SNES plugged through S-Video has "shaky" image

Hi there,

I have an SNES hooked up to my LCD TV through S-Video. Lately I've noticed that on some games, the whole screen kinda shakes or vibrates when certain sprites or objects are moving. Say in Gradius III's weapon selection screen, it will occur if I change which weapon set I use by going up or down. I've checked cable connections and restarted the machine.

I've also retested it just now and the problem doesn't occur. I wonder if it's related to heat.

I'm not sure what's going on. Any idea? Also, I'm running games from the PowerPak.

Thanks!
DJCC

Your LCD TV probably doesn't support 240p video, which is what most games have the SNES output. It's not standard, though most game systems before the PS2 and GameCube ran in 240p. It's possible to hack SNES games to run in interlace mode, which might help.

Most older game systems are best run on analog CRTs. Digital displays such as modern HDTVs are poorly suited for the old machines. Another option would be to get one of the upscaler devices hookup between the system and your HDTV. Something like the XRGB series, however they are expensive enough that buying a analog CRT TV might be easier.

The problem seems to be intermittent. I'd say about 3/4 the time it's fine. Would the possible explanations in the two previous posts still be valid?

I don't have direct experience, but I know that TVs these days have tons of flaky image enhancement algorithms that have endless corner cases. I wouldn't be surprised if there was one that tried to do things with fields and motion, and was getting confused by the 240p signal and sometimes looking OK, sometimes doing annoying things. By far the best approach is to keep a CRT TV around for playing the PS2 and GameCube and earlier. If space is a premium, a line doubler or TV that uses a good equivalent chip inside might suffice. I'm sure people have discussed this on other forums and made a list of TVs that work decently with these older consoles.

Good thing I still have a CRT for EVERYTHING. Hell, when I had an Xbox 360 in my room, I played it on a CRT!

You'll need a CRT anyway to play Zapper, Menacer, Super Scope, and Guncon games.

I got a free 42" plasma TV that I might be able to repair, but I still probably won't use it over my 27" CRT for anything. SNES was terrible on it. As far as I can tell, the only use for modern digital TVs is for 1080p source material or as a computer monitor. Lacking a modern console, Blu-Ray player, or interest in watching TV, that's out.

Well, I don't totally agree for the following reasons :
1) CRTs are HUUUUGE. It really takes place in your house.
2) Modern TVs accept both NTSC and PAL, and have all kind of AV inputs which is a nice thing. CRTs typically only accepts the standard of the country you live, and will display a monocrome image at best, or a shaky monochrome image at worst (unless you have one of the latest generations)
3) Modern TVs doesn't have this annoying beeping sound at 15kHz

I have one of the brand Panasonic and it works fine for old games. If I kept the original settings things were looking horrible but I just had to enable a lowpass filter somewhere in the setting and it looked great. The only problem is with flickering which is interpreted as interlaced. This can get somewhat annoying but is never a game breaker.

Also de-interlacing algorithms is a complex thing. It's common for the TV to attempt to detect movement on the screen, and keep the framerate up with filtered image when there is movement, while dividing the framerate by 2 but have higher resolution when there is no movement.
This of course was designed in order to look great with films, but will not work well with video games.

Weird, what's the point of the IR receiver mess it came with then if it seems to mostly be a Zapper?

The Super Scope's big improvement over the Zapper is that it's designed to provide precise positional input by timing the scanning process. Its timing is accurate down to roughly 1 or 2 pixels for two reasons: hardware support and the fact that it ignores red.

The Super NES doesn't rely on the program to poll the controller port repeatedly; instead, it counts pixels in the background. In Zap Ruder, I could get vertical readings from the Zapper down to the scanline, but it's impossible to poll more often than once every six CPU cycles (18 pixels).

Red phosphors are slower to light up and slower to cool down, so they don't provide as clear of a timing signal to the circuit. The Zapper appears to sample all visible light, causing a variable delay of between 0 and 100 pixels between when the electron gun passes where the gun is aimed and when the light becomes bright enough to detect. The Super Scope, on the other hand, is reported to have a cyan filter.

And that's why Thwaite uses the mouse rather than the Zapper: because it needs positional input rather than just hit detection.

The IR receiver allowed the Super Scope to be wireless.

Ah, I forgot it was wireless.