Emulator

Do we know what it's actually supposed to look like? A screenshot from actual hardware would be helpful here.

Conceivably the no_banding image is how it "should" look. Though I'm unclear if that's what it should look like on hardware, or is a result of using 24b rendering in a version prior to 4.0-1192.

These videos seem to show minimal banding on hardware...
https://youtu.be/B3ARK18UV78?t=379
https://youtu.be/pN5veQjVbcA?t=306
https://youtu.be/1AN-gt3nCSo?t=206
...I can see minimal banding in some paused spots, but it's unclear if that if that's due to the compression used or not.

Moby games shots seem to show banding, but again JPG compressed so source is unclear...
https://www.mobygames.com/game/gamecube/pn03/screenshots/gameShotId,51981/

Hmm, yeah the videos look much smoother than current Dolphin rendering, and appear to be legitimate console footage. I guess we can call this valid then. Very strange issue...

Can you mess with various settings and see if anything else affects or even fixes it?

Try disabling EFB2VRAM copies in the Advanced Section. Changes banding in other games.

The only option that seemed to have any effect on it was Per-pixel Lighting, which didn't fix the banding just made the bands more smoothly circular.

I'll order the game and check it out if I remember. I have a feeling about this.

Edit: Apparently I picked up the Japanese version of this game at some point. Will investigate.

Yeah, I hadn't tried the different rendering backends earlier. All but software rendered are the same. Something noticeable in the software rendering is that there seems to be some sort of dithering going on, where every other verticle line is a different color.

kolano wrote:

Yeah, I hadn't tried the different rendering backends earlier. All but software rendered are the same. Something noticeable in the software rendering is that there seems to be some sort of dithering going on, where every other verticle line is a different color.

kolano wrote:

Yeah, I hadn't tried the different rendering backends earlier. All but software rendered are the same. Something noticeable in the software rendering is that there seems to be some sort of dithering going on, where every other verticle line is a different color, which might make the banding less visable.

Yeah, I hadn't tried the different rendering backends earlier. All but software rendered are the same. Something noticeable in the software rendering is that there seems to be some sort of dithering going on, where every other verticle line is a different color, which might make the banding less visable.

Ug, sorry, what I thought was an edit button for former comments was a reply.

You're fine.

I'm leaning toward the banding being correct emulation and older builds being inaccurate though. If you turn on all the accuracy options in Dolphin, it sort of muddies it, but the component signal from my Wii makes it even muddier. It's still there though.

Here is another comparison shot closer to my shot on console.

Oh yeah, that comparison looks pretty definitive to me. I see all the same banding and weird discoloration.

The banding does still seem to be there in the console shot, but the dithering makes it significantly less visible. I think the lack of the dithering on the HW backends explains what's going on; unclear if there is any mechanism to emulate such more accurately; we at least seem to get it right on the software backend.

Yeah, the game clearly just wasn't made with high resolutions on mind (duh, the console is only 480p at best). It's just going to look weird at high resolutions, there's not really anything we can do about that. If we blur it enough to mask the crappy lighting like the console does, then we're just back to native resolution anyways. With that said, running at native resolution with the copy filter on might be enough to mask it.

I misread JMC's comment and though that last image was from console (stupid me didn't pay attention to the fps counter in the corner), so I'm once again not entirely certain. Still leaning towards this just being how the game is though.

You can get dithering in the hardware backends by disabling the enhancement "Force 24-Bit Color".

JosJuice wrote:

You can get dithering in the hardware backends by disabling the enhancement "Force 24-Bit Color".

That's what I initially thought, but it doesn't seem to make any difference here.

It's neat to see people talking about this. My observations:

• Force 24-Bit Color removes the dithering but not the banding. It's a shame this option doesn't fully solve things
• I imagine the dithering, copy filter/deflicker, and composite signal mask most of the banding on original hardware, but it also just seems less intense in general than it does here no matter what settings are used
• This might be the change that ushered in all the banding: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/68

For most draws the game renders at 1/4th of the final color level and the last TEV stage scales the color up by a factor of 4.