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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

NTSC was also known for its poor colour reproducability compared to PAL due to how the color signal was modulated. PAL had automatic control where NTSC often required manual adjustment in case the hue was drifted. For that reason NTSC was often said to stand for 'Never Twice the Same Color' or 'Never The Same Color'.

I wonder if any of the shaders also has this behavior of randomly shifting the hue or an ability to change it by a give offset.

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NTSC colors were bad - really bad - but wideband bayer filters + sRGB are the source of the mediocre colors we see today.

We could have beautiful Kodachrome quality colors If we used narrow-band RGB filters and a wide gamut (Rec.2020, or Rec.2100PQ) colorspace. If you look at the spectral sensitivity specs of Kodachrome film they are fairly narrow-band and closely matched the perceptual sensitivity of human vision (CIE 1931).

If you display an sRGB encoded image with Rec.2020 gamut (without colorspace conversion) the colors will appear very washed out. If you display a Rec.2020 encoded image on sRGB (without colorspace conversion) it will appear oversaturated. Separately, narrower and/or more widely spaced bandpass filters will increase color saturation. It turns out that narrow-band filters approximating the CIE1931 curves are a natural match for the Rec.2020 colorspace. Since CIE1931 approximates how humans perceive color the colors are also more accurate.

It was a "lucky" accident that the properties of CRT phosphors, from which sRGB is derived were a good match for the wideband color filters used in color video cameras.

There is good reason why many high end projectors use lasers as light sources these days; you can't get much more narrow-band than that.

https://www.christiedigital.com/about/display-technology/las...

https://www.barco.com/en/inspiration/news-insights/barco-res...

Retroarch does have some NTSC filters (combined with svideo/composite input) that are appropriately noisy.

Fair point for home games. Arcade games skipped NTSC and just used RGB on separate wires.

A lot of home hardware had RGB as well. The variety of hardware in general was pretty high, to the point that many tricks pixel artists employed only worked on very specific hardware combinations. Case in point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-G02cjXpZ0

Notice the glass tubes at 0:47+. On the composite output, they look smooth and have that rainbow effect. This only worked on first revisions of the Megadrive; later ones had better quality output, mostly losing the effect.

The same applied to displays - crispness, scanlines, bleeding etc were all different.

I didn't see your 0:47 reference and almost couldn't tellt he difference but then it was obvious.

Isn't there a similar issue with sonic in front of the waterfall not working correctly on emulators?

As a PAL person I wonder if there are any shaders that give Hanover bars

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