I'll definitely keep an eye out. I've got the thread watched so I'll get an e-mail as soon as someone posts.Nemesis wrote:Thanks Misty, it's good to see there's some interest out there about this. I'm taking a short break from this for now to work on other things, but I'll be coming back around to it in the coming months, so watch this space.
If you don't mind sharing your techniques, I'd be glad to help out where I can, too - by dumping discs, or helping with coming up with the dumping process (if I can!), or the video stuff, etc. I've got some video capture experience, and good hardware.If I get a dumping process working for the disks, I'll definitely need people like you who have the actual media to help out with the dumping efforts. The only game I have is Space Berserker.
I've got five games right now:
Blue Chicago Blues
Hyperion
Manhattan Requiem
Pyramid Patrol
Space Berserker
I lost interest in collecting for a bit because most games for the system are just so crappy, but the prospect of dumping them is making me interested in buying again.
Definitely look into that, because it could be a deal breaker. If deinterlacing changes the frame references, then even on games that use 480i footage it might be hard to use for emulation.Yikes, I didn't know that. My capture card can capture individual frames without deinterlacing, (IE, grab either the odd, even, or interlaced frame), but I don't know if it can record video without deinterlacing. I'll have to check the settings.
Another thing I noticed that you might want to keep an eye out for - at least from the glance I've taken so far, it seems like all game discs I have (whether Japanese or North American) run at the NTSC-J IRE of 0.0, instead of the standard NTSC-M IRE of 7.5. You'll want to see if your capture card has an option to choose an IRE, because if you use the wrong setting you'll probably either clip or crush the darkest part of the image. The difference isn't a huge deal on analogue monitors, where the values aren't absolute and it's possible to display "blacker than black" colours; the signal just looks slightly darker. But when digitizing the signal most capture devices interpret the base IRE level as an absolute black and clip any values below that.
(IRE is basically the amplitude of the video signal, and the bottom of the range represents the black level.)