To me your screen shot looks just as bad in other ways (dithering / scan line / jagged). Can you get me one in Kalm in the same place I took the Mednafen shot? I can put them all along side then too.
Yeah the jaggedness and lines going here and there was definitely my bad, the display was configured like bollocks so it stretched the image one way and shrunk it the other way. Dithering, however, is unavoidable, simply because it is a PS1 game. Still, the fact that the dithering is visible through even a shitty screenshot, is a testament to how much more accurate the Component signal is next to that old PAL/NTSC crap.
I can get a Kalm screenshot too, but it'll probably take a couple hours because I need to fiddle around with save files and get them on the Memcard.
Update: Well, here it is. This time around, I decided to use the screen (HDTV) I always use for pretty much everything since the other one turned out to be a big hunk of $#!!.
Now,
this picture will only tell you so much, but it confirmed my gut feeling. The pixellation is very much there, but then again so is that dithering, because, well, HDTV. Also, using an external camera to make screencaps for this sort of purpose is bad since each screen has adjustable sharpness and brightness and all that (although mine are set to default.) It also adds that blue tint and the picture is much brighter than the image itself was.
So, just for reference, I wanted to see what another emulator produces. With a color depth of 32 bits, there is obviously no dithering involved, and no external camera involved.
Which results in this.I may have been wrong the first time. Neither PS2 nor ePSXe look like they make an effort to blur the image in any way, unless instructed otherwise. The blurring is not part of the game, it's part of the displays of that era. Mednafen might be simply trying to replicate that, because it's often considered part of the nostalgic experience. I know the GPU plugin I use with ePSXe has an option for fullscreen smoothing, which produces an almost identical result, but if it's disabled, it doesn't blur anything.
What do you make of this?