Emulator Fullscreen Non Stretch?

[WizardStan]

What happens during TV Out than? Is it 2x and not 2.1?

It would do the 2x it is doing now, and then clone the screen to the TV which does its own filtering. You would still get the same bars across the top and sides

SO I guess my only option is to wait for a miracle or design something that goes on the top of the screen that is thin enough to block out the black screen on the top and the bottom, because this is going to drive me insane

Really? Something that sticks to the edge of the screen is preferable to the millimeter of space at the top and bottom? Yet the huge black bars along the sides give you no problem? You are strange in my mind.

 

[DaveC]

So I would like to add the following: why is the current SNES "fullscreen mode" stretched, while Genesis/PicoDrive "fullscreen mode" looks so nice?

No why can Picodrive fill the top and bottom of the screen without stretching left to right and SNES can't?

Because most Genesis games were 320 across and that doubles to 640 evenly so that is why no stretch. SNES games were mostly only 256 wide so you can either play 512 wide which is compressed horizontally. I think you are talking about the SNES version where fullscreen is 3X horizontally and yes stretched. That is just an integer 3X mode and there is no fractional mode yet that is all. When you do fractional you either get those columns of uneven sized pixels or blurr no way around that.

 

[chris_c]

forgive me if what I suggest is lunacy !

But what about an GLES filter?

Basically take the 1:1 screen area ram and transfer it to a GLES texture (this could slow it somewhat - but maybe not?)

Using ortho projection you could scale the output to whatever the end users desired, with a combo of a number of possibly user changeable settings you could use different GLES texture scaling options like linear or whatever.

Feasible? - I don't know if transfering the buffer to the GLES texture each frame will choke the memory bus, but once on the 3d hardware you can do what you like with it with little cpu overhead...

I may look at this if I get some time after my Paris trip - (bet its raining there too!) if someone who's written a emu plugin wants to pm me and talk me through source set up and the basics of the filter that would save a lot of time and make it more likely to happen...

 

[1magus]

What happens during TV Out than? Is it 2x and not 2.1?

It would do the 2x it is doing now, and then clone the screen to the TV which does its own filtering. You would still get the same bars across the top and sides

SO I guess my only option is to wait for a miracle or design something that goes on the top of the screen that is thin enough to block out the black screen on the top and the bottom, because this is going to drive me insane

Really? Something that sticks to the edge of the screen is preferable to the millimeter of space at the top and bottom? Yet the huge black bars along the sides give you no problem? You are strange in my mind.

I knew someone would bring that up, I don't mind the black bars at the left and right at all I got used to it when I saw how ugly stretched widescreen TV looks on my HDTV.

 

[john4p]

I knew someone would bring that up, I don't mind the black bars at the left and right at all I got used to it when I saw how ugly stretched widescreen TV looks on my HDTV.

+1

Black bars on the left and right are no problem. Keeping aspect ratio is important. I don't mind the smoothened look either so prefer to use the full height when possible.

What Tyler wants is easily possible using notaz' framebuffer scaler (with SteveM's hack it works with SDL).

Either just scale the 256x224 pixels to 640x480 to have a nice full height using 4:3 mode or scale the 256x224 pixels to 548x480 if you prefer to keep the 8:7 format while using the full height of the Pandora's screen.


Some pics to illustrate the formats:

doubled pixels (that's the currently available mode):

256x224 scaled to 640x480:

256x224 scaled to 548x480:

 

[fusion_power]

I still don't understand, why Nintendo made the SNES with such a weird Aspect Ratio. What was the sense to make a TV Console without a proper 4:3 TV aspect ratio? :huh:
Did they already calculated the later stretching during making the graphics or did they just ignore that all Games will be stretched to 4:3 resulting in a even fatter Mario?

 

[zapman]

Really? Something that sticks to the edge of the screen is preferable to the millimeter of space at the top and bottom? Yet the huge black bars along the sides give you no problem? You are strange in my mind.

I would also prefer some black bars on the sides while the height of the Pandora screen is used 100%. The slight blur is a reallyreally _very_ slight blur and the bigger area is so totally worth it. Ratio should stay close to the original, a small change is ok imo (especially if some more screen mm² are gained).

I don't like the 3x2 scaling of the SNES emulator at all: it messes up the aspect ratio, still doesn't use 100% of the screen and looks plainly ugly.

 

[WizardStan]

I don't like the 3x2 scaling of the SNES emulator at all: it messes up the aspect ratio, still doesn't use 100% of the screen and looks plainly ugly.

It was basically a free feature though, for those that did want it. Adding a full height scale is not free, someone will have to code it.

 

[zapman]

I don't like the 3x2 scaling of the SNES emulator at all: it messes up the aspect ratio, still doesn't use 100% of the screen and looks plainly ugly.

It was basically a free feature though, for those that did want it. Adding a full height scale is not free, someone will have to code it.

Yes, and I am not complaining I'm sure there are people who use it and I'm always thankful for _anything_ all you coder release! Thx guys!

 

[Exophase]

This whole thread has nothing to do with horizontal resolution, it's strictly vertical.

No why can Picodrive fill the top and bottom of the screen without stretching left to right and SNES can't?

The following is true for both SNES and Genesis: in NTSC the display is 224 scanlines high and in PAL the display is 240 (okay, SNES is really off by a scanline or something). I doubt Picodrive is scaling 224 to 480 instead of 448. Why? Because it's a small magnification and results in a lot of distortion for very little benefit. You guys are flipping out over not filling about 6.7% of the screen height.

Either just scale the 256x224 pixels to 640x480 to have a nice full height using 4:3 mode or scale the 256x224 pixels to 548x480 if you prefer to keep the 8:7 format while using the full height of the Pandora's screen.

If you're going to have the scaler exercised anyway you'd may as well make it an option, but there's such an obvious tradeoff from your images that I doubt many will really prefer the third to the first. It's also worthwhile to have a horizontal-only scaling option.

I'd also like to ask what you used to scale these images, because it might not match what the FIR based resampler in the Pandora hardware is capable of.

That's non integer scaling and requires interpolation. A PC with a resolution of 1024x768 must scale about 3.4 times: after scaling that 3 times, that .4 doesn't make a noticeable difference, and you can use a simple nearest neighbour scaling to keep the clean look. Bigger screens will have even less problem hiding the non-integer part.

Nearest neighbor will look very noticeable at that resolution. For it to stop causing visible distortion you'd probably have to have a resolution that's so high that you can't see neighboring pixels distinctly anymore. Something like the density Apple is claiming with their Retina display.

I still don't understand, why Nintendo made the SNES with such a weird Aspect Ratio. What was the sense to make a TV Console without a proper 4:3 TV aspect ratio? :huh:
Did they already calculated the later stretching during making the graphics or did they just ignore that all Games will be stretched to 4:3 resulting in a even fatter Mario?

~256 wide was pretty much standard for a lot of consoles. It was probably a popular dot clock.. the higher the resolution, the faster the video hardware has to be. Even for platforms like PC-Engine that had multiple dot clocks (and hence horizontal resolutions) 256 wide was by far the most common. Even on PS1 256-wide was used a lot. One benefit is that larger pixels means you don't have to use as many tiles to cover the same space. But it also means you have non-square pixels.

A lot of SNES art is clearly made with a 4:3 resolution in mind, but a lot of it seemingly isn't. Probably larger things got the treatment, while with smaller things it was sometimes easier to work in pixels, and people forgot the pixels weren't square.

 

[john4p]

I'd also like to ask what you used to scale these images, because it might not match what the FIR based resampler in the Pandora hardware is capable of.

Just MS Paint to demonstrate the dimensions. With notaz' scaler it'd look much better of course.

 

[1magus]

So basically the PSP can do this fine because the resolutions of the console it tries to emulate are very close but the Pandora's screen is too high res?

 

[DaveC]

I knew someone would bring that up, I don't mind the black bars at the left and right at all I got used to it when I saw how ugly stretched widescreen TV looks on my HDTV.

+1

Black bars on the left and right are no problem. Keeping aspect ratio is important. I don't mind the smoothened look either so prefer to use the full height when possible.

What Tyler wants is easily possible using notaz' framebuffer scaler (with SteveM's hack it works with SDL).

Either just scale the 256x224 pixels to 640x480 to have a nice full height using 4:3 mode or scale the 256x224 pixels to 548x480 if you prefer to keep the 8:7 format while using the full height of the Pandora's screen.

But the other point is that to many it isn't worth the extra blurriness and distortion to fractionally scale 224 to 480 just to get the extra millimeter at the top and botom when you can double 224 to 448 to get very close and avoid all of the filter blurr or uneven pixels without the filter. It is not that much of a size difference vertically for these systems so why make the pixel art look like crap for such a small strip?

So basically the PSP can do this fine because the resolutions of the console it tries to emulate are very close but the Pandora's screen is too high res?

No the PSP can do it because it is easy to blurr the image out so bad in hardware that you don't notice the uneven pixels. Of course then everything looks all blurry but if you don't notice more power to ya. Think about it. 272 vertical height on the PSP matches NO emulated system very well at all, not 1:1, not doubled. In actuality the PSP resolution is one of the WORST resolutions for emulators. The Pandora 480 high is actually better as you can double 2X most stuff and it fills it good enough for most and doesn't ruin the graphics with excessive blurr. To get a more accurate aspect you can filter in one direction instead of two. This lessens the fuzziness and even closer resembles a TV (if that is your aim) as TVs were softer horizontal but the pixels were more isolated and sharper vertical (scanlines).

 

[Exophase]

So basically the PSP can do this fine because the resolutions of the console it tries to emulate are very close but the Pandora's screen is too high res?

No, Pandora can do it at least as well as PSP, if not better because it has more resolution to give a closer sampling.

 

[john4p]

But the other point is that to many it isn't worth the extra blurriness and distortion to fractionally scale 224 to 480 just to get the extra millimeter at the top and botom when you can double 224 to 448 to get very close and avoid all of the filter blurr or uneven pixels without the filter. It is not that much of a size difference vertically for these systems so why make the pixel art look like crap for such a small strip?

I'm not saying remove the doubled pixels mode. The other modes (scaled to full height) would be just nice to have, too.
Personally I'm used to playing SNES-games on a blurry TV. I don't need to be able to distinguish every pixel. In fact the interpolation blur/smoothness makes the experience even more genuine to me.

 

[EvilDragon]

For me, it depends on the games
Games which use the checkerbox trick are much nicer with the blurry scaling, as that removes the ghosting that happens on LCDs in that case.

The more of those "blurry-CRT"-Tricks games use, the better they look with blurry scaling

Apart from that, I also prefer simple 2x usually.

 

[DaveC]

But the other point is that to many it isn't worth the extra blurriness and distortion to fractionally scale 224 to 480 just to get the extra millimeter at the top and botom when you can double 224 to 448 to get very close and avoid all of the filter blurr or uneven pixels without the filter. It is not that much of a size difference vertically for these systems so why make the pixel art look like crap for such a small strip?

I'm not saying remove the doubled pixels mode. The other modes (scaled to full height) would be just nice to have, too.
Personally I'm used to playing SNES-games on a blurry TV. I don't need to be able to distinguish every pixel. In fact the interpolation blur/smoothness makes the experience even more genuine to me.

I suppose it depends on what you are used to. Of course that doesn't mean you couldn't prefer the games looking sharper than they did on your old TV.

I actually had my SNES connected to my Amiga 1080 RGB monitor with a custom cable, so it was always pretty sharp to me, and sharper than the Pandora/PSP etc blurr filter.

 

[Pleng]

My eyes are old and sore. I bough a Pandora which has a huge screen for a handheld. I like my games to fill that space

 

[WizardStan]

If your eyes are bad enough that the extra mm will make a difference, I would suggest the resulting blur from using a filter to get that extra mm would cause your eyes even more trouble

 

[Pleng]

or, indeed, if my eyesight is that bad, then the blur will be apparent regardless of anyfilters applied...