4:3 classics on WideScreen idea

RetroArch General
#1

I love emulating consoles but there is an issue when it comes to running 4:3 games on a widescreen they look bad whether it be black bars on the sides or god forbid ‘stretching’. The mainstream media has the answer! when they receive a ‘tall cell’ video they want to show, instead of showing as is with ‘black bars’ intact on ether side, they use a blurry zoom effect of the video to fill the black space and keep the correct ratio

here is a quick example http://us.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/ … .cctv.html

#2

I just made a shader that does something like this, as a matter of fact. It’s in the borders subdirectory, called ‘bigblur.’ I just added it a few days ago, though, so you’ll need one of the recent nightly builds to get it, or else checkout an updated batch from the common-shaders repo on github.

The border shaders are a little weird to use. You choose the variant that matches your fullscreen resolution and then set your video settings to either 16:9 aspect ratio or turn off ‘force aspect.’ The shader will force 4:3 integer scaling and then fill the rest of the space with whatever effect the shader imparts (in this case, the zoomed blur; there are also some that do animated effects, like snow, color swirls, etc.).

#3

Thanks for the quick reply! keep up the good work…

#4

Another idea too, I remember some TVs have a semi-stretch mode where the center of the image space is kept 1:1 but the left and right of the image is slightly stretched to the sides so that it gives the illusion of maintaining the correct ratio, in photoshop it’s called smart resize. If someone could code a shader that does that, that would be awesome!

#5

I’ve considered trying something like this, but I haven’t pursued it because it would make for inconsistent speeds for scrolling and particles/bullets/etc depending on their distance from the center of the screen, sort of like a fisheye effect. This would make it super-hard to gauge trajectories until they were right up in your face, making them hard to dodge. This was the same concern with implementing a “seam-carving” algorithm, except in that case, the bullets would speed up and slow down erratically as they moved over seams.

#6

Have tried this, has selected the bigblur 1440p shader, selected ‘linear’ as the filter and scale as ‘dont care’, disabled ‘Force Aspect Ratio’ and the aspect ratio is set as ‘core specific’. But when i load a game its just zoomed in on the game screen and still has black borders on the left and right, im using the latest nightly build (dec 27th)

#7

You have to make your aspect ratio 16:9

#9

Oh, I think I know what’s up: you need to choose the bigblur.cgp from the 1440p folder rather than loading the cg file directly.

#10

Ah good call that was the issue :lol: .

Is there anyway to add a shader like CRT-Geom or CRT-Easymode as well?, have tried replacing the ‘stock.cg’ filter with either crt-geom or crt-easymode and just gives unpleasant effects?

#11

I haven’t had much luck with it. You can replace stock.cg with something like easymode and hardcode it to whatever your scale is (6.0 in this case, IIRC). It probably still won’t look great, though.