This thread was split from Wii/GC pixels are not square. See that thread for some additional background info.
Here’s the in-theory “correct” resolution settings to simulate each of the RetroArch cores’ original display. I’ve also included hypothetical video encoder scaling which could be used to correct their PARs where I know them (based on the work of editors on the Pin Eight wiki). This information is useless right now but could become useful in future.
First off, it’s assumed that your Wii and TV are set to 4:3 mode, not widescreen or any kind of “wide zoom” feature your TV has. If your Wii is set to widescreen 16:9, RetroArch does some additional scaling which will make everything wider by 6%. In most cases, Default Filter should be set to “Point filtering”. If you don’t like point filtering that’s fine, but that’s the assumption I’m making here. Aspect Ratio should usually just be set to “Custom” in order to avoid further unnecessary adjustments, but “Core provided” should also be fine most of the time. We’re also going to assume Integer Scale is set to OFF because it mostly just gets in the way of positioning the screen (it doesn’t currently center the image, so if we use it we’ll get a picture that just sits in the top left of the screen being annoying).
Wii-to-TV Connections There’s a few ways that your Wii might be hooked up to your TV: you might have an HDTV with component cables (the kind with five plugs: red/green/blue, plus white/red), an HDTV with composite (the red/yellow/white cables), a CRT with component cables, or a CRT with composite. The resolutions you’ll want to use will depend somewhat on these.
For CRT (any cables), you’ll almost always want to use the “double-strike” resolutions (240p and below). If you have component cables and your TV is an “EDTV” or even one of those super weird late-model CRTs that does HD, you could also try the 480p and below resolutions and see if you like them. They’re less accurate to the original consoles, but you might like how it looks, so it’s up to you if your TV does both. Some CRTs have component input but don’t support 480p resolutions, so it’s OK if you’re limited to 480i and below, just use the 240p resolutions.
On an HDTV with component, you’ll almost always want the higher resolutions–most HDTVs can’t handle “double-strike” because TV manufacturers don’t really care about NESs working on their sets any more. You could try them just in case (see below) or use something like Godlance’s scanlines filter to simulate what it might look like otherwise.
If you’re on an HDTV that’s connected over composite, things are kind of complicated. You should try the double-strike resolutions just in case you got lucky and your TV handles them. Most of the time, the TV will interpret the signal as 480i and cause some kind of awkward juddering; a fun way to test what your TV does is to set RetroArch to 512x240p fire up Sunsoft’s Batman - The Video Game on one of the NES cores. The story intro in this game rapidly flickers some text over background images. You should be able to see this flickering with the naked eye, it’s very obvious and kind of unpleasant (this is the intended behavior; Sunsoft is really weird). If, instead of flickering, you see the text and the background at the same time, your TV can’t do double-strike and is incorrectly deinterlacing the image, which it thinks is 480i.
If you can’t use the higher progressive resolutions (above 240p), you’ll need to use a 480 interlaced mode for custom ratios, unless a future update allows custom ratios at double-strike resolutions. This means any cases where you need custom ratios won’t look as good as your progressive-mode stuff.
If you can’t use any progressive resolutions at all (240p, 480p, etc.), you won’t be able to get quite as sharp a picture and some effects (like Batman) will be kind of broken. You’ll just have to put up with 480i. If you’re in this scenario, all I can really recommend is picking up some component cables for the Wii. You don’t need to buy the $40-ish Nintendo brand cables, most third-party ones are fine. Some of them are poorly made, but as a general rule, cables are cables and they’ll pretty much do the job. Check Amazon or something for reviews if you’re not sure whether a particular brand is garbage.
If you’ve got something more exotic going on like a VGA adapter or a Wii U over HDMI, then you should be fine to use the same settings as below, with the disclaimer that I have no personal experience with those circumstances so if everything goes terribly wrong, then that sucks.
This post generally assumes that you’re on an HDTV with component, so the stated resolutions are the ones in the 480p range. If you’re using interlaced resolutions like 480i, then ignore the “p”. If you’re using 240p and similar, simply divide the figures listed here by two (e.g. 448/2 = 224).
Arcade (Final Burn Alpha) Seriously? C’mon. This is just impossible. Just about every arcade machine has a different aspect ratio to the last; not to mention, the displays they run on aren’t really TVs and sometimes might not adhere to NTSC specifications. This means adjusting these games to look right on a consumer TV set may mean something other than the values below. That said, the majority of games do run on NTSC-compatible displays, so here’s a few machines with known PARs.
A.B. Cop; After Burner; After Burner II; GP Rider; Last Survivor; Line of Fire; Racing Hero; Super Monaco GP; Thunder Blade Screen Resolution: 640x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 692 Most TVs are going to lose some of this (at least 4 pixels). We can’t really do anything about that, though; the same thing would happen if you hooked up the original boards to a consumer TV.
Bubble Bobble; Ikari III - The Rescue; Mario Bros.; P.O.W. - Prisoners of War; Street Smart These and Double Dragon below are kind of complicated because of their rather slim aspect ratios on the original hardware. For that reason, I’ll provide two setups. Basically, use the first one, which looks sort of close to right, whereas the second relies on hypothetical (and maybe impossible) video encoder scaling to make it look right.
Real world (looks a little too thin): Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 64 , 16 : 512x448p
Set your Wii to Widescreen to fatten it up a bit, but it’s still a long way off wide enough.
Theoretical (looks a lot too fat): Screen Resolution: 512x448p
Double Dragon Just to reiterate, Double Dragon has the same problem as above.
Real world (looks a little too thin): Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 64 , 0 : 512x480p
Set your Wii to Widescreen to fatten it up a bit, but it’s still a long way off wide enough.
Theoretical (looks a lot too fat): Screen Resolution: 512x480p Aspect Ratio: Core provided (4:3) or Custom (16:9) Custom Ratio: 0 , 0 : 512x480
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 720 (running 640 wide), 684 (running 608 wide) 576 (running 512 wide) Relevant to all of the above. First off, is the last of these possible? I’m not sure where the video encoder’s scaling bottoms out, but some software like Genesis Plus GX won’t go below 640. Assuming that this is the minimum, we won’t be able to get the correct 45:44 pixels for these games using a Screen Resolution that’s 512 wide. Thus, we’d need something like 640-wide with video encoder at the full 720, or 608-wide with video encoder at 684.
Demon’s World/Horror Story; Double Dragon 3 - The Rosetta Stone; Hellfire; Zero Wing; Wardner Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Core provided (4:3) or Custom (16:9) Custom Ratio: 0 , 0 : 640x480
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 618 Again, this is below 640/might be impossible, depends on the minimum value for the video encoder. There’s really nothing we can do about this, as we need all 640 pixels for these games. We could go thinner by enabling bilinear and tweaking the custom ratio if necessary, but feh. I’ll come back to this with an ideal config for bilinear.
Enduro Racer; Hang-On; Space Harrier; all games on Sega 16B hardware Screen Resolution: 640x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 686 Right on the borderline of overscan for most sets, likely to lose some of the picture.
Snow Bros. Screen Resolution: 512x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 676 This is entirely guesswork, since I don’t see any direct references to the Snow Bros. dot clock. Thus, I’m just looking at the snowballs, which have a 5:6 ratio, and adjusting the PAR in order to make them appear circular. It may not be precisely accurate, but something close to this was clearly intended by the developer.
(Horizontal) games on NMK-16 hardware The NMK-16 hardware underwent a few revisions, so there’s a couple of resolution setups for those.
256x224 games (e.g. Bio-ship Paladin, Black Heart, Bubble 2000, Fire Hawk) Screen Resolution: 512x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 644? The NMK pixels clocks aren’t documented currently, so this operates on an assumption that these games have a 5.37MHz pixel clock, like the NES, SNES and similar. This guess is being made on the basis of Bubble 2000, a Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move clone. The bubbles are drawn with dimensions (14*16) which exactly match an assumption of 8:7 pixels. To be clear, this number is not arrived at through any technical means.
384x224 games (e.g. Saboten Bombers) Screen Resolution: 384x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 678? Again, this is kind of guesswork. We’re assuming a 7.635MHz pixel clock, which is frankly arbitrary; it’s half of the HSYNC used by Bio-Ship Paladin, but there’s little reason why that should be correct for other games’ pixel clocks. That said, using Saboten Bombers as an example, 678 results in a title screen which looks like the game’s flyer: the bomb on the title screen becomes circular instead of an oval. Extremely unscientific. On the upside, 678 is the scaling used by RetroArch when the Wii is set to widescreen, so it’s convenient. The true clock is probably somewhere in the 7.5-8MHz range, so the correct video encoder scaling could be anywhere from 648 up to 692.
All (horizontal) games on Toaplan/Raizing second-gen hardware Oh man, these are exciting! The pixels are 10:11, just like the Wii, so we don’t even need to tweak the video encoding. 640 (RetroArch’s default setting when the Wii is set to 4:3) is already correct. Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Core provided (4:3) or Custom (16:9) Custom Ratio: 0 , 0 : 640x480
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 640 (hooray!)
Cave Story (NXEngine) Cave Story is a tough one to deal with, because it uses 320*240 square pixels. We don’t have square pixels, and even with hypothetical scaling, we’re going to lose some pixels to overscan (on most sets, anyway). Oh well. For a PC game, Cave Story does a really nice job of sticking to a pretty reasonable safe area (10%), so the HUD shouldn’t be impacted on any standard TV, you just won’t see a little bit of the edges.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Core provided
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
CPS-1 / CPS-2 (FBA) CPS-1 and 2 games run natively at 384x224p.
Screen Resolution: 384x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 644
Doom (PrBoom) I’m not certain at the moment (will confirm later), but I think Doom in RetroArch runs at 640x400 (pixels are intended to be square). We’re probably going to lose some picture to overscan if we use the video encoder to square them up; since this is a PC game, it’s not designed to take overscan into account, since that’s a TV problem. Oh well, too bad.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 0 , 40 : 640x400
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
Game Boy / Game Boy Color (Gambatte) Game Boy and Game Boy Color games run natively at 160x144p. The Game Boy is one of our problem cases at the moment, because RetroArch doesn’t have a way to display square pixels, which the original platform used. Thus, a couple of settings are provided here. The first will look “thin” compared to a real Game Boy. If you want to use it (or other platforms where the pixels are noted to be thinner than they should be), you might want to switch your Wii to 16:9, for the 678 video encoder width, which brings the pixels a decent chunk closer to square.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 80, 24 : 480x432
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
This second option will look “fat” compared to a real Game Boy. It might be worth noting that it does actually look “thin” compared to the old Super Game Boy, so it’s closer to correct than Nintendo got way back then.
Screen Resolution: 530x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 25, 24 : 480x432
Game Boy Advance (VBA Next) Same problem as on the Game Boy/Color, we need square pixels but RetroArch doesn’t provide them at present. So, same deal as before, a couple of options. First up, the “thin” look.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 80, 80 : 480x320
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
And the “fat” look:
Screen Resolution: 530x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 25, 80 : 480x320
I’ll make a third note here to describe what Nintendo seems to be doing for its GBA stuff on TV (e.g. the official GBA emulator on GameCube). I’ll use the “RetroArch names” for settings for best clarity. Their emulator runs at a Screen Resolution of 608x448, with a Custom Ratio of 480x320. (The difference is filled with Nintendo’s border, but in practical terms it’s the same as leaving it black in RetroArch.) They then use the video encoder to scale to 668 pixels wide, resulting in ~square pixels. This is practical on GBA because you don’t need a full 640-wide framebuffer to display its screen, but not for something like Cave Story or Quake where we need all 640 columns.
Bonus: widescreen. The Game Boy Advance uses a 3:2 aspect ratio, which is wider than 4:3, so here’s an excuse to set your TV back to widescreen for a bit. I’m going to offer a couple of setups here. The first one doesn’t require bilinear filtering, so you’ll have very sharp pixels, but on most TVs, some of the picture will be cut off due to overscan. This is a larger issue on a handheld platform like the GBA where the display has no overscan at all, so games weren’t designed to keep things like HUDs inside the “safe area” and you might not be able to see things like health bars if you do this.
As always, we’re going to assume that the Wii itself is set to 4:3, not widescreen. However, the TV set should be set to widescreen for this scenario.
Screen Resolution: 512x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 16 , 0 : 480x480
This is an exact 2*3 integer scale of the graphics. This means we’re working with all kinds of pixel ratios. First, I’ll explain in words, math equation below that. We’ve got the 10/11 “Wii constant”, the 640/512 video encoder scaling, the 2/3 integer scale and the 4/3 scaling your TV will do. (I know this is kind of obnoxious, but 16/9 is exactly four thirds wider than 4:3. When I say 4/3 scaling, I mean the scaling by a factor of 4/3 from 4:3 to 16:9. Don’t worry about it.)
Math: (10/11) * (640/512) * (2/3) * (4/3) = 1.01…
This is our pixel aspect ratio when we use this setup. Expressed as a fraction, that’s 100/99. This is so close to square that if you can tell the difference, you’re an even bigger jerk than I am. Now, on the matter of overscan: assuming you’re not losing a great deal of picture (personally, I lose 16 lines, or about 5 and a third GBA lines), you might feel that’s a negligible amount and not enough to impact your experience of your games. If you do encounter a game that pushes its HUD right to the top or bottom, you could always reposition your image vertically so that you’re losing content from the other end, where there’s hopefully less important information. e.g., Let’s say you’re playing Metroid Fusion, and you can’t read the current location on the map screen. You could try setting your Custom Ratio to something like 16 , 8 : 480x480, moving the entire image down off the bottom of your TV. Basically, make an executive decision about how much to sacrifice in any given direction. Otherwise, you could switch to bilinear and use an arbitrary scale (see below).
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 634 (impossible?), 656 with different settings as discussed below Since we’re a tiny bit wide, we actually would need to scale to below 640, which I’m not sure is something the Wii video encoder is capable of. Assuming this is an impossibility, we could instead shoot for a slightly wider framebuffer so we’re not fattening it up quite as much. Let’s see, if we went with 530x480p (a resolution that’s already available in RetroArch), scaled to 656 … (10/11) * (656/530) * (2/3) * (4/3) = ~1.0002. There’s our closest, at 0.02% wider than square, and less than 0.1% more accurate than what we can already do in current RetroArch. These differences are so minimal that none of this matters unless you just want to be unreasonable.
OK, if the overscan was too much for you, then we’re going to have to go off-integer, so we’ll need to turn on the bilinear filter. Now, I can’t tell you how much overscan you have, so you need to figure that out yourself. RetroArch’s RGUI (the checkerboard menu) is as good a place as any to test this. Have RetroArch on 640x480, and set your Custom Ratio to the same. Go get right up by your TV, and start adjusting your Custom Ratio. Move the picture down, pixel by pixel, until you see the black area outside the RGUI menu. That’s the edge of the picture, so the number right before you hit black is your upper overscan. Your lower overscan will be similar, so do the same thing by moving the bottom of the image upward. For me, there are 10 lines outside the top of my screen, and 6 lines outside the bottom.
Once you’ve figured out your overscan, you can use a tool like this one to calculate the ratio you should be using. Just put 594 and 480 in the left boxes, and in the lower right box, put the height of your display. The correct width for you will automatically be filled in. If you want to do the math yourself, it’s simple: [your display height] / 480 * 594 = [your custom width]. So on a TV which displays all 480 lines, you would want the following settings, but you’ll need to do the math to get yours if this isn’t you.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Default Filter: Bilinear filtering Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 23, 0 : 594x480
Neo Geo Pocket / Color (Mednafen Neopop) First up, this core is currently (as of v1.0.0.2) broken in RetroArch. You’ll need to use the core from v0.9.9 to play games, and since this core is from before per-core settings were implemented, it won’t save yours. As a workaround, you can rig up all these settings to apply to the current/broken core, and load it before loading the legacy version. The legacy core will simply take the settings of whichever core was launched before it, so if this was the other Neopop core, you’re golden.
Second up, more square pixels, at 160x152. Yay. First up, the “thin” look:
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 80, 12 : 480x432
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
“Fat” look:
Screen Resolution: 530x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 25, 12 : 480x456
Neo Geo (FBA) In theory, all Neo Geo games run at 320x224. In practice, a lot of games only actually use 304 of those pixels and fill the rest with empty black or garbage. Rather than display this garbage, Final Burn Alpha trims many games to only display the 304 columns, cutting off the extra stuff entirely. So we need two different setups for Neo Geo. First up, games which use the full 320:
Screen Resolution: 640x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 720
It’s potentially interesting that that 720 scale would actually solve the “garbage overscan” problem for us, because a decent chunk of that scale is actually in the overscan area. Anyway, here’s the cropped resolution for many other games:
Screen Resolution: 608x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 684
A reasonable idea in this scenario might be to switch your Wii (not your TV) to 16:9 for Neo Geo, which will bring both of these a bit closer to the correct ratio, with a video encoder scaling of 678. For games in the “304-wide” family, such as the Metal Slug series, this is very close to correct.
NES / Famicom (FCEUmm / NEStopia / QuickNES) All NES games run natively at 256x240p. While Crop Overscan is a useful feature, it changes the output resolution of the core, so we need two different setups depending on whether it’s enabled or disabled. Like the thing says, reload after changing this setting. First up is the ideal settings when Crop Overscan is OFF.
Screen Resolution: 512x480p Crop Overscan (reload): OFF
If you’re wondering what Crop Overscan is for, the short version is, some NES games drop garbage in the areas on the edges of the screen where, on contemporary TVs, it wouldn’t be seen. Since nobody would ever see it, it didn’t matter if it looked all messed up or something. On a lot of modern TVs, you’re seeing more of the picture than you would on an older CRT, so now all that crap is visible. Crop Overscan simply cuts some of the edges out of the picture so that this stuff is hidden again. Here’s the ideal settings for when Crop Overscan is ON.
Screen Resolution: 512x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 16, 16 : 480x448 Crop Overscan (reload): ON
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 644
PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 (Mednafen PCE Fast) The TurboGrafx-16 and variants is another platform with a variable resolution. Annoying. I don’t really have enough TG16 experience to say which (if any) resolution is the “de facto standard”, ala 256*224 on the SNES, so here’s a couple I’ve encountered.
256*224 (e.g. Alien Crush) Screen Resolution: 512x448p
256*232 (e.g. Bonk’s Adventure, Dragon’s Curse/Adventure Island) Screen Resolution: 512x464p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 644
Quake (TyrQuake) RetroArch lets you set a resolution for Quake to run at in the Core settings. I’m away from my Wii right now, so I can’t test at the moment what the ideal resolution is. I know Quake under RetroArch is a little slower than the alternative QuakeGX homebrew, and has to be run at a somewhat lower resolution to get fullspeed. Personally, I’d recommend using QuakeGX instead, but if you want to use RetroArch, just make sure to match the resolution you choose for Quake in the core settings to your Custom Ratio. Once again: PC game, not intended to account for overscan; you might have some HUD problems.
Screen Resolution:640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: match to your Quake resolution
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
Sega MS / GG / MD / CD (Genesis Plus GX) Oof, this one’s four (technically more) platforms in one. Without meaning any disrespect to RetroArch, JUST USE THE ACTUAL GENESIS PLUS GX. The standalone emulator handles its platforms’ resolutions and aspects phenomenally and includes a massive raft of tweakable features not in the RetroArch version. It is also able to do resolution switches in real-time for the games that do that, which would require exiting to the menu each time you need to change it. On any other platform, genplus-gx’s libretro port is a revelation, but on Wii it’s trumped by the original. Also, I don’t feel like listing all these resolutions.
SNES / Super Famicom (SNES9x Next) The SNES can run at a variety of resolutions, from 256x224 up to 512x478. What a jerk. This means there’s not one correct resolution for the SNES. Fortunately, the wide modes are exactly twice as wide, which suits us fine, and the majority of SNES games run at the de facto standard of 256x224, so we’ll start with that.
Screen Resolution: 512x448p
That was easy. Now, RetroArch does feature a 239/478p mode, but it seems the SNES9x output isn’t actually giving us the full 239 lines, so if you use one of these modes in RetroArch for a supported game (Super Mario World PAL is probably the best-known title) it’ll come out looking kinda janky. So let’s rig up our own custom ratio for those games.
Screen Resolution: 512x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 0, 2 : 512x476
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 644
Virtual Boy (Mednafen VB) This is another case where you might want to use a different emulator, WiiMednafen. Virtual Boy emulation has advanced greatly since the WiiMednafen port, which also means it’s gotten very slow. Still, if you really want to play Virtual Boy on RetroArch, the following are the suggested settings.
Screen Resolution: 384x448p
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704?
I don’t know the technical details of pixel width on Virtual Boy. They look pretty square in photos I’ve seen, but if we try to use square pixels, we’ll lose some picture to overscan, which wasn’t true on the original hardware. If we assume square pixels (might be questionable), it might be best just to use bilinear filtering and an arbitrary scale, maybe something like 640x364 with video encoder scaling to 686? Again, this might all be moot, because Virtual Boy performance on RetroArch isn’t really all that playable. Incidentally, I didn’t bother looking at what the anaglyph modes do to the set resolution, because what a hassle. Maybe later.
[u]WonderSwan / Color (Mednafen Cygne)[/u] More square pixels (224x144 of them), and as a bonus, the WonderSwan is a weird thing. Instead of the usual two sets of inputs on the face, like a Game Boy, the WonderSwan (and Color) have three sets, so that the device can be rotated for playing vertically-oriented games. There’s even at least one game that involves rotating the screen upside-down. This is another case where it might be reasonable to recommend another emulator: WiiMednafen is specifically rigged up to support the WonderSwan’s rotation (you can map rotation to a button), and switches up the control scheme, too, since your d-pad is now your face buttons and your … other buttons in the top left are now your d-pad. RetroArch currently won’t allow you to map the controls in a sensible way for vertical games–I’ve already posted an issue regarding this. All that said, if you want to use RetroArch to play WonderSwan and you’re not interested in playing games that use a vertical orientation (or multiple orientations; Klonoa being the most prominent of these; the console is rotated between stages), here’s the deal. No vertical setup is given here as the games aren’t currently playable. I will add one if/when they become playable in RetroArch.
Screen Resolution: 640x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 448x288
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 704
Bonus: widescreen. RetroArch’s WonderSwan looks amazing on a widescreen TV set; it’ll fill most of your TV and you don’t even need to sacrifice sharp pixels, because we’re doing the same as our GBA trick from earlier. Even better, since the WonderSwan’s picture is slightly shorter, we probably don’t even need to worry about overscan! Again, we’re going to assume that the Wii itself is set to 4:3, but the TV set is on widescreen.
Screen Resolution: 512x480p Aspect Ratio: Custom Custom Ratio: 32 , 24 : 448x432
Hypothetical video encoder scaling: 634 (impossible?). See GBA discussion earlier.
