P2 - empty line between in movie

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Hi, I have read through most of the post here but I cannot find any info about this problem.

Basically, I am trying to play the Privateer 2 game. I am able to run it in dosbox 0.74 and also in the window mode (with the DOStoWindow patch) without any problem, however, in both cases, whenever the movie comes up, I noticed there are numerous horizontial empty/black line which scatter on the screen with almost same distance. The most obivous is when the game start up and the Origin logo pops, there was one screen that is suppose full white, but instead mine is scatter with black lines

Have anyone encounter the same problem? I even go as far as to decode the movie with ffmpeg, and those movie in the movie directory doesn't have those mysterious line....

My guess is it have something to do with the resolution but no matter how I change the resolution setting in dosbox, the line still appear, can anyone help?

Most appreciated. Thanks
 
It's not a *problem* per se. It's how the game was made. The game interlaces the movies. Back when people all had 13 and 14 inch monitors it wasn't an issue. But now, with larger monitors the norm, the interlace lines end up looking huge.

With the windows version of WC4 has a command line switch to turn off the interlacing and Prophecy allows you to do it from a menu within the game but I don't recall any way to do it in Privateer 2. Playing around with some of dosbox' alternate rendering modes and various resizing options might yield more reasonable results though.
 
What I still don't get is why the heck people EVER though this was good looking, even on a 14" Monitor. For me interlacing was always worse then low resolution.
 
Without the interlacing, it's easy to see the blocky compression artefacts in the videos. By spacing the rows in the low-resolution videos, the eye attempts to 'fill in the gaps' as a natural part of the way the human eye works. I remember experimenting with the two options in Prophecy and eventually chose to stick with the interlacing.

But that's why they had it as an option. So if you didn't like it, you weren't stuck with it.

Of course, we have high(er) resolution options for WC4 and Prophecy available, fortunately.
 
cff said:
What I still don't get is why the heck people EVER though this was good looking, even on a 14" Monitor. For me interlacing was always worse then low resolution.
Click to expand...

Ditto. I find interlacing only looks acceptable if the video is hi res and about the size of a postage stamp, the wide lines in P2 look awful to me. Another issue with interlacing is that it has the effect of darkening the appearance of the video.

Was this just a cosmetic choice though, or was it implemented in order to reduce workload on the rather weak computers of the day?
 
I see. I too guess that have something to do with the "running old game with new technology", but didn't realize it is the hardware (monitor size) that is causing it.

Thanks a million!
 
Apart from the sheer size of the picture, on a CRT screen those black lines would appear to be less sharp, because the adjancent lines of the picture would "smooth over" into the black lines... I hope you get what I mean, maybe someone could word it better?
 
I think what you mean is the very nature of a CRT screen - electrons striking a phosphor screen - means that there will be some 'bleed-through' between the alternating rows of video. On flat panel screens, pixels on the monitor match the pixels on the displayed image (assuming the display is running at the monitor's native resolution), so the distinction between the video and the black lines becomes much clearer.
 
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