Dreamcast SVid better than ATI??

[Procyon]

Last night I finally burned the Atari 800 emulator for Dreamcast and gave it a whirl.  Holy moly, that thing is incredible.  And I was playing it for a while until a thought occured to me... Could this actually be looking better than the output from my computer with an ATI Radeon 7500?  I thought that would be impossible, but I fired the computer up just to take a look...

Oh man, the difference was insane.  I have no smoothing turned on in the Atari800Win emu, but the edges of the pixels were still kind of blurry, yet on the Dreamcast, they were razor sharp!  And black backgrounds were solid black on the Dreamcast, yet they were ever so slightly grayish coming from the Radeon.

Would any of you happen to know why this is?  And how I might be able to get my Radeon to output S-Video with the same quality as the Dreamcast?  I'm using Monster2 S-Video cables for the Radeon, so I don't think it's them.  How could they be worse than the standard 1st party Sega S-Video cables?  Thanks for any  replies.

[tom61]

The Dreamcast was designed, from the ground up, for TV use. PC cards pretty much have TV-out tacked on as an afterthought. Since you're already using Monster cables, that's probably close to the best you're going to get out of your card. You might try playing with the TV settings in your card's drivers, you might be able to tweak out a little better picture.

[Trenchbroom]

You might try playing with the TV settings in your card's drivers, you might be able to tweak out a little better picture.

Yes, definitely play with those.  Also don't forget the separate brightness settings within MAME itself.  I was very unhappy w/ my S-Video TV and ATI card when I first got it because the colors were always washed out and the black was a dark grey color.  When I finally figured out that MAME had separate brightness controls I was able to set the brightness controls for the TV and the card fairly low and then adjust the brightness for each individual game through MAME.  Made a big difference.