This last year has been like a Renaissance for Wii homebrew. Lots of new apps and long awaited updates have appeared and things feel as exciting as in the late 2000's when Wii homebrew started. It doesn't matter if AI is involved in this development, I congratulate the people crafting these apps for gathering the knowledge and expending their time working on improving the Wii experience.
However, I am experiencig one big issue that hasn't happened up until now: some apps have added a 240p mode and when I turn it on I get a red tinted image. It's like playing on the Virtual Boy. I'm using a PAL Wii on a PAL CRT TV with RGB cable. It's possibly the best image quality you can get from a Wii, speacially in 240p, but the experience is ruined.
The only similar thing that happened in the past was when paying Virtual Console NTSC games in a PAL Wii with RGB. The image will have this red tint, but using a composite video cable will get the colours back in exchange for a blurrier and unstable image. Since that wasn't hombrew it felt like it's own thing that would remain like that forever. Luckily this has been fixed recently,
At that time, all the emulators that supported 240p just displayed right. When @SuperrSonic added "double strike" to Wiimc it displayed right. Wiistation added 240p and it works as expected. In 20 years I haven't encountered any other instance where I saw the red tint.
The first time was in @Mayo1990 's port of Quake III when the experimental 240p and 264p where added. 264p displayed well (except for the wrong aspect ratio and zoomed image) but 240p was red. Since Mayo1990 said it was experimental and that game was design for high resolutions I didn't give it much thought.
Then @emukidid added a 240p toggle to Wii64 and it worked well until release 1.4.2. From 1.4.3 onward I get the red tint again. I was able to fix it in the settings.cfg where you can force 240 putting "VideoMode = 2". This makes the menu display in 240p at default too and makes the 240p menu toggle useless (you can't go back to interlace mode).
And lastly, Seta-GX received the 0.4 update with 240p support. This release is specially troublesome because it runs at 480p by default and nothing displays on my CRT. With the right button sequence you can run a game in 240p mode but it's red tinted. You can't change to interlace either so this is the worst case scenario. Fortunately, Z-GX alternative works perfect in 240p.
Why is this issue sudently happening? Is it not easy to implement? Isn't documentation clear enough? Has a bug beeing introduced in the libraries? Is it not proper testing? Is it because developers can't test it with real hardware and equipment?
This souldn't be treated as a rant. I know developing these apps is a process that gets perfected throught iterations. I just want to warn the developers that this issue is happening in case they are not aware. I think this should be considered. I'm sure lots of PAL users are having this issue too. Maybe they can express themselves in this topic to point out the importance of the problem.
Thanks and take care.
However, I am experiencig one big issue that hasn't happened up until now: some apps have added a 240p mode and when I turn it on I get a red tinted image. It's like playing on the Virtual Boy. I'm using a PAL Wii on a PAL CRT TV with RGB cable. It's possibly the best image quality you can get from a Wii, speacially in 240p, but the experience is ruined.
The only similar thing that happened in the past was when paying Virtual Console NTSC games in a PAL Wii with RGB. The image will have this red tint, but using a composite video cable will get the colours back in exchange for a blurrier and unstable image. Since that wasn't hombrew it felt like it's own thing that would remain like that forever. Luckily this has been fixed recently,
At that time, all the emulators that supported 240p just displayed right. When @SuperrSonic added "double strike" to Wiimc it displayed right. Wiistation added 240p and it works as expected. In 20 years I haven't encountered any other instance where I saw the red tint.
The first time was in @Mayo1990 's port of Quake III when the experimental 240p and 264p where added. 264p displayed well (except for the wrong aspect ratio and zoomed image) but 240p was red. Since Mayo1990 said it was experimental and that game was design for high resolutions I didn't give it much thought.
Then @emukidid added a 240p toggle to Wii64 and it worked well until release 1.4.2. From 1.4.3 onward I get the red tint again. I was able to fix it in the settings.cfg where you can force 240 putting "VideoMode = 2". This makes the menu display in 240p at default too and makes the 240p menu toggle useless (you can't go back to interlace mode).
And lastly, Seta-GX received the 0.4 update with 240p support. This release is specially troublesome because it runs at 480p by default and nothing displays on my CRT. With the right button sequence you can run a game in 240p mode but it's red tinted. You can't change to interlace either so this is the worst case scenario. Fortunately, Z-GX alternative works perfect in 240p.
Why is this issue sudently happening? Is it not easy to implement? Isn't documentation clear enough? Has a bug beeing introduced in the libraries? Is it not proper testing? Is it because developers can't test it with real hardware and equipment?
This souldn't be treated as a rant. I know developing these apps is a process that gets perfected throught iterations. I just want to warn the developers that this issue is happening in case they are not aware. I think this should be considered. I'm sure lots of PAL users are having this issue too. Maybe they can express themselves in this topic to point out the importance of the problem.
Thanks and take care.
