There are no options in the game and looking through the games folder there are no setup options there either. Just a list of .smk video files in the vids folder. I don't know but if its going to be possible to remove those scan lines you would probably need to open those up and rencode them or something along those lines.



I think I remember the lines when I ran the original boxed copy under Windows 98. It may be done for artistic purposes, but I suspect it's more likely to keep file sizes down. The videos are in Smacker format and Wikipedia talks a little bit about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smacker_video.

You can try downloading the free Rad Video Tools to recompress those videos and deinterlace them, although the result might actually look worse due to the low resolution.

http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm

This was an early and cheap way to keep movie sizes down, especially for FMV. Keep in mind that this was made before good video codecs and fast processors, RED ALERT and other early C&C titles did the same thing.

Could they not have doubled the lines on playback? That would have still save the same amount of space, but it wouldn't look like you've got a tiny set of Venetian blinds in front of your screen.

Line doubling could have been an option but without a really good filter it's going to look terrible. A filter that doubles the lines and then smooths them would have been too much for most machines of the day. There were CPUs that could do It, but the system buses weren't made for the extra bandwidth required. A dedicated optimised codec would have worked but you'd be shutting out the half of the market with the slower machines.

I didn't say anything about smoothing, I literally just meant draw each line twice (or 'double thickness' if you like). This would have prevented the darkening effect of having every other line black.
I don't see why it would look terrible really. The resolution of the video would be the same, each line would just be thicker.

EDIT: Just to demonstrate, I downloaded a screenshot of one of the cutscenes and messed around in GIMP.

The .jpg is the original, the .png is after line doubling. What I literally did was copied the screenshot onto two layers, made all of the black scanlines in the upper layer transparent and then moved it up by one pixel so it was in front of the scan lines on the lower layer.

That actually looks OK. I take it back.

My experience of scanline doubling is mostly with retro console and arcade emulators. It can look absolutely awful with pixel art. Many arcade games also designed their pixel art with scanlines in mind. The raytraced lighting and shading in the Sanitarium FMV renders help avoid the chunky effect you can get, I guess.

One thing the scanlines did help with though was to hide the artifacts caused by the compression. I didn't really notice them with the scanlines but once you double them, there are artifacts everywhere!

Here's a patch I made to remove the scanlines. Detailed instructions are included, but the short version is 'Extract to your Vids folder, then run patch.cmd'. This should work fine in Windows - for other systems you may have to find a suitable replacement for bpatch, but the patches themselves are probably fine. Please let me know if you have any problems!

I just installed your patch. I have Windows 10 and it worked perfectly.

exmensa patch does not seems to work with FR version because video files are different from EN.

To remove scanlines, what you need is to open each video file and change byte at position 20 (or 0x14 in hex) from 02 to 04. You can do that with any hex editor (like HxD).