big also.

When you talk about sharpness, what do you mean? In a technical sense the image is sharp when the (large) pixels have sharp edges. But overall the amount of detail in the image remains the same - the graphics won't magically receive more fidelity from being displayed on a larger screen, how could they?

I have recorded a video of my A4000 where I run some games and I have directly recorded the video output. Here: [ Show youtube player ]. If you select the 1080p mode in the YouTube settings (little gear icon and quality option), that's basically what the output of the Amiga will look like through an Indivision on the same screen (in reality a bit sharper, since YouTube encoding softens the image).

In the beginning of the video I am running Workbench in a higher resolution thanks to a graphics card (not Indivision), so the amount of detail is higher. But none of the old games support graphics cards, so they will remain 320x256 no matter what hardware you have. Using the SCART cable is already more or less as good as it will get (for games).

[Hewitson]

I'm unsure why you're unhappy with the picture you're getting, I have my 2000 hooked up to a 51cm Flatron and the picture is absolutely flawless. Certainly better (and bigger) than any Commodore monitor could produce.

An Indivision and modern monitor would actually give you a much worse picture for gaming, it will look like crap without the scanlines.

[demolition]

Well, the Indivisions does support artificial scanlines which helps quite a bit, although it is still not exactly the same as using a real CRT.

[AshtonPete]

Well I have just loaded Turrican 2 to see the difference between mine and AJK's and its damned awful... What I did notice was in AJKs screen mode was something called CvisionCCP or something like that set to 1024 x 768....What is that? It does not in my Screen Mode Prefs!....

[demolition]

Cybervision - is an addon gfx card for the Amiga, so just ignore that.

[ajk]

Yes, even if you did get a graphics card it would not change how the games work/look, it would only provide more options for Workbench and other "serious" software.

[AshtonPete]

I am by no means of the understanding of all this hertz stuff, but I have tried making my own 23 pin to VGA and it just said on screen that THIS FORMAT is not supported. So that never worked...TBH I think I am flogging a dead horse trying to improve gameplay. I'd be happy if I could just get gameplay on a modern monitor at full screen to be as promising as an old Amiga monitor. I have been so aggravated that I have felt like throwing in the towel and flogging what I have and stick with WINUAE. It annoys me that in 2013 compromises in monitor mechanics/physics or whatever it is; has not been given consideration with all the technology available today. Sad! to say the least.

[demolition]

You posted a video and then removed it again?

It looks to me like your TV has the sharpness setting up too high, which will cause all vertical contrasts to be extra visible. The most correct setting on any TV is usually as low as it can go, so try that. Generally disable all video processing as well or set the TV into gaming mode if it has one, which should help with smoothness and latency.

[orange]

perhaps OLEDs or Laser TV will have better quality.
so far, C=1084 and similar have best colours, I think.

[john1979]

I spent some time searching for 20-24" Sony Trinitron CRTs on ebay until I found one close enough to pick up. They go for a couple of quid and make excellent monitors via Scart RGB. The picture is fantastic.

Most support NTSC/PAL modes and have S-Video input for a C64 too.