A New Visual Experience In Emulated Games

[Prometheus]

That's probably not possible on all Game Gear titles, for what it's worth. I seem to recall that DrSMS, which supported the Game Gear, had the option to turn off the "GG mask". On some games, it would widen the viewport (this looked quite neat if you were playing your Game Gear games on a Game Boy Advance, for example), but on others all you would see was a confusing mess.

(Also, I'm not entirely sure that throttling down the Game Gear's higher number of on-screen colours is really an "enhancement"... )

 

[Exophase]

Probably the biggest reason this works on any GG games is because they were ports from SMS. Normally this style of programming wouldn't really make any sense.

 

[Prometheus]

There are a couple of games that were Game Gear exclusives (the one that springs to mind most readily is Tails Adventures, which a friend of mine once pointed out can have its viewport enlarged like this) where this should work, if memory serves.

Mind you, I'm just going on the fact that they displayed fine when "GG mask" was off in DrSMS, though...

 

[Exophase]

I'm sure there were exceptions, I just think it'd occur more than you'd expect in GG games, because of the heritage. Those exclusive could have also been extending legacy engines that were once for SMS.

 

[Prometheus]

Mm, Tails Adventures almost certainly would have been doing that - it was, as far as I know, made by Aspect, who I'm pretty sure probably re-used their platformer engine (or parts of it, at least) a lot of times between the Game Gear and Master System (if memory serves, they were responsible for all of the Disney-licensed games on the two, as well as every 8-bit Sonic The Hedgehog title from Sonic The Hedgehog 2 onwards, at the very least).

 

[-Tj-]

I'd like to jump in and (hopefully) add to this conversation, regarding the OP's idea.

If you could decode the tile maps and the placement of items/enemies in the level, it's possible you could do what you're thinking. However, depending on if the background has any kind of effects going on, enemy AI, and other things, you may or may not get what you're picturing in your head. For example, some enemies are not activated till they're within a certain distance from the screen's draw area. Even if they were activated, they might just sit there till you're within the activation distance.

Graphically, something like Zelda might work, where there's nothing special going on with the tiles on the backgrounds other than maybe some tile swapping or palette swapping for animation, however on something like the Sonic games, the background relies on hblank scrolling (did I get that right? it's been a while since I worked in that industry), which may render 'ok' on the horizontal pixels around the original's resolution, but might look really bizarre above and below that. It's even possible that you would get a background image that's not big enough for the target resolution because it was never intended to go beyond the native resolution.

Were I to guess, this might need to be done on a per-game level. Depending on the software and the game engine used to make the game, one company may compress their data differently from another, and even the same company may use a different system for the very next game.

I imagine this kind of thing is not impossible, but it might not be worth the effort in many cases. Like the others have said, you may see something you weren't supposed to see. You might see secret areas you never saw because you didn't know they were there (maybe good) or you may see broken bits of levels where the level designer left parts to clone to other areas (maybe bad). Maybe you might see a message a designer left for hackers (something I'd thought about doing at one point for games I've worked on).

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Bottom line, not impossible, but perhaps too much trouble for too little gain. It might be a fun way to play a tired old game though.

 

[TitanUranus]

Well, what about.. and ok this is just a random shot in the dark but probably more viable as a means to produce a screen widening 'effect' than the sophisticated methods talked about so far, but what if you used some aspect ratio distortion in the manner of smart stretching where the picture is progressively stretched horizontally. Now before you all lambast my idea I have an added suggestion. We all know smart stretch works by stretching the center (focal point) least and the edges progressively more - which can look very good on a 4:3 picture scaled to 16:9 (I'm a film historian, I know about aspect ratios and they drive me mental, especially when some arsehole is sitting watching something in the wrong aspect ratio and everyone looks like matchsticks or weebles). However, this would look shit with a sprite that's running from screen corner to screen corner - rapidly changing it's dimensions as it goes. Unless.. and here's the clever part, unless the MAIN sprite (ie player sprite) was the focal point and could be tracked so where ever it went it was normal size - the rest of the screen was stretched on the fly accordingly. Obviously this would still look shite for a lot of games but could work ok on others. Probably not worth the hassle though - just thought I'd drop in one of my random ideas.

EDIT: Forgot to mention - I hate people who mess with aspect ratios, leave them the way they were meant to be. Maybe some variable smart stretch would be acceptable, but I doubt it. Video games are art - you wouldn't 'bend' the Mona Lisa just to fit it in a nice new picture frame you bought now would you?

 

[bzar]

^ That would probably look kinda trippy in a fast paced shmup

EDIT: Thinking about it, some games with a suitable context like Life Force could actually get an atmospheric boost from an effect like this

 

[Luminous]

Re: Pleng's idea, if it was done in an ordered fashion (say, top left to bottom right for a given block of pixels) it could be more of a gradient than a dither. I'm sure that's far easier said than done of course.

Apparently there was a Gameboy emu a few years back that added colour to the original monochrome games, I remember EvilDragon talking about it.

That's because those games have support for colour in the way the palettes work. You could make a tool for GB games which would allow you to inject colour in to them.

Do want. I liked the ability to play regular GB games on my GBC (like donkey kong land) and modify the monochrome to my own preferred colors. Hope this gets implemented, even in the far future.

 

[Ollonk]

The only color scheme I remembered was the trippy one you got by pressing Down+B at the gameboy screen. Ah, good times.

 

[fearofshorts]

I think we should compile a nice database of games which have no interesting information up the top or bottom of the screen. There, cropping!

The rest would have to be played in a normal res. though... Well, it's one (relatively easy) solution anyway.