BONUS 01. [FPGA 4K] Rad Racer (NES) - Title & Demo
No Commentary / 4k60 (4:3 Integer Upscale) / "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette / Decent Player
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR44Lsym0AXzlkcixYzLe0jhU
This is being played on an "AnaloguePocket" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
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Not much to this Demo, the guy doesn't even know how to turn!
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Technical Notes:
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TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Watch in 4k if your computer can handle it.
This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!
I went for a 4:3 output with pixel perfect sharpness via integer upscales. 4:3 was selected because this was the aspect ratio people played the game in on the original console. The video is compressed losslessly so no definition is lost.
256 x 240 - internal NES resolution
256* 10 = 2560 / 4 = 640
240* 8 = 1920 / 3 = 640
2560 x 1920 = 4:3
So you can fit the nearest neighbor upscales in a 4k frame and suffer no interpolation and have it in 4:3!
I'm using the "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette developed by FirebrandX. The Nintendo Entertainment System does not have any way of letting you know what it's colors should be EXACTLY by our current digital standards. It was all analog and can't be translated precisely. This hasn't stopped some people from trying though! The "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette was developed to look very nice and accurate to how a modern day NES would appear!
About the Analogue Pocket: It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a NES exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a NES exactly. Which is what this is.
I'm playing this using the OpenFPGA feature on the Analogue Pocket which allows developers to import/create cores (systems) to be used by the FPGA "chip". The "Spiritualized NES" core is the one being played on and is widely considered to be a port of the core in Analogue's "NT Mini/Noir" systems and made by the same developer.
I'm using the Analogue Dock to play this on my TV and capture the footage.