I'm a junky for calibrating my A/V equipment, if you have any idea what this means then you understand proper black levels and color saturation, etc.
Well I had never given it any thought, but the GC isn't calibrated at NTSC standards. This dumbfounded me, so as soon as I leanred this, I went to experiment.
First of all, proper calibration requires the user to have a source material disk, usually like Digital Video Essentials or other types of source media. You can buy them for about 15 bucks at any place that sells TV's. But in this case, we cant pop in a DVD in to a GC, so I ran in to a major problem; How do I calibrate this thing if I cant run source material? I thought about making a case mod for the GC so it would allow me to play normal DVDs but that just seemed too costly to me. So instead, I went on a hunt through my 51 GC games to find source material.
These are in the order that you should be calibrating your television.
FIRST THINGS FIRST:
If your TV has 'Vivid, Enhanced, Standard, Movie' etc settings, use the Movie or Pro mode, as these modes have the most natural picture with the fewest filters and BS that degrades picture quality. You should also know what kind of connection you're using. If the back of your TV has component, S-Video or HDMI inputs - USE THEM! Liksang.com has component, S and HDMI cables for Gamecube on their site. The details of what cable you use are as follows:
R/F: You are getting the worst possible picture quality. Time to upgrade.
composite video: or RCA plus. These are those Red, White and Yellow plugs that came with your GC. These are standard video (yellow) quality, but offer the best audio (red and white) quality.
Component video: These are the more expensive plugs, they have a Red, Blue and Green jack on the end. These are the second best for video quality. if you use these, keep in mind that you'll need to use the component cables for video, and the RCA plugs for your audio, just dont connect the yellow jack. When you use these cables, you can enable a Progressive Scan mode, which disabled interlacing and improves picture quality even further.
HDMI: i'm waiting for confirmation on this, it's on Liksang.com, but i'm not sure if it works on the American region GC. It ships from Japan, which could possibly mean that it only works on the Japanese GC. I'll update when I found out. The thing is though, this plug offers the absolute best video quality. If your TV has this jack, you're in luck; GC games look amazing using this output. It also offers progressive scan mode, or 480p to be exact.
Now for the calibrating:
Brightness: Black level is extremely important, too dark and you ruin everything, too bright and you ruin everything. getting it just right creates a vast improvement in any video source, but man does it really shine on GC. I used Resident Evil here. Pop it in, and in the options menu select 'Adjust Brightness".
Dont play with the contrast here just yet, and do not adjust in the in-game brightness! Doing so will vastly degrade picture performance (it should be at 80). It explains what to do here, basically you want to sit in your normal position from the screen with the lighting in your room you usually use. I play in the dark, so it's lights off. And SMPTE says I should have a 30 degree cone from the screen; For my 51" widescreen RP that meant somewhere around the 8 to 9 foot distance range.
Now that you have that done, set your television brightness so that you cant see ANYTHING below the red line. Now go ahead and start a game.
Contrast: You're in the dining room now, so look around, is it so dark that you cant see anything? Contrast becomes a major player in the GC's video range. Now there's two things to consider here;
1.) Find the peak contrast your television can handle before it blooms, distorts, or changes color from absolute white.
2.) The proper contrast level of the GC.
You wont be able to find out the peak contrast level of your television without a calibration source disk, but you CAN use good judgement. Walk from the dining room in to the zombie hall, but dont activate the cut scene and zombie attack. Instead, take a look at the lamp above you.
Let's set your contrast to MAX. If you're using a direct view television or 'tube television' or basically anything that's not an RP or FP (rear or front projection), you should see the lamp distort like crazy, even changing shape and color. Back off on the contrast until it returns back to its normal shape by going back and forth from ZERO contrast to MAX contrast, once you find the actual point that it changes shape and distorts, set your contrast right beneath it.
Let's check your brightness again, go in to 'Adjust Brightness". Can you see anything below the red line? Can you see even less above the red line? Make your proper brightness adjustments.
Now check out the hallway. You should see almost nothing down the hallway except for the distant lamp and some slight outlines of your character and the walls. Wait for a lightning strike.... how's that for atmosphere? Go ahead and kill the zombie, then enter the main stair hall. You should be able to clearly see the well lit area, look for distortion around the candles, the chandelier, etc. Lower your contrast if you do. Remember that properly calibrated sets have between 5% and 50% and never above when it comes to contrast.
Color & Tint: Now you're probably noticing that the color is way off. Color and tint are two things that give the most trouble when performing a soft calibration (using the on screen menus of your television). Depending on your television, you could have a red push, green push, even a 'fleshtones' push. These are all done to cheat the NTSC standards, by moving the temperature of the television set in to blazing high levels which makes the true color of white more blue. So they add more red to compensate to create more believable flesh tones, or more green to compensate for the additional blue. It makes soft calibrations a nightmare. This step is usually performed using a BLUE FILTER along with source material, such as the THX blue filter glasses ($2 on thx.com). but we're not going to worry about that here. Because you cant use a source other than the GC video games, you're forced to eyeball it, which means it will never be perfect.
However, I found a way to get it pretty damn close. First, we'll do it the obvious: Let's turn your color all the way up. You can still use Resident Evil here, but a brightly colored game (Mario, Wind Waker, Pikmin) will work better imo. Here's what you do, find objects that are RED and BLUE and try to get them on the screen so you can see them both. The brighter the red and blue objects are, the better your results will be. I found things such as the map in Resident Evil which has red and blue doors (to denote locked and unlocked doors) work somewhat well. These aren't 100% colors, but we're eyeballing anyway. Just lower your color setting until the red and blue objects no longer 'bleed', this term is used to describe the point at which a color distorts and seems to bleed outward of the object. You want to get the color setting so the reds and blues stay inside the object and do not look like they're glowing. Find the point where they actually start bleeding and then go right beneath that, that is your MAX setting, do not exceed it. Now from here just take a look around and see if things look right. The wood of the mansion in Resident Evil should look rich and deep with redish wood tones, the candles should have a red and orange tinge that becomes white as it moves outward. As long as you're not bleeding the colors, you should be about perfect.
Tint is harsh as well, another eyeball test. The startup screen for Mario Sunshine uses tons of colors, which is great both for the color and for the tint calibrations. Make the blue look blue, the red look red, if those two colors look natural, you're as close as you can get without professional help. After you adjust tint, check the color again, any bleeding? If so, adjust, and then do tint adjustments again.
Now throw in Resident Evil again if it's not already in there. Go to the brightness adjust screen. You should see NOTHING below the red line. However, the game should not be hard to see at all. If it's too dark to see, adjust your contrast, but dont bloom it out! If you do need to adjust contrast again, check your brightness, color and tint again, as changing any setting will effect the other settings.
Now the final test, and you need good eyes for this one. Sharpness is a feature that is supposed to be dead. It's even in higher end pro-sumer televisions even though it was only invented to add line detail to broadcast television when it was invented. On some TV's, you need a little line enhancement, and I mean little, like 10% max. On some other TV's, it should be turned all the way off. To see what you need, press Y and enter your status screen. We're going to look at a few things: Your ammo counter, the small boxes that display your Defense Weapons (dagger, grenade, tazer, etc) and the words around your health meter and the top catagories, file, map, etc.
First, we'll turn sharpness all the way up. See how it adds lines to everything? This isn't making the picture more detailed, it's actually destroying it. Go down slowly and watch the changes. Go all the way to Zero. If it looks very blurry dont worry, go up one tick at a time. Keep looking at the ammo counter, the small boxes and those words, are they getting 'edgey'? You should litteraly find a pojnt as you increase the sharpness controls where you see added 'noise' around the things I mentioned. Back off until that noise is completely gone, you're getting 100% of the picture quality now.
You're done! Now keep in mind that this setting will look like absolute krap if you switch to TV or movies, the brightness setting is way to low for NTSC standards. The Gamecube cuts off black levels at around 9%, so if you ran a source disk like video essentials you would see that even the 10% black level bars are getting sucked up. If you turn the brightness up to regular levels for TV and movies, then go back to Gamecube, you'll see how horrible it looks, it kills almost all your detail and makes it look like a blanket of fog is over everything.
I'm in the middle of adjusting my 5.1, so i'll post the audio side of things later. What kind of audio systems do you guys have?
Mini Racers, by Looking Glass Studios. Yes, the Looking Glass that made some of the most innovative first-person PC games ever (Theif, Terra Nova, Ultima Underworld...)... this might not be at that level of quality (their N64 games were Command & Conquer and Destruction Derby 64, decent but not spectacular, and its being just a top-down console racing game), but it was never released due to Looking Glass' sad demise some years back, so it was thought lost... until a dev cart of the game was found recently. And the person who has it actually wants to dump the game, something that does not exactly always happen... (remember when Echo Delta, that unreleased strategy game, showed up on EBay? Yeah, I don't see that rom anywhere. But at $1500 for the game, that makes sense... though given that it's just a flash cart it'd be best to make a backup, you probably wouldn't want to give that rom to anyone else...) let's hope it gets dumped. I'd love to see this game, it's by Looking Glass and looks somewhat like Micro Machines or the racing stages in Blast Corps...
Casual game focused, with exceptions for major franchises, that is. (note that the DS has all of the top 10 -- with six casual games, Mario, Mario Basketball, Final Fantasy, and a new RPG.
Quote:Media Create Sales: 21 -27 August
01 NDS FF3 - 503.051 / NEW
02 NDS NEW SMB - 65.556 / 2.901.264
03 NDS Rune Factory - 42.210 / NEW
04 NDS Brain Age 2 - 41.784 / 3.073.195
05 NDS Cooking Navi - 37.326 / 384.045
06 NDS Tamagotchi 2 - 30.504 /430.933
07 NDS Mario Basketball 3on3 - 30.355
08 NDS Animal Crossing WW - 30.023 / 3.149.131
09 NDS Brain Age - 22.866 / 2.736.150
10 NDS English Training - 17.465
1. Nintendo DS Lite 163.274
2. PlayStation Portable 29.945
3. PlayStation 2 21.829
4. GameBoy Advance SP 2.719
5. GameBoy Micro 1819
6. Xbox 360 1197
7. Nintendo GameCube 837
8. Nintendo DS 410
9. GameBoy Advance 14
10. Xbox 12
I know that these "DS is winning Japan" things are not new at all, but still, all 10 for the DS, with casual games so obviously pushing the market... could this happen here? I'm not sure... similarly aren't cell phone games a lot more popular there than here? Though that's in part because cell phones in Japan all use one system while here there are a bunch of incompatible ones... anyway, while the DS's success is nice, it's happening in a way that doesn't really encourage the development of games for hardcore gamers -- which is why despite the far smaller userbase those titles seem to be perhaps more likely to be released on the PSP (third party games, I mean)... maybe that will change but the DS market really is dominated by nongame products, casual games, and franchises, more so than any other console I know of. Is this a good thing? For Nintendo yes, unquestionably. For hardcore gamers? Well, maybe, just because of all the good games on the DS, but ... well, the PC continues to have fine success as a casual gaming platform, but isn't exactly doing well for hardcore gamers these days...
The real question is, are the people who buy a DS for Brain Training or Tamagochi going to start buying more traditional games too?
Well it seems that in the land of the rising knights of Arthur (also Rare), organ donar cards could be overturned by the wishes of relatives upon someone's death.
This has been changed. Now the organ doner card trumps anything relatives have to say.
There is an OUTCRY over this. Apparently some very pushy relatives are outraged they no longer have the ability to completely disregard the wishes of the deceased.
The price, the date, the finalized games, the last secrets revealed.
Here's the info.
We all know about the NOA event taking place on September 14th. Now, there will be a Nintendo of Europe event in London the very next day, on September 15th. GoNintendo reported about it first, I believe. And I have also received the invitation since.
Also, I have made some enquiries and it seems that there will not be such an event in Japan. Consequently, I am forced to change my mind about when the launch details will be announced. I now believe that the two events by NOA and NOE will break the news, after all. I do wonder, though, when the Japanese launch details will be announced. NOA might have Miyamoto and Iwata participate via videoconference.
So watch that countdown at the top. That is when we will find out. Also, Nintendo really do have another surprise in store for us, which will be revealed at these events. Just how big that surprise will be, I do not yet know. But stick with this blog and I might be able give you some indication soon.
Finally, Makerofdust on the NSider forums alerted me to a Swiss online store that started its Wii pre-orders today. When I called them this afternoon, the consoles had already been sold. Their entire first batch was sold out within four hours. Just how many they had been allocated they wouldn´t say. But they said it was quite a number. By the way: their asking price was 399 Swiss Francs, which converts to $320 or €250. Just thought I should give you some positive news to counterbalance the rumours of production line problems.
-----
The production line rumor is just that, for now. IGN says it's bogus, so it's a wait and see.
But to be realistic, what could the last secret be? Kaplan had a video interview with IGN who said that by september when we start to get demo units in stores, we'll reveal the last secret 'Hardcore gamers stay tuned'. What could it be? What do 'hardcore gamers' want?
We know the system has wireless LAN, online support, purdy, though standard res graphics, gigantic third party support... wait a minute. Graphics, what's the one thing that the Wii doesn't excel in? I'm not going to say 3-D glasses, but graphics are the weaker of the buying points of Wii. If Nintendo offered something that enhanced the way the games look somehow, it could be huge.
If you think about it, what have we heard? Red Steel was shown at E3 and was said to be the Gamecube version (the first dev kits) Zelda: TP looks exactly like the GC version sans widescreen. Metroid Prime 3 was also built on the gamecube dev kits, with some effects thrown in that the GC could easily handle such as blooming and bump mapping, all things we've seen before. What if... just what if...
-----
Nintendo will announce news regarding the Wii through magazines Nintendo Power (United States) and Nintendo Official Magazine (UK) on September 1st.
Normally, the two official magazines are not released on the same date, but for once they will to ensure the news is announced everywhere at the same time.
“On this ocassion subscribers will not recieve their issues any earlier than the proper on-sale date (01 Sept) due to our cover game being embargoed until that date. Rest assured this wouldn’t happen normally and it’s because it’s a BIG exclusive.”
So, until Friday, it’s speculation time. Could it have anything to do with Resident Evil Wii (read our recent news story regarding this here)? Or maybe it’s an entirely new game. Perhaps a new IP sprung from the mind of master designer Shigeru Miyamoto?
----
I.... I mean, it could be..... that....
-----
The endless Wii rumour mill continues to grind apace, with the latest gossip around the emerging home platform claiming Nintendo has, to date, shown only games that mask its true graphical potential.
The reason Nintendo did this? According to the French source citing 'secret Nintendo leakers', Nintendo wants to surprise everyone. That's right. The latest Nintendo rumour is that the final press showing of the Wii will see massively uprated graphics across the Wii range.
"Nintendo has been playing us the fool all along. They have been showing us trailers for games that have deliberately downgraded graphics compared to what the Wii can actually do. This is to create an element of surprise for the press during Nintendo's next media event," claims the Actu JV section of Jeux France.
Of course, this is an auto-fulfilling prophecy. It's not as though Wii software with almost six months' additional development time is going to look any worse than it did during its E3 debut...
-----
Force companies to show only the GC dev kit content, giving them the finalized Wii devkits just months ago? I.... I....
I'm calling it now: Resident Evil for Wii shown September 1st, and in 14 days from now, Nintendo shows off their finalized graphics.
I have hope in one hand, shit in the other, but mark my words: Something will happen at some point that might interest you.
Haha! What's with the "music" tags at the start of them? Is that like what these live journals recommend I listen to, the "theme music" of the post? Hilariously stupid!
So there are a lot of things in the news these days about a big vote about what defines "planetness". One proposed rule set was "if it revolves around a star and is not revolving around another satellite (the gravity "barycenter" is not inside that other satellite, meaning they are revolving around each other more or less), and if it is massive enough that it's gravity overcomes it's own shape to make it spherical, it's a planet. The one they actually voted on was another set of rules saying, if I remember right, it has to orbit the sun, have cleared out it's "surrounding neighborhood", and some others, whatever.
There are a few things I have to say about this. First of all, as many scientists are saying, this really is pointless. Whether you call Pluto a planet or not, it is what it is. Call it a whale, as in redefine whale to mean "marine mammal or icy rock beyond the orbit of Neptune". This also doesn't help science at all as far as I can tell. This isn't a new discovery. They didn't find out something new about Pluto making them reconsider. They are changing the definition, the data hasn't yet changed.
There is no "planetness" somewhere "out there". It's a word. It is merely us saying "this idea represents this", instantiating a class to help us deal with the stream of otherwise meaningless information that is the universe. I know this is all obvious to anyone who's ever even had a passing thought about language, but the news doesn't seem to get that. If we wanted, we could, instead of defining the rock itself, define a carved out shape of the rock and some space to the west of it as a thing we call Pluto. At any rate, this won't change anything about the object, it'll just change what we call it. And so, why is it that big a deal if we call it something else? The only real reason is to make information easier to manage. Somehow I'm not sure this'll do anything of the sort. I'm fine with a rough definition of planet that is pretty much arbitrary myself.
That said, there's an easy solution to this. Leave the science to the scientists, but in cases like "what do we call it?", why not start up a new craze in the form of "name that celestial object!", the new hit show translated into every language where everyone on the planet gets to vote on a selection of names, and whether or not something is a planet or a star or whatever. Since it won't affect the science or anything (if they call a moon-like object a "star" it won't change the fact that it orbits other things and isn't a nuclear inferno), it seems fine by me. Also, it'll get people into science in a more hands-on way. Make people feel like idiots if they don't care about it too, that helps.
So, I'm just wondering what those who are still in school are taking. I actually kinda want to go back to school, 4 months of seems like it's too long.
Anyways, I'm working towards a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Alberta. I'm majoring in Political Science and minoring in Sociology.
My schedule this year looks like this
Fall:
Drama 101: Introduction to Theater Arts -T/R 9:30-10:50
Political Science 220: Canadian National Goverment and Politics - M/W/F 1-1:50
Political Science 260 - International Relations - M/W/F 10-10:50
Psychology 104: Basic Psychological Processes - T/R 11-12:20
Sociology 210 - Introduction Social Statistics - T/R 2-3:20 -Lab M 11-12:50
Winter:
Drama 102: Play Analysis - T/R 9:30-10:50
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 220: Violent Weather - M/W/F 9-9:50
Pol S 220 continued
Pol S 260 continued
Sociology 224: Deviance and Conformity T/R 2-3:20
Sociology 225: Criminology T/R 12:30-1:50
It should be an okay year. I'm not really looking forward to social statistics though, and I'm not quite so ssure about psych. The two poli sci courses should be interesting along with soc 224 and 225. Drama 101 and 102 are to satisfy my fine arts requirements, and involve no acting, so that's good, I think they're pretty much english classes. Psych and Violent weather are to fulfill sciece requirements.
![[Image: miniracersdevcart.jpg]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2006/09/miniracersdevcart.jpg)
