480P issues on a westy, black lines

Sounds like a known bug with the way Wii (and GameCube as well I think) do transparency in some cases. You see it mostly in misty or foggy scenes right? It's just a graphics bug that shows up more with progressive scan mode.

If you mean lines like are showing here around the windows, it's just the graphics. Which sucks.

I've seen that glitch on my GC (480p only) and Wii, on both a Dell 2405fpw and a Westinghouse LVM-42w2 1080p display. I think it's a hardware problem with transparency stuff, like the poster above said.

Is this supposed to happen with all Wii Consoles or just happens with a few?

How can i test with mine if i have the same problem?

Thanks

What I posted is normal, some people see it, some don't. Some are bothered by it, some aren't. It's a glitch, not a defect.

There is a GPU problem going around, but it shows up most often as random flickering red, green, or black pixels, not lines. That is a defect and Nintendo will replace the console in that event.

I have seen the lines on 37'' Polaroid LCD,but not on a 42'' Philips LCD.

This occurs as a result of 16-bit color rendering. The Gamecube and Wii are both limited by a 3mb framebuffer (why oh why didn't they increase this for Wii?!). As a result, developers often have to resort to a 16-bit color display mode...which the GC/Wii happen to display very poorly (extremely dithered output). There are games out there which use 24-bit color, but it seems that 16-bit color is more common.

Even if the system had been capable of outputting in HD resolutions, this memory limitation would prevent it from ever happening. I believe the Wii is strong enough to handle some games in 720p (more simplistic titles). Afterall, the original XBOX had its fair share of 720p games (including many running at 60 fps). Something like Wii Sports would have been possible in 720p had they allowed the output AND provided a larger framebuffer. I can't imagine that the cost would have been too great either.

Believe it or not, the PS2 actually has a larger framebuffer (4mb rather than 3mb). The lack of high quality texture compression and overall system memory was more of an issue there, though.

The lines showing around the windows are actually pretty accurate. What's the problem there?

Surely not? I've played many a game I know was rendered in 16-bit color over my years of PC gaming without any such issue.

Surely so. That *IS* the reason.

The quality of 16-bit rendering varies per chipset, however (this is why you may not see it on your PC). GC/Wii titles using 24-bit color do not suffer from those defects, however. This is why stuff like Metroid Prime and F-Zero GX are so clean (24-bit color) while Zelda TP and Wind Waker were so incredibly grainy.


The lines aren't the problem (as they are simply a part of the geometry used in that scene); it's the color dithering.

So what other 'chipset' that will produce the same effect as a result of rendering in 16-bit, or is that not the reason despite your insistence to the contrary? Looks to me like more like Zelda is just conserving RAM by rendering transparent effects at half the vertical resolution and overlaying them by spacing them out to every other scanline.

Voodoo 1 and 2, nVidia GeForce (early series) and TNT, plus a whole host of others. The voodoo cards have some nasty horizontal lines along with minor dithering and the earlier nVidia cards had EXTREMELY severe dithering in 16-bit color. The PSP has some pretty serious dithering artifacts while rendering in 16-bit as well.

There's nothing mysterious about this. That IS the problem. Games rendered in 24-bit color DO NOT exhibit such issues while 16-bit titles do. I'm mainly referring to dithering, by the way, but those vertical lines that show up in certain scenes are also artifacts of that issue.

I've used all those cards in my days with many a game, so know what the dithering of 16-bit color looks like on them, and that is quite different from the scanline-like effect seen in Zelda.

Yes, but they all have severe dithering problems. Voodoo cards (until Voodoo 3, which solved the issues) in particular have more of a horizontal line issue rather than vertical.

I was originally talking about dithering (which is what I see in that screenshot above) while you are talking about something else entirely (vertical line pattern).

I have witnessed the vertical line issue on Sega Dreamcast in certain situations, however, and it is most common on Gamecube and Wii. It only occurs in 16-bit rendering mode, however. Games which run in 24-bit DO NOT suffer from that issue. That's all there is to it. Those lines are the result of poor 16-bit color output.

Are you sure your Wii isnt placed too close to your TV?? Placing your Wii close to your TV can cause annoying Flickering lines on the picture.
It did for me until I placed my Wii further from the screen.

Thanks Nintendo Customer Support!!

The black lines shown in the picture isn't an interference issue, it's simply how the game is designed. I dug around a bit more and found it was likely an optimsation done for the Gamecube version that simply carried over to the Wii, a performance saving method know called "stipple alpha."