ModRetro Chromatic Firmware v4 0 Demonstration
6The Chromatic has a new firmware update, v4.0, which bring some much-welcome quality of life improvements to its functionality.
The most important update is that you can finally stream audio over USB, no more need to plug in an audio cable into your line input to hear audio. The audio quality over that method was exceptionally, as demonstrated in my previous video. I used Alleyway to demonstrate this because there is a lot of silence and the stereo title screen music is output correctly.
Another welcome feature is the ability to use the menu button on the Chromatic to select the built-in palette options. The only way you could do this before was to hold down the button combos as booted the console or loaded a game with a flash cart.
The frame blending feature almost completely eliminates flicker in games that rapidly draw and redraw graphics to enable transparency-like effects on the slow passive-matrix LCD display of the monochrome Game Boy screens. I had showed what the Chromatic does in previous firmware here: • ModRetro Chromatic Frame Blending Comparison
However, not is all perfect with this new firmware. In the previous firmware, v3.2, the Chromatic was made compatible with streaming on macOS and Discord. In order to do this I read ModRetro changed the color output from RGB to YUV 4:2:2. This leads to rather noticeable color smearing on the X-axis, especially because the capture resolution, 160x144, is so low. It will not smear black, white and gray pixels, that part of the signal is not compressed. Unfortunately the ModRetro firmware updater does not allow you to downgrade your firmware, it can be done but the process is cumbersome and you would lose audio streaming over USB and other features.
0:00 - Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
1:53 - Alleyway
3:41 - Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS