Why didn't consoles start coming with S-Video or Component cables by the 4th/5th gen or even the 6th gen? The picture quality is so much better than Composite it's not even funny and you'd think by the 5th gen or especially 6th gen they'd be more concerned with the way the graphical quality was perceived on a first impression, and with Composite you're just seeing blurry bullshit especially on the PS2.
Because people were happy enough with composite... and there were loads of people unironically happy enough with RF as well.
A lot of consumer TVs back then didn't even have S-video, hell, a couple didn't even have composite either.
penny pinching>>12242073American moment
More important question, why did console manufacturer insist on using proprietary video cables instead of using industry standard outputs, so that users could use regular cables they already own? Were there massive profits they could earn by selling their own cables?
>>12242062inferior video signals helped hide how shitty the game actually looks
LowestCommonDenominator
>>12242062Very few people owned TVs that supported s-video or component, so it wasn't necessary. Even well into the PS3/360 generation, consoles were still shipping with just composite cables.
>>12242073I remember being an 8 year old kid around '95/'96 and dreaming of having my very own 20" bedroom color cable TV with "the RCA jacks". I think nearly every TV we had owned up to that point was RF only.
>>12242109when i got a 360, i initially had it hooked up to a crt tv lolhad a friend over and we were trying to play skate 2, and i couldn't even read the text on screen. the price of even a shitty brand 32" flatscreen was still high enough that my broke ass had to budget it in over a couple paychecks.
>>12242069>and there were loads of people unironically happy enough with RF as well.I use RF filters when playing older console emulators. Takes me right back.
Because their TVs they bought in the early 90s that didn't have those plugs still worked perfectly fine.
>>12242062Because the TV industry colluded to have global-standardized HDMI instead, so console-makers aren't gonna support a dead format no new TV after that point will have. But I do agree with your sentiment. I had a PS2 with an aftermarket S-video cable, and the results were damn near HD.
composite is the ideal video outputlots of tvs only had rf and composite
>>12242215I played 360 over RF on a 12" CRT for most of college. FFXIII was really hard to read...
I always found the quality of 3D games via component/s-video compared to composite, a minimal upgrade at best. The difference shines more so with highly detailed 2D games.
>>12242079SCART is absolutely massive and it's also a two-way cable so adding in protections against other devices shoving voltage into your PlayStation would add a lot of additional design time and manufacturing expense. You'd also need either a software or a hardware switch to determine what type of video to send down the cable, since doing something like also outputting S-Video through SCART while the user wants RGB or Composite would likely cause display issues.As for component video, there's multiple different standards for component cables including separate RCA plugs as well as the japanese D-terminal. Also just about every console that supports component out also supports RGB so it's easier to just have a single plug that does everything instead of six different connectors for each video type.
I got a brand new TV in 2001 that was RF only. a VCR/TV combo. I never even knew composite was supposed to be better until a decade later.
>>12242062I didn’t even know my SNES supported s-video until a few years ago. I have a universal s-video for 6th gen and I knew the PS2 plug fit in a PS3, but didn’t know the Gamecube plug could fit a SNES. Kinda weird how Nintendo consoles used the same A/V port for 3 generations.
>>12242832AV Famicom uses that connector in Japan as well, so FC/SFC/N64/GCN can all use the same cable.
>>12242078Also Japan
>>12242842Official GameCube composite cable box in Japan featured four console logos. Disappointing that Wii had its own cable, but I guess they had to redesign the connector to accommodate YPbPr component signal.
>>12242873based, I haven't seen the NEW FC logo alongside the others
>>12242062>The picture quality is so much better than Composite it's not even funnyIt really came down to the quality of the comb filter in your television set anon. With a top quality TV with a nice 3 line comb filter, composite can look excellent and you would have to resort to zooming in with a magnifying glass to see the difference.I used to produce TV and our Sony broadcast tape decks were composite, like in the rest of the industry. They looked better than SVHS, which has lower bandwidth, even when the SVHS machines were hooked to the monitors directly with S-Video cables.All of this must seem very very confusing to the kind of retro game fans we have here.
Americans back in the day never updated their TVs, you couldn't even count on people to have a set with Composite, let alone any of that other shit.
>>12242873They could have just used the same pins for component in america and RGB in europe like everyone else. I looked up a pinout of the Wii's AV port and it seems like the redesign was to accommodate additional data lines needed for the D-terminal cable to work, which was pretty common in Japan at the time.If not for that they probably could have kept using the same cables.
>>12243016By some point TVs were good enough and unless you were a videophile there was no point in upgrading. Broadcast looked great, and you got what you got otherwise.By the mid 1990s it wasn't uncommon for TVs to have S-Video inputs though. But a TV lasted forever, why would you spend the money to upgrade one of the priciest pieces of consumer electronics? What so your kid can take a magnifying glass and pixel or "phosphor" peep? That wasn't even a thing back then.
>>12242062Why ship the cable with the system when you can charge them $20 for it?
>>12242904I bring up what you're talking about on /tv/ and /pw/ from time to time. OTA television and C-band satellite broadcasts could look very clear and detailed under optimal conditions.
>>12242832PS3 uses the same analog connector as PS1 as well, there's no reason to change it.
>>12243071It's about bandwidth, all home media formats until Laserdisc were bandwidth limited compared to broadcast NTSC. Look how big a u-matic is vs VHS. And U-matic wasn't even as good as Type C 1" reel to reel but you never saw Type C in a normal TV studio. That was more for telecine transfers for broadcast and as masters for home release. All these formats were delivered as composite signals and they looked great because they had adequate bandwidth. The zoomers here don't know that given adequate bandwidth, and a good comb filter, composite signals look great and the real issue is the regeneration of the NTSC signal from the lower-bandwidth or specific track storage formats on the tape which cause problems. And the Genesis proves that different signal generation subsystems can cause all kinds of issues for games, even given the supposed limitation of composite. I do wonder what the bandwidth is and the signal generation actually looks like on various games consoles too, might be the comb filters have to work "harder" with certain systems and variants to make things look good.With smaller tape to increase the bandwidth you have to either run it faster or use wider tape, and if you want to make a format that's cheap to sell, you have to make the entire case and the tape cheap and compact enough. You also don't want to give the home recordist access to higher quality recording technology, you're making a tape format to sell with the film and TV industry in mind as a primary customer. If they can tape things at too high of a fidelity that's a problem for your primary customers - industry. Anyway given all that the home formats can't run as fast and don't use so much tape or of the better formulations because that just costs too much money and most people don't give a shit about the quality anyhow.
>>12242904>you would have to resort to zooming in with a magnifying glass to see the difference.why does everything have to be exaggerated to one extreme or the other? jfc
>>12243030>It wasn't like this. But it was actually like this. However it wasn't like this because...magnifying glass on S-Videoneck yourself you LARPing jeet
>>12243112I'm not kidding when I say this though. Of course it depends on many factors including the TV, its comb filter, the quality of the circuitry inside the TV, whether or not the cable delivering the signal is being interfered with or if it's not adequately shielded, like with the tiny thin wires common for adapter cables often were. And then the other device, its circuit layout and build quality and tolerances, HOW it generates the signal, etc.Don't believe me? Read up on how to choose a fucking Genesis.>>12243121You get easily confused. At some point S-Video connectors became more common, gradually, on TVs. But most people didn't give enough of a shit to seek out home media systems that would take advantage of that. S-Video movies sold poorly. Home SVHS decks sold poorly. Laserdisc wasn't very popular either though it was much more popular than SVHS home releases.So what's the point in updating the TV if you don't care enough to buy equipment which will show any difference? I don't get how you're confused about this. People didn't buy new TVs all the time.
>>12242062Digital Foundry didn't exist back then
Anyway I'll be here to educate you kids about this stuff. I was there. It'll be fun.
>>12243071People knock the RF connector but given adequate signal generation and processing, like you'd find on the business end of a cable plant or what feeds a broadcast TV antenna, you could achieve PERFECT looking signals as good as broadcast or cable, which after all come in over that same connector. But people don't really realize the poor RF connector isn't the problem, but rather the NTSC signal generation and conversion to RF by the adapter unit. Otherwise how could crystal clear TV come in over an antenna or cable?You could blow somebody's mind on /vr/ by talking like this. It actually sounds like a fun HackRF project. See how good of an image you can generate and deliver over the RF connector from some given source. Maybe that's the next level of retro gear nonsense, scalers on steroids.
>>12243023Wii does a weird thing where it only sends Y/C signal when the game region is set to NTSC and RGB signal only when the game region is set to PAL. You can't play NTSC games in color with a SCART cable (the entire screen will be red because SCART input mistakes one part of Y/C for R) unless you force video mode to PAL and some games don't like that. Both video modes support component video.
>>12243479Maybe to help with region locking? Is that a thing on Wii?
>>12243483Yes, Wii is region locked, just like all other Nintendo consoles with disc drives. I highly doubt that the oddity with a SCART cable was an intentional lockout measure though, as it would only affect one region.
>>12242062>4th/5thWhat is this zoomer classification?Nintendo sold s-video from SNES onwards, you just had to buy it separately.
>>12243494>What is this zoomer classification?Blame Wikipedia. They made something up and everybody just adopted it as established terminology.
>>12243494>Nintendo sold s-video from SNES onwards, you just had to buy it separately.yeah that's what i was talking about you braindead fucking boomer i was asking why it wasn't included, go back to bingo night at the old folk's home
>>12243487Well the trick Nintendo or any company would use is to try to make the conversion as generic as possible so they don't have to specialize their regional variants too much. So it's probably an artifact of that. Whatever RAMDAC they used to generate the signals may have had its quirks as I'm sure they all do (did?). A lot of this stuff is completely undocumented of course. People know how to emulate the Wii but they probably couldn't tell you shit about the bit depth or other features of the DACs driving the actual output signal from the frame buffer. Or line by line or however the particulars work - it'd be frame buffer for Wii but the further back you go it becomes more of a mystery and an art.>>12243494It didn't make sense to include it in the package seeing as how many people still had RF sets into the '90s. You bought a new TV like every 10-15 years or so, you might get another TV for the main room and then put the second one in the den or what have you. But TVs were not the toilet paper things we have today. They were huge, heavy, and appropriately expensive. At my house growing up in the '80s we had two televisions, and we were upper middle class at the time. One upstairs in the living room, it was an ENORMOUS and beautiful Mitsubishi Diamondvision (kinda like Trinitron) in a huge wooden cabinet. It was delivered by several large men. It had a flat metal remote where you could just touch the appropriate controls, you didn't need to push a button. It was actually somewhat annoying but it looked very cool. I believe it was a 32" set. It was so impressive that adult normies who came over to the house would comment on how cool the TV was. It had an RCA Video / audio input and RF but no S-Video. And it was top of the line in probably 1988 or so. The other TV we got later and it was newer with a plastic chassis, 24", but it had front RCA and rear S-Video connectors, that must have been in about 1993 when that TV came in.
>>12243501>>12243494Wikipedia "came up with it" because none of you dumb niggers ever bothered to. Now you'll seethe about it until the day you die.
>>12243502>i was asking why it wasn't includedSee >>12242069and >>12242073
>>12242215I couldn't read Dead Rising's text for shit.
>>12243521Generations were a little dodgy, it was a retro-nomism. Everybody knew the Atari was an earlier generation from Master System and NES, and everybody knew that was an earlier generation than SNES and Genesis, but then you had Neo-Geo which was technically the same generation as SNES and Genesis, then later you had 32x and then you had N64 which wasn't precisely aligned with a generation nor was Jaguar or Saturn and Dreamcast was intentionally positioned to come out "between" generations and etc.In retrospect there should be some sort of storage / RAM / MIPS / colors / moving objects on screen be they sprites or triangles / 2D and 3D hardware acceleration and how much / sound generation sort of mult-dimensional map structure which you put everything on with the year as one dimension as well, so you could imagine a manifold which places each system and ranks it by capability weighted by how early it came out. But this is too much for English majors and even marketing people.
>>12243128They don't know what a comb filter does or what what it refers to.
>>12243494How new are you? People have been using that exact terminology on this board since it was created.
>>12242062Most TVs just didn't have them, especially cheaper smaller TVs common for kids bedrooms etc. I never saw a TV with S-Video until like 15 years ago, I didn't even know it was a thing up until then. There were also plenty of TVs that didn't even have composite, RF adapters for each of the major consoles were something I saw at the store all the time even through 6th gen.
>>12242062I'm Australian and I've never seen an S-Video port in my life. For what it's worth, PAL composite is a lot clearer than NTSC composite and looks basically the same as NTSC S-Video.
>>12242062When my parents bought me an SNES it came with a RF switch, composite, and an S-Video cable. I had no idea what to do with S-Video but I had a vague idea that I could plug the yellow and red and white cables into our VCR.
>>12242062I was using an old 1980s console TV with a single coaxial plug until the early 2000s. We connected our VCR through RF and that had composite plugs. I actually only started using s-video and component in the 2010s.
>>12242062Because console designers weren't clueless underage memelings.>>12244006>People have been using that exact terminology on this board since it was created.How new are you?
>>12242062The entire TV-producing industry does collude every now and then to decide on global standards for media formats so every TV is compatible with all the forms of media out there. They decided that USB and HDMI would be the "universal inputs" for media so it's simple, and since it's better than S-video for HD and at the time "future-better" for formats of ultra-HD that didn't even exist at the time, that's what they went with while saving them the costs of producing the physical inputs for a format used by absolutely no one except now-obsolete gaming consoles and DVD players.It really is that simple.They also colluded to keep the fiberoptic inputs on TVs even though the only time I have used it is for headphone amps so I can use headphones on my TV, and that's the ONLY thing I know of that it's useful for.
>>12244215If you aren't familiar with those terms you are obviously a newfag
>>12244273SPDIF is for surround sound receivers you dingus
>>12244292Whatever. It's useful for headphone amps.
>>12244292It's a consumer optical digital format with no clock, it's not designed for high quality.
>>12244454>>12245278>>12244273lmao. zoomer understanding
>>12245301For a digital format to be "good" it has to transmit clock data with the audio frames. It's why they left the clock off consumer digital formats - makes it harder to get a perfect copy of the signal.I've noticed these activity stimulator comments of yours, they're always content-free. Are just sageing the thread and bumping /hhg/ to sell more useless e-waste?
>>12244284>copedy cope projectlol. Fuck off kid.
>>12245402How's that analingus taste
>>12242062Because of what TV's commonly had at the time. it's a very easy answer. Same reason the NES was in mono, stereo wasn't common yet in household TV shit.
>>12242073Only reason I went out and got a new TV that had something other than RF was either the Playstation 3 or the Wii (Can't remember which) literally didn't work through RF. I used RF all the way from Atari 2600 until the end of the PS2 era.By the time the PS3 came out though, I was almost exclusively playing on PC with a VGA and then a DVI cable which looked far better than any console anyway. And then eventually HDMI and DisplayPort came out and consoles started to use those too, so everything was a moot point.
>>12242823>I never even knew composite was supposed to be better until a decade later.Reminds me how I got my first PC monitor with a HDMI port circa 2007, but I didn't even know what HDMI was or meant, so I kept using VGA until circa 2012.
>>12242823That just means you're not a very curious person. Didn't you wonder what those extra cables that came with your systems did?
>>12242062You have to keep in mind that I would say up through 6th gen, video games were strictly seen as a kids thing. And the kids probably didn't get to use dad's big expensive TV in the living room, they had the old hand-me-down zenith brand shitbox that was probably composite at best. You couldn't expect most people to have s-video or component, especially for the kids' TV. So if they're going to include a pack-in cable, it's going to be the lowest common denominator. Which is why they came with RF cables in the 80s and early 90s, and composite cables in the mid 90s onward. >>12242079probably penny-pinching. Cheaper to install one multi-out socket than to include an entire backplate with individual jacks for composite, s-video, stereo audio, etc. That and not enough space. Stereo receivers and VCRs had all those inputs/outputs on the back, but they were also a hell of a lot larger
>>12242079>so that users could use regular cables they already own?cost reduction of the hardware is more important than your time and money. a console manufacturer saves money on manufacturing costs just using a proprietary thing that consolidates audio/video/etc. in one plug than a series of rca ports+svideo etc. they also get to make more money selling the proprietary cables. when things like scart / sivdeo etc. came about, nobody thought about forcing electronics manufacturers to comply with any standard since the market place was full of people using wildly different monitor/television configurations and support. as long as it supported one standard it was good enough.
>>12242079>Were there massive profits they could earn by selling their own cables?Yes.
>>12242062ameripoors didn't have s-video
>>12248179We did, it's just /vr/ has a lot of users on it that grew up playing on shitty budget 13" "walmart special" budget CRTs that lacked it. The slightly older and burgeoning AV-fags of the time period sought out the back of the living room television and inspected it to discover the neglected composite and sometimes even s-video ports.
>>12247710I figured they were for stereo sound
>>12242079What "industry standard outputs" do you imagine they didn't use?
