Force progressive mode for cores that have interlaced output

[ReaperMan02]

Greetings,

So, I would like to propose a feature request to where we can select an option for forcing progressive mode for cores that have the option of displaying interlaced modes (Genesis, SNES, and PSX immediately come to mind, especially PSX),

The primary reason I'm requesting this feature is mainly due to the fact that deinterlacing video is just plain awful and is a real pain to get right. Having the option to output progressive video, while obviously it would be inaccurate, would be a nice quality of life feature to have for those that often record game footage.

Probably would be trivial to implement, relatively speaking. It could either be implemented as a per core option (maybe global?) or possibly as an option in the video recording configuration. Please take my request into consideration. Thanks!

[Spikestuff]

"Forcing" isn't beneficial for the main power users that requires Interlaced Mode (Encoders/Publishers).

More or less having an option to enable a Progressive scan, with Bobbing/Blending (something Octoshock has for instance) is what you can probably get/request.

[ReaperMan02]

That's what I meant, a selectable option to force outputting a progressive frame instead of an interlaced one. It would be opt in, of course. Not sure how flexible that would be as I don't know how these cores pass rendering to Bizhawk, but for PSX for instance, it should be as easy as just copying the entire framebuffer instead of every other line, though to be fair, I haven't looked at VRAM to determine how that's handled. I probably should.

[CasualPokePlayer]

Probably would be trivial to implement

It is very much not. The way force progressive hacks work is abusing that internally the game is actually rendering progressive in the first place (i.e. rendering both sets of scanlines within the same frame), but just ends up displaying it as interlaced. Not every game actually does this, the rate at which games do this would vary depending on the system (for some systems, like the GC and Wii, this is a common practice, other systems might not be a common practice). The complexity in implementing this kind of hack too varies depending on the system (for old systems like the SNES and GPGX, it's much more complex to implement, at least for "accurate" rendering).

If a game doesn't do it, trying to force progressive can have unexpected results, depending on how the game is trying to implement interlaced rendering. It could be fairly harmless, maybe just being the same as weave or bob deinterlacing. It could just be a completely broken result.

As a note, BSNESv115+ already does "force progressive" for the "fast PPU" option.

[Spikestuff]

Pretty sure these are related.
Request: Is this possible (temporal antialiasing) - #496
[Feature Request] Nyma Cores - Bob deinterlacer for interlaced modes. - #3196

[CasualPokePlayer]

The first one is unrelated, the second is just wanting to expose other deinterlacing modes, forcing progressive output is not deinterlacing, it's simply displaying a progressive image as it may be the case the game internally renders as progressive anyways, but ends up displaying as interlaced (typically just due to having full resolution progressive be unavailable for display).

[ReaperMan02]

I feel I should clarify that I wasn't asking for a deinterlacing solution (I can deinterlace on my own, it's just an ugly solution in general), but a progressive mode solution.
Decided ted to fire up Tekken 3 as I know it's interlaced and the interlacing happens on the framebuffer, apparently, so it isn't as trivial as I had envisioned. Not sure how difficult it would be to address in that case (it's entirely possible that Mednafen does this incorrectly and it's a progressive image on a real playstation)

[ReaperMan02]

Decided to look into this further and apparently the PSX literally renders the framebuffer in interlaced mode, so it appears as though it would take a bit to patch a progressive hack into the core.
As for the other consoles like the Genesis, they handle rendering a bit differently given their tile-based rendering, so maybe it wouldn't be as difficult to implement?