Playstation 2

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This subreddit is dedicated to the best selling video game console in history, Sony's Playstation 2 We are all about the games, discussions, news, questions or suggestions related to the PS2. Tell us what you love(d) about it, what game you hated, when you first got your system, or if you're completely new to it! Remember, "Live in your world, play in ours!"

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Why is the quality so bad? How can I improve it? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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All PS2 games look really blurry on Panasonic Viera TV.

For comparison, when I play the Jak trilogy on PS5 (which is just the PS2 ports), it has a sharp and crisp image. But the same games on an actual PS2 are much lower quality. This leads me to think there's some scaling issue that the PS5 automatically fixes since I don't think they remastered it or anything. And the same applies to every PS2 game.

It's currently connected via RCA component cables, and I tried messing with the game mode settings on the TV but it didn't really do anything noticeable. I'm wondering if I should buy a PS2 to HDMI converter or if that might be even worse than the current set up. I don't have much money I can spend but if I need to I will, just whatever it takes to get it looking good. It looks like sh*

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Not sure about your setup but just thought you should remember that the PS2 was primarily designed to be used with CRT TVs and they were blurry as hell. Game designers of that era expected it and even designed their in-game-assets around that e.g. jagged edges in low poly art got blurred into smooth curves.

PC emulators are even adding CRT filters to make games look more true to the intended vision.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Just want to add on clarification that this doesn't mean "they look bad because everything looked bad back then", but rather, they were designed to look good^1 on CRT displays because the graphics people were used to working with CRT artifacts, so when different display technologies arrived that didn't behave the same, the CRT-targeted graphics didn't look as good as they were meant to.

It basically came down to pixels bleeding into neighboring pixels in a way that created gradients between pixels. So while the pixels themselves were still limited to the ridiculously low resolutions of CRT TVs (which basically didn't change since broadcast TV was a thing), they could simulate a higher resolution for the shading with those subpixel gradients.

Though note that this "good" is still relative to how good things were able to look at the time. The resolution is still way under what you're used to today.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Spot on, thanks for clarifying!

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