What NES & Famicom Games Made Use of Composite Video?

[wingzrow]

So i've been playing NES games on my Wii through hombrew recently, and one thing dawned on me. I shouldn't be playing in S-Video because some games made use of composite video signal to blend the picture in a way that made the image better. Mostly late releases like Little Samson but some earlier games did this too.

So what NES games made the best use of this? Games off the top of my head are Ninja gaiden ii and iii, and battletoads.

[Zing]

You suggest developers intentionally designed certain aspects of their game around rainbow and dot crawl artifacts? I suspect not. I'd love to see some examples.

Sure, there may be dithering in games that benefit from the blurriness of composite, but dithering would be used regardless of the video output quality.

*edit* I looked for some examples and only came across Little Sampson. The game extensively uses dithering. The dithering would blend more smoothly with composite on a CRT, but the developers would use this dithering even if the game were to be output in RGB. It's just what they had to do when working with very limited colour palettes on the NES.

I internally debated s-video versus composite for my Super NES, as I knew certain games could lose "worse". Star Fox is one example that is repeatedly mentioned, as many polygons in the game have dithered shading. After actually experiencing s-video output on my system, I am pleased to say that the sharper dithering is not a problem. I am now able to see the game as intended.

You do want to turn down your sharpness setting on your TV if you use s-video. Sharpness was a feature designed to enhance blurry edges of composite video. It is unnecessary with s-video and the ideal setting is usually "minimum", although it will take a little time to get used to the softer, but proper, image.

[FABombjoy]

You suggest developers intentionally designed certain aspects of their game around rainbow and dot crawl artifacts?

I believe he might be talking about composite NTSC artifacting, or the purposeful exploitation of composite NTSC color artifacts to generate colors outside of a system's standard color palette.

I know that games like Tower Toppler on the 7800 use this, but I wasn't aware of NES games that use it too.

If the Wii NES emulator is decent enough it should also emulate this effect.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

So i've been playing NES games on my Wii through hombrew recently, and one thing dawned on me. I shouldn't be playing in S-Video because some games made use of composite video signal to blend the picture in a way that made the image better. Mostly late releases like Little Samson but some earlier games did this too.

So what NES games made the best use of this? Games off the top of my head are Ninja gaiden ii and iii, and battletoads.

Maybe it's just poorly worded, but that makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about. The NES PPU was designed to output RF and could be amplified to output composite video as well. It is incapable of producing video signals beyond that. S-video component HDMI etc weren't available to developers. The NES can't produce RGB either, that's something only VS Cabinets and the PlayChoice10 can do. Therefore the answer to your question "what NES/Famicom games made use of composite video?"

ALL OF THEM. Every single NES and Famicom game ever made was made with composite video in mind because that was the only video output the NES or Famicom could do outside of RF, which is inferior.

But still, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're question is just extremely poorly worded and instead you mean something else. Please restate your question.

[theclaw]

He wasn't talking about hardware. He meant games which tried to intentionally use composite's distinct qualities as a creative element.

That is, games that may have had artistic differences were the graphics RGB based.

[TonyTheTiger]

You suggest developers intentionally designed certain aspects of their game around rainbow and dot crawl artifacts? I suspect not. I'd love to see some examples.

Nothing on the NES that I can think of but it was somewhat common on the Genesis. Check out the Genesis section here: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/screenshots.html.
Unfortunately they're terrible screenshots but they get the point across.

It's interesting because in the Sonic screenshot you get the rainbow banding in the waterfall through composite and this author calls it "horrible" but there's certainly some fridge brilliance going on here since real water actually does that. So the banding here may very well have been intentional. This website, despite being pro-RGB, inadvertently makes a reasonable argument for playing some games in composite for certain purists.

So, yeah, it's not unheard of but I haven't seen many examples of it outside of the Genesis. Although the shadow in that one Saturn game looks like it was meant to blur.

For the record, this actually isn't limited to video games, either. It has a long history in film and television. The animators of Sleeping Beauty intentionally oversaturated the cels because they knew there'd be some dulling when captured on film and presented to the audience. It caused a slight outcry when Disney released the movie on Blu-ray and went "back to the cels" without taking this into account. And unless Hollywoodland was lying to me, George Reeves wore an off-color Superman costume when they filmed in black and white because they knew the real colors wouldn't look right on TV.

[wingzrow]

Sorry if what I was talking about was poorly worded. Scroll over the NES game pictures made by sunsoft on this page for an idea of what i'm talking about.

http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/rgb_compare.html

"Sunsoft's artists really knew what they were doing on the Famicom. They blended their colours and used dithering methods that suited NTSC composite perfectly, creating lifelike, earthy tones that just might look better than RGB..."

[theclaw]

Yup you have to consider NES graphics are stored in their original form in ROM, then scaled down by the PPU. Without composite you're seeing NES games how (at times brilliant) creators drew and envisioned them. With it you're seeing them how home users were expected to. Who's to say who's right from the moral viewpoint?

[BlastProcessing402]

I wasn't aware that any NES games did that sort of thing. I know some Genesis games did, though, often to fake transparencies and such. Really quite clever on the part of the devs.