Color Bleed on TV (Any Fix?)

[mr.Curmudgeon]

Hello,

I've run MAME on several TV's in my home and one thing I've noticed, on both a 27" Sony Trinitron and my 36" Wega in the living room, there tends to be some extreme "bleeding" with the color Red. (ex: the Robotron attract demo)...

I know it probably has something to do with acceptable NTSC "broadcast" color ranges. I have messed with the color and brightness settings and it clears up a bit, but it's still really noticeable and I find it pretty distracting during gameplay.

My questions are:

Is there a setting in MAME to tone down specific color frequencies?

Is there a way to adjust this inside the TV to make red less "hot"?
I can only adjust the overall color in the tv menu, not specific colors.

Would a genuine arcade monitor be immune to this sort of "color bleeding"?

Any other way to fix this? Hardware adapters, etc....or might it just be an issue with my video card.

I've read through the monitor vs. TV site, but I haven't seen anything on color fidelity, per se. Maybe noone else has this issue.

mrC

[menace]

I'm not sure about your tv but most have specific color pots on the neckboard that you can adjust to enhance or reduce a color--sounds like your red gun has been upped a notch.

look for something called red drive or somesuch.  you can also run the sente diagnostic cartridge in mame for a nice set of color bars to use as a guide.

[b3atmania]

The source of colourbleeding might be the signal. Try to use RGB (SCART) first, then S-video and only use composite video as a last resort. Composite video is well known for color bleeding.

If that doesn't fix it, you might want to enter the service menu on your TV. The service menu is ment for service engineers and factory calibration. Sony TVs useally require some mad remote control button sequence to activate it. Search the net for how to do it.

When changing something in the service menu make sure you copy all the current settings to paper first, so you can change it back if something goes wrong.

[mr.Curmudgeon]

The service menu tip was the sort of thing I'm looking for, since I'd rather mess with stuff outside the TV first.  

The red bleed appears on both S-Video and Composite and it is the only color that looks that way. It resembles a horizontal smear on any text/object that is pure red, making it really difficult to read.

I'll look into the service menu option, then go from there, since if I can fix it the picture will be pretty close to perfect.

Thanks for all the advice so far.
mrC

[mr.Curmudgeon]

b3atmania:
That "secret" service menu is a goldmine. I'm miffed I've had a sony TV all this time and never knew about it.  

It looks like the red drive setting is fine, since turning it down doesn't change anything. However, when I adjust the "red pin" setting I can see a slight improvement, but trouble is I can't turn it down less than "0". The red still looks messy.

Is there any other adjustments I might make to clear it up?
Or is it time to do adjust something inside the TV?

thanks again,
mrC

[Trenchbroom]

One thing that is often overlooked is that MAME itself has some contrast and brightness controls in the program.  So you have to play with 3 sets of picture controls:  the TV, the video card, and MAME.  

It took me a LONG time to get  all 3 synced up where I was happy with the picture but after a few hours I was able to get rid of the color bleed on my Panasonic S-Video.  Just take your time with it.

[mr.Curmudgeon]

I'll give it a shot....I guess I overlooked that as well.  

[Xiaou2]

 Nothings gona help much... especially if you are using composite.

 When you take the signals Red, Green, Blue, Greyscale, (and sync?).. and mash them together (as composite does), theres going to be a huge loss of color and detail information.   This is why the colors are faded or bleed.

 Red is a Dominate color - brighter than blue and green... thus even with its loss it ends up overpowering the other colors.  

 Svideo will help a Lot... but even that has the problem.  (i turn down the color saturation to help reduce the running... but at a cost of less vivid green and blues)

  Someone wrote a patch for mame once that allowed direct RGB outout manipulation for the user...but sadly it never got instituted into the official mame.  I think that would have helped dramatically...

 Im currently looking into Component converters.  Ive heard converters arnt that good - but maybe thats cause they were the older composite/svideo ones.  Component has more color information - so should be much better picture on my tv.  I guess mine has 480i capability thru the component inputs. (panasonic 27")

 

[mr.Curmudgeon]

I am using S-video and after hours of messing with it, your right, nothing seems to help.

However, that "patch" sounds exactly like what I'd need, is it still available? If not, maybe I'll have to buy an arcade monitor after all.

[Harry Potter]

The red bleeding is quite common on TVs (no matter how new they are) if you're using any type of analogue signal (ie composite, S-video, Component). It is most noticable if you have something like (for example) a solid red circle/square on a white background.

I have an LG 68cm TV (about 1 year old) and I get the same problem using Component output from the DVD player.

Lowering the contrast will improve it a bit but unless you have seperate RGB signals going into it, you're outta luck.

Fix: Get an arcade monitor

[mr.Curmudgeon]

It's funny, but I didn't think such a little thing would be such a major annoyance. It's so subtle, yet it totally removes that authentic arcade feel. The games (since they are a little fuzzy on a TV, and the color bleeds) feel (subconsciously) like they are in another dimension and not right in front of you.

So I guess the hunt for an arcade monitor begins.