What Do You See In Sonic The Hedgehog's Waterfalls?

Isn't this not really an effect of the CRT itself, but the low fidelity RF or composite connections? CRT screens could be pretty sharp (look at monitors) and while I know that CRT TVs were interlaced while CRT monitors made around this time no longer were, they could still produce a rather sharp picture with a good quality input (like those videos of people modifying old CRT TVs to have RGB inputs)

I definitely remember seeing some faint rainbow colors as a kid, but it certainly wasn't as pronounced as whatever that filter is doing. CRTs produced all sorts of color fringing artfiacts like this, and they'd vary in severity depending on the TV and the quality of the video connection.

I definitely break from most retro enthusiasts when it comes to CRTs, however. Even as a kid, I wanted to see crisp, perfect pixels. Media like Nintendo's wall calendars (and the "black box" era cover art) leaned hard into that aesthetic and I loved it. I remember my dad upgrading our Genesis to an s-video cable, and being disappointed that it didn't resolve the inherent fuzziness of our tube TV.

So for me, seeing these games displayed with every pixel clear as day across a ginormous 4K screen is finally the realization of what I always wanted. I'm in my retro gaming glory.

There was definitely a faint rainbow effect on the waterfalls. The examples above are just silly - it never, ever looked anything like that.

No rainbows. Never. In the 30ish years I've played it.

@Bonggon5 Maybe I'd feel the same but I can't justify the expense of seeking one out. The hard truth is that CRTs are destined for extinction since new ones aren't being made anymore and the manufacturing process exceeds the ability of even the most dedicated hobbyists. Once existing sets burn out, that's the end of that.

The only time I really miss CRTs is when it comes to arcade games. There was something about seeing Pac Man's phosphor glow against that jet black background in a dark room that is inimitable. But even that is hard to separate from my general nostalgia for golden era arcades, so who's to say?

All that said, people should definitely play whatever way makes them happiest! It's great that these old games continue to find audiences all these years later regardless of what screens they're being displayed on!

A tiny bit if you squint.

That's the thing about gaming on CRTs back then, there were many variables and inconsistencies. There are those who say that the dithering effects didn't blend on the CRTs they had the way it did for others. I recall seeing that happen in some cases, though it probably relies partly on the picture settings as well. There's also the issue of the Genesis having problems with rainbow banding with the lesser video out options. Those rainbow bands were always there, and look a lot like they do in those later pictures. I love the Genesis, but its video output was quite poor for many people. I have no nostalgia for that level of authenticity. I have RGB cables for my Genesis systems and like the output. On emulation, you also get an RGB-quality image and I have my preference for processing and scanlines with that.

I played genesis on crt tv back then, I never see any rainbow, just normal regulator waterfall.

Castle of Illusion has a level with neat rainbow like waterfalls, I don't remember it looking rainbow like at all in Sonic. I'll have to check it out.

I don’t recall seeing rainbows back in the day, but I may have just forgotten.

I know I don’t see them on my PVM via RGB, but that’s not how me (or anyone) played these games back then. I do have a small consumer CRT that accepts RF so I’ll have to try it. That’s how most of us played it back then.

On a side note, I tested a Master System via RF a while back on the small CRT. And while the quality of the picture was obviously poor, it was infinitely more nostalgic than playing via RGB and I still think it looked great!

I have encountered rainbow banding on the genesis, although it’s not like this double rainbow reaction this person is having. I might add that if you were playing on a 13” tube via composite it may not have been pronounced. Maybe more pronounced on larger sets.

The rainbowing is almost certainly not intended, only happens over composite on consoles from batches with especially cheap/bad encoder chips, and was definitely never as pronounced as it is with this filter. The intended effect was fake transparency, which you'd get on composite from any batch, of any revision, on any screen.

On the specific consoles that have this issue, it's present not just in waterfalls, but also in palm fronds, glass tubes, lighting and shadow effects, and basically anywhere a transparency effect was attempted.

@Cyber_Akuma in this case it's actually an effect of the composite video encoder chip. Sega sourced those from multiple vendors, so some boards ended up with worse ones than others, which accounts for why lots of people never encountered it.

@flamepanther I’ve only ever owned model 1’s. My current model 1 doesn’t have very noticeable banding, but definitely a previous model 1 did have that. In fact I was considering the HD retro vision cable at the time to clean up that signal but then a replacement model 1 solved any issue I had with genesis over composite

https://imgur.com/Oj9Thtm

It doesn't look like that for me when using composite, but I have cheated slightly as I don't have composite cables for the Megadrive. 😉

@flamepanther But the Sega Genesis wasn't the only system to rely on how the blurryness of the signal and scanlines would effect the way the image looked.

@Cyber_Akuma it's not the only one, but there are a lot of misconceptions about that. The blurring is less to do with CRTs and more with composite and RF video. Checkered dithering is often assumed to be intended for blending, but is actually common even when it's not (e.g. Game Boy games) and vertical bands are more effective for that.

I'm not aware of any convincing evidence that developers relied on visible scan lines (no, not even the SoR piano), and that idea actually runs counter to the idea of reliance on general blurriness. Most NTSC consumer TV sets throughout the 80s and 90s hid scan lines almost completely due to shadow mask patterns and phosphor bloom. Unless you were gaming on a high end Trinitron or a video monitor made for computers, you weren't likely to see gaps between lines. It definitely wasn't something the developers could rely on being present.

A good rule of thumb for separating the myth from the reality (which I'm stealing from the developer of I Wanna Be The Guy) is to ask yourself, "if the effect wasn't intended, would this have been done any differently?" If the answer is no, then it's probably a neat coincidence.

@Sketcz I believe it's either the video encoder or signal noise. I've heard that some of the board designs introduced a lot of signal noise and that simply taking the lines off the board leads to some improvement. Considering that Sega made mistakes with the audio circuits of some of the revisions, I can believe that. Sega did a lot of things right, but their MD board design wasn't one of their better things.

Apparently, there is an RGB mod for the system for those who want their RGB to be, somehow, different from the stock system. You are correct that the system outputs RGB natively. There's also an S-video mod, which I figured is worth mentioning.

@NinChocolate the old fix used to be to get a 32X. It pulls nice clean RGB from the main console, and they had much better composite encoders. Obviously there are much more practical solutions now, but it was effective!