Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Jedit: Dec 10, 2011; Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Collateral Damage posted:

Is there any truth to the claim that it was the porn industry that tipped the scales in VHS' favor over Betamax, or is it just urban legend?

The same claim was going around about Blu-ray versus HD-DVD.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 09:20

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# ? May 27, 2024 22:31

Collateral Damage: Jun 13, 2009

moller posted:

I assume it was that the early beta movies were on two tapes (60 minutes per?) and VHS were on a single tape, although that might also be folklore.

In Europe we also had Video 2000, which was a much more technically advanced format than either Betamax or VHS. Like a lot of intra-euro projects it turned into a bit of a cockup (*cough*Eurofighter*cough*) though, because Philips and Grundig managed to make their first generation machines incompatible with each other by putting the audio head in slightly different locations, so a movie recorded on one machine would play the audio out of sync on the other.

The format also never had much support from the movie companies and hit the market too late.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 10:09

moller: Jan 10, 2007; Swan stole my music and framed me!

Jedit posted:

The same claim was going around about Blu-ray versus HD-DVD.

This one I feel like the ps3 "won" as a Trojan horse. Although I also feel that by the time Joe average thought about upgrading from DVD streaming had basically overtaken optical discs. I don't think I've ever seen a standalone Blu-ray player in use, but I've seen people buy Blu-ray for their PlayStations.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 10:24

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

JediTalentAgent posted:

Sort of like how people comment on retro gaming looking better on some CRTs than newer HDTV, is/was VHS a format that similarly was primed to take advantage of certain features of a normal tube TV of the time that more modern TVs would not? As the guy said, when it was hooked up to an old CRT TV, the picture looked 'good'.

By virtue of CRT TVs being ubiquitous and dominant for decades, old game consoles and VHS were designed to work around or even exploit their quirks and limitations. So yes, in that sense you could say that retro games look "better" on a CRT than on an LCD or Plasma, though I would prefer the term "period correct".

Certain games exploited both NTSC/PAL and the nature of the CRT itself, to achieve transparency effects on hardware that was incapable of handling an alpha channel, and other similar effects. You could even use the inherent color handling of NTSC to generate significantly more colors on screen than the console was actually capable of outputting. A lot of really neat tricks were/are possible, demo codes in particular have been really adept at discovering and using them.

This is a really fantastic explanation of one of the most impressive demos ever: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

All that you see in the video and the pictures was done on a 4.77MHz IBM PC-XT, with a CGA graphics adapter. You know, graphics that could only do 4 simultanous colors, and usually looked like this:

That's why a lot of us retro-nerd gamers like to either use CRT/scanline emulation screen filters, or play on actual CRTs. Not because it's "better", but because the games were designed with that monitor technology in mind. On an LCD with no filters apart from straight pixel upscaling, old games look extremely pixelated and low-res, because that's what they are. But the graphics weren't meant to be seen as sharp square pixels, they were meant to be slightly fuzzy.

(This all basically ended when 3D games became dominant. Unlike fixed-resolution 2D "pixel art" games, 3D games scale well with resolution and display technology.)

By virtue of the way it works, a CRT imparts a bit of softness to the image, a basic form of antialiasing and dithering/filtering. This helps older pixelated graphics look a lot better than they really are.

Here's an example that's maybe a bit extreme:

And some games just don't look right at all if the monitor is too modern or too sharp. On the left is a Sonic game, as it would look in an emulator on your PC. On the right, a basic CRT simulation is applied, which simply blurs the image a bit horizontally. The difference is quite noticeable, and much closer to how the game looks on a CRT.

Getting back to VHS, I wouldn't say they look "good" on a CRT, but they certainly look "less poo poo". VHS was designed to be "good enough" on a common CRT TV. Once we got better monitor technology, we started to see all the warts that were hidden by the limitations of CRTs.

And VHS is severely limited by its nature. If you've ever compared hooking up a game console with RF versus Composite versus S-Video versus RGB (Component/SCART), there's a bit difference in sharpness and color. VHS is Composite video by nature, that's how the signal is encoded onto tape. You can never get better quality than that out of VHS, no matter what you do. And a lot of people even hooked up their VCRs using RF, which just made everything even worse.

DVD was a gigantic step up in both video and sound quality, even if you were stuck with a Composite connection. And if you had S-Video or RGB, the difference from VHS was mind-blowing, much larger than the difference from DVD to Bluray/HD-DVD.

E: Here are some more good examples of what a CRT (or CRT simulation) can do:

KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 12:44 on Oct 17, 2016

# ? Oct 17, 2016 10:37

Improbable Lobster: Jan 6, 2012; "From each according to his ability" said Ares. It sounded like a quotation.; Buglord

Collateral Damage posted:

Is there any truth to the claim that it was the porn industry that tipped the scales in VHS' favor over Betamax, or is it just urban legend?

Not really. IIRC there was actually plenty of betamax porn. The sheer number of porn companies ensures that at least a few of them are going to be on every format, including the winning one.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 12:27

The End: Apr 16, 2007; You're welcome.

KozmoNaut posted:

By virtue of CRT TVs being ubiquitous and dominant for decades, old game consoles and VHS were designed to work around or even exploit their quirks and limitations. So yes, in that sense you could say that retro games look "better" on a CRT than on an LCD or Plasma, though I would prefer the term "period correct"....

Tonnes of awesome CRT stuff

Hey, that post was awesome and now I'm totally fascinated by the clever graphic tricks to squeeze more out of crts. I've seen 8-bit guy's look at CGA - is there any other great sites or videos to learn more?

# ? Oct 17, 2016 12:58

Redrum and Coke: Feb 25, 2006; wAstIng 10 bUcks ON an aVaTar iS StUpid

Slanderer posted:

VHS was actually incredibly good, which is why the format was wildly successful for many years. To claim otherwise is pretty loving stupid lol

I think it depends on what the measure is and what alternatives existed. It was great for filmmaking and for movie studios, since it expanded the availability of films.

Were there better quality alternatives that offered similar performance benefits?

# ? Oct 17, 2016 13:04

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

Laserdisc was always "better", at least at playing back media. Tapes had the advantage of not being a read-only medium.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 13:27

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

The End posted:

Hey, that post was awesome and now I'm totally fascinated by the clever graphic tricks to squeeze more out of crts. I've seen 8-bit guy's look at CGA - is there any other great sites or videos to learn more?

Thanks

It all depends on how deep you want to go into the whole thing. Analog video is a really arcane subject, lots of math, lots of electronics knowledge, and a whole lot of experimentation: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/1184

Wikipedia has a short overlook on why it's even possible to extract more colors from a limited palette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

The link about the 8088 MPH demo has some interesting tidbits, but it is a bit high-level. Here's an updated look at the demo, with a bit more detail: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/8088-mph-the-final-version/

And even more information on 8088 MPH: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/8088-mph-how-it-came-about/

This post goes deep into the color modes and the extremely dirty tricks used to reach 1024 colors on CGA: http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated.html

There's tons of cool stuff on the 8088 MPH blog, including patches to make the Commander Keen games run with 16 colors on CGA adapters: http://8088mph.blogspot.com/

I've been mostly focused on the 8088 MPH demo, because it's just so gosh darn interesting, but there is a ton of information out there on tricks used by console games, either to 'cheat' on the graphics, or to do stuff that really shouldn't be possible on the available hardware. The C64 hacks are particularly amazing. This is one of my favorite videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe1-VVXIEh4

The C64 is so thoroughly understood that emulators such as VICE are 1:1 faithful reproductions of the original hardware, implemented in software that can run on a modern PC. Every memory trick, every scanline 'just-in-time' action to squeeze more sprites on screen at once, it's all there.

Here is 8-Bit Guy's take on the subject of old-school graphics hacks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsycfDliZU

There is a ton of very interesting stuff out there, for all kinds of old-school systems. If it was hooked up to a CRT of some kind, you can be sure someone, somewhere hacked around the limitations to get better graphics. After all, if you could make your game do stuff that everyone thought was impossible, that was the best publicity you could get. Stuff like adaptive tile refresh, which basically made arcade/console style smooth scrolling games possible on PC video hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

A system like the Amiga didn't have similar problems with smooth scrolling graphics, because it had dedicated hardware to handle that type of operation. But the PC didn't, so a clever hack was needed. And John Carmack is probably one of the cleverest and most brilliant hackers out there, not just for pretty demos, but for actual games with fast, pretty graphics and good gameplay.

KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 13:34 on Oct 17, 2016

# ? Oct 17, 2016 13:27

Redrum and Coke: Feb 25, 2006; wAstIng 10 bUcks ON an aVaTar iS StUpid

SwissCM posted:

Laserdisc was always "better", at least at playing back media. Tapes had the advantage of not being a read-only medium.

They did have issues with running time though, since you could only get about 60 uninterrupted minutes of play before having to turn the disk around, whereas you could get 2 hours from a vhs. I always hated flipping a double sided DVD, I can imagine laser was similar.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 15:02

Grassy Knowles: Apr 4, 2003; "The original Terminator was a gritty fucking AMAZING piece of sci-fi. Gritty fucking rock-hard MURDER!"

Improbable Lobster posted:

Not really. IIRC there was actually plenty of betamax porn. The sheer number of porn companies ensures that at least a few of them are going to be on every format, including the winning one.

There was betamax porn but there weren't that many porn companies before home video got big, for obvious reasons.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 15:02

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

Grassy Knowles posted:

There was betamax porn but there weren't that many porn companies before home video got big, for obvious reasons.

If anything the old myth has it backwards. VHS helped the porn industry immensely by creating a new untapped market that was actually fairly easy for an established company to get into. Now the reverse is happening with internet streaming and camera technology, by lowering the barrier for entry too far it's over saturated the market, killing off profits and forcing companies and performers to adapt or get jobs not centered around people jacking it.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 15:14

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

Non Serviam posted:

They did have issues with running time though, since you could only get about 60 uninterrupted minutes of play before having to turn the disk around, whereas you could get 2 hours from a vhs. I always hated flipping a double sided DVD, I can imagine laser was similar.

One of the many reasons why it only saw niche use. A shame, at it's best it could surpass early DVD encodes.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 15:17

hackbunny: Jul 22, 2007; I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av