Taking Old Games Into The HD Era

With all the recent coverage of Street Fighter II HD Remix I’m sure many of you gamers throughout the world have been wanting to see what other classics might look like if they were “remastered.” Thankfully we don’t have to wait for game studios to do it themselves as these days everyone has access to filters in older game system emulators that let you see what 2D and 3D games look like with a technology called anti-aliasing.

Wikipedia Says: In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution.

So what’s the difference between just applying a AA filter and actually remaking a 2D game for HD? This comparison picture from racketboy explains things easily.

As you can see actual remake sprites are increased in size and bit depth to present more detail, while applying AA to old sprites just makes edges smoother while not increasing detail as is shown below (Via NeoGAF).

And what about 3D? Well in 3D actual remakes make higher detailed 3D models and higher resolution textures for the models while AA on old games is just a filter applied to every frame presented to the user. Perhaps the best visualization of this is Final Fantasy VII which had some R&D remake screens released awhile back.

Here is FF VIII with AA in the emulator ePSXe:

Here it is in ePSXe with AA turned on:

And here is Square Enix’s tech demo remake:

So while remakes will always certainly look better, applying AA to old 2D and 3D games make them a lot more visually appealing in many circumstances.

So what’s the deal Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo? Why don’t you have all kinds of AA options for Virtual Console, PS1, PS2, and XBOX titles? Yes I know PS1 games have an AA option on the PS2 and PS3 but it’s really not that great. It’s baffling these huge companies haven’t implemented something like this as the coding is easy enough and could even be set to auto detect games and instantly apply the best AA for the specific title.

Maybe we’ll get more visual options with the Playstation 4 and XBOX 720 but who knows. Until then enjoy the differences on your local emulator with games you own of course!