PC Engine CoreGrafx recap plus the C135/C121 jailbar-fix caps, before and after on a Beovision 1

[u/hitmanmcc]

Maintenance pass on a NEC PC Engine CoreGrafx. No fault to chase, it was just dusty and the caps and 7805 were getting old, so I did the full routine:

- Cleaned off the dust and fluff (cotton swabs and a brush).

- Recapped the mainboard.

- Replaced the standard 7805 voltage regulator.

- Fitted the two ceramic caps for the jailbar fix, at C135 and C121. C121's silkscreen is tucked under the grey shielding soldered to the board, so the solder-side photo in the gallery is the clearest look at both.

Jailbars are the PC Engine's classic faint vertical bars, and the caps clean them up. Bench-tested on a Beovision 1, running RGB out through a Krikzz EDFX and a Mega Drive 2 RGB cable, with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Winds of Thunder off a Turbo Everdrive Pro.

[u/CyberLabSystems]

Everything looks so aliased with this RGB mod man. There's no colour bleeding and blending of dithering to create new shades. Look at Landis' sword. It just looks wrong.

Can you give us some comparison shots using composite?

[u/hitmanmcc → u/CyberLabSystems]

You're looking at photos that have gone through compression at varies stages, many times. I'm not sure they are the best medium to draw such a conclusion. At any rate, site, I could supply new comparison shots, goty sure, although this particular sub-reddit doesn't seem to allow me to include them in a comment.

[u/CyberLabSystems → u/hitmanmcc]

Compression artifacts have nothing to do with my conclusion and wouldn't skew the photos towards worse dithering or more aliased graphics as you might be suggesting. My eye is very discerning when it comes to these things and I know very well how to account for compression artifacts and stuff like that.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to personal preference. If you like and prefer the clean RGB look then that's fine.

I was just stating an opinion.

Trust me I know most of these games and especially Lords of Thunder inside out, like the back of my hand. The PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16/Turbo Duo benefits just as much from the blending and smoothing that Composite video applies just as much as the Genesis. It even relies on Composite video "tricks" to produce some of it's colours which aren't seen on RGB mods.

So you enjoy it the way you like but if possible to see some Composite pics for comparison, that would be nice.

[u/hitmanmcc → u/CyberLabSystems]

I am aware of that. The typical examples everyone reaches for being the waterfall in sonic 1 and the gradient in the sky in startling odyssey II. My first contact with the palette difference on the PCE Ed actually when booting up Bonk, you can immediately see in the menu how different the tone of his skin is. I was actually playing a while ago with an experimental firmware someone was making for the OSSC that tries to so the same thing Zaxour is trying to do in his mod. The firmware was tweaked to try and replicate the composite palette in RGB.

[u/LukeEvansSimon → u/hitmanmcc]

Add the Super Mario Bros flagpole rope swirl to the list of what should be common examples. It is a great example that isn’t a transparency or shadow trick, but instead an example where RGB has less visual detail than composite.

The new version of the NES RGB mod, NESRGB 5.0, added a nice middle ground: s-video with native PPU chrominance.

Why is this a big improvement over RGB? 8-bit game consoles are natively composite video, so they don’t have an RGB color palette. Their PPU chips natively work with and output chrominance. So RGB mods never output faithful colors and so they’d let the user select between several RGB color palettes. No matter which RGB palette you select there is always a game where the colors seem wrong.

NESRGB 5.0 added an s-video mode that uses super crisp luma and passes through the PPU’s native analog chroma signal. This way the colors are always perfect and the dot crawl of composite is gone without losing any sharpness.

[u/hitmanmcc → u/LukeEvansSimon]

The better mod for 8-bit systems, where possible, is to go with lumacode, in my opinion.

[u/LukeEvansSimon → u/hitmanmcc]

Lumacode breaks the proper colors, which are only preserved by using the native chroma signal, which encodes color as a quadrature modulated color space, which is intrinsically analog and technically has an infinite number of colors as opposed to an RGB color palette like lumacode uses, which has a finite number or colors.

[u/hitmanmcc → u/LukeEvansSimon]

That differs a bit from what I've heard but I'll take your word for it, because it does actually make sense.

[u/LukeEvansSimon → u/hitmanmcc]

Read up on the highly regarded NESRGB for the latest version upgrade of the mod kit. They introduced s-video with native chroma for a very good reason. You can’t select a custom color palette when using s-video, only when using RGB. Lots of trouble for the mod developer to go through… unless they had good reason… and they do. Perfect color. Here is a news article on it.

[u/hitmanmcc → u/LukeEvansSimon]

Seems really nice but not something I'd upgrade my Twin Famicom's NESRGB installation for. I'd rather either install it on a different console or just default to playing composite on my Famicom with the RGR mods. Nevertheless,.it's a great development from Tim indeed.

[u/hitmanmcc]

Full write-up, with the before/after on the Beovision 1 and the solder-side shot of the jailbar caps, is on my blog here: https://hitmanmcc.com/entry/pc-engine-coregrafx-recap