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High quality Playstation 1/Playstation 2 captures

category: general [glöplog]
I've started to make some high quality video captures of Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 demos (after doing some Dreamcast captures earlier). There are a lot of bad quality captures out there (low resolution, low framerate, low bitrate). I'm using the Open Source Scan Converter and an Elgato HD60 Pro HDMI capture card.

Unfortunately this is not a straight forward process.

For the Playstation 1 it can be hard getting a demo to run in the first place. The mode change from 576i in the boot screen to 240p/288p results in some missing frames and audio, so demos starting right away are tricky. I am working on a custom exe launcher which sets the correct screen mode before launching the demo but sometimes this doesn't help.

For Playstation 2 the main problem is interlacing. Fortunately I've managed to get pretty decent results with the bwdif deinterlacing in ffmpeg. I have tried to run some of the demos in 480p/576p. Some do work, but the output resolution is wrong. I may take a closer look at this later.

The goal is to get (near) pixel perfect captures, but this is not always possible (some Playstation 1 demos run in 512x256 or 512x240 with a 4:3 aspect ratio). The output is scaled with nearest neighbor integer scaling and then padded to a height of 1080 pixels (to avoid youtube-scaling). This means that most demos have black bars on top and bottom. This also means that some demos may or may not have slightly wrong aspect ratio.

These are the demos I've captured so far:

Playstation 1

Pawlov by Elitegroup (video)
Monophobia by Witchcraft (video)
Iaquo by Yodel (video)
Deadline caught me by Paradox and threepixels (video)

Playstation 2

Funslower by soopadoopa (video)
Aura for Laura by soopadoopa (video)
d136b by neuroscientists (video)
4 Edges by The Black Lotus (video)

If there are any PS1/PS2 demos you want captured, feel free to post a request in the thread.

I am probably also going to put high quality mp4 files online in the future (with much higher bitrate than youtube will give me).
added on the 2019-10-17 00:35:22 by neon neon
Nice! Please also redo the Haujobb ones.
added on the 2019-10-17 00:55:05 by noname noname
cool, these look much nicer than existing captures. when you add them to the site, please don't use the "youtube hq" label but just replace the existing youtube link :)
added on the 2019-10-17 01:27:54 by havoc havoc
Great job with attention to details of captures for these systems, the only thing I miss are scanlines :D
added on the 2019-10-17 21:34:54 by rutra80 rutra80
YES! .. these are great, nice work!
added on the 2019-10-17 22:05:37 by dwarf dwarf
Nice work, great to see people putting effort into getting good caps!
added on the 2019-10-17 23:01:31 by Sdw Sdw
awesome <3

especially Iaquo!
added on the 2019-10-17 23:38:50 by noby noby
Added some more PS2 captures:
Sohn des Nichts by neoscientists (video)
Innerloop by neoscientists (video)
megadentro by neoscientists (video)

Sohn des Nichts and megadentro both run in interlaced (576i) but they are really 288p. This has been fixed in the post-processing.
added on the 2019-10-18 00:18:13 by neon neon
How about Schleudertrauma ?
Maybe I still have the disc somewhere...
And I think you also needed a XPloder-module (or a devkit) to start it.
added on the 2019-10-18 16:22:38 by hfr hfr
@hfr If you can give me an iso or an exe I can see what i can do
added on the 2019-10-18 17:58:13 by neon neon
Great job, this was badly needed thanks!
Yeah, and Schleudertrauma would be nice.
added on the 2019-10-18 19:00:40 by arm1n arm1n
Great work! Finally a decent capture of Aura for Laura!
added on the 2019-10-18 19:46:36 by break break
Added another PS2 demo:
Laser Sundays by TPOLM (video)

This one runs in 512x512. I managed to get a pixel perfect capture but the final video has been scaled to 1366x1024 to get the correct aspect ratio.

I added a youtube hq-link to the prod since the original youtube video is by the author.
added on the 2019-10-19 20:48:16 by neon neon
What break said!
added on the 2019-10-19 21:22:24 by Blueberry Blueberry
and yet another PS2 capture:
Evolution by Condense (video)

This one has been scaled to 16:9 aspect ratio since it seems it was meant to look that way.
added on the 2019-10-20 14:27:52 by neon neon
Quote:
The mode change from 576i in the boot screen to 240p/288p results in some missing frames and audio


Perhaps a RetroTink2x would help get rid of those signal sync problems? Or those new RAD2X video cables that have a RetroTink2x integrated into the cable.
added on the 2019-10-23 12:41:07 by mic mic
+1 for hjb demos, the existing youtube cap of strange worlds is quite blurry
added on the 2019-10-23 19:05:10 by maali maali
Added another PS2 capture:
Tabula Rasa by Haujobb (video)

This one was a bit tricky. It looks like the intention was to run in 60 fps interlaced based on how the frames look. Unfortunately it runs in everything from 12 to 60 fps but the interlace-aware code (or something like that) assumes full framerate.

In the existing capture everything runs in 30 fps, but suspect it was captured from an emulator or not rendered realtime.
added on the 2019-10-23 23:22:04 by neon neon
don't use "youtube hq", just replace the existing link.
added on the 2019-10-24 00:56:33 by havoc havoc
thx! :)
added on the 2019-10-24 01:50:24 by havoc havoc
Back to the PS1 again...

As mentioned earlier, the problem with some of the demos is that the OSSC needs some time to acquire sync after a mode change. My first approach to fix this was to write a loader which sets the mode to the same as the demo it loads. Unfortunately most PS1 demos do a GPU reset at startup which resets the mode to NTSC before the demo immediately sets the mode back to PAL.

After some reversing and adding some logging to the PCSXR emulator, I've made a workaround. The fix is simply to nop out the instruction which resets the GPU. So far this has been tested with one demo and it works fine.

fr-minus-01 by Farbrausch (video)
added on the 2019-10-31 00:51:05 by neon neon
Thanks a lot for the captures!
added on the 2019-10-31 08:34:02 by v3nom v3nom
Quote:
Tabula Rasa by Haujobb (video)

This one was a bit tricky. It looks like the intention was to run in 60 fps interlaced based on how the frames look. Unfortunately it runs in everything from 12 to 60 fps but the interlace-aware code (or something like that) assumes full framerate.

The demo runs in PAL, so it should be 50 or 25Fps.
If you got 60Hz, did you maybe run it in NTSC?
added on the 2019-10-31 08:55:13 by hfr hfr
Quote:
Quote:
Tabula Rasa by Haujobb (video)

This one was a bit tricky. It looks like the intention was to run in 60 fps interlaced based on how the frames look. Unfortunately it runs in everything from 12 to 60 fps but the interlace-aware code (or something like that) assumes full framerate.

The demo runs in PAL, so it should be 50 or 25Fps.
If you got 60Hz, did you maybe run it in NTSC?


Strange, it runs in NTSC on my PAL PS2. I can get it to run in PAL using GSM, but it doesn't help in the low framerate parts.
added on the 2019-10-31 09:10:31 by neon neon

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