There’s a lot of misinformation flying around in here, so I’m going to try to briefly cover the basics. Hello, boulder.
Classic TVs were 4:3. Does this mean that classic games consoles displayed a 4:3 picture?
No. The games were designed to be played on a 4:3 set, but that doesn’t mean the console’s aspect ratio was 4:3. For example, the majority of Sega Master System games had an active area of 256*192 pixels and the signal is padded out to 240 lines with background color. It’s kind of like watching a movie in letterboxed format. Then you have to factor in the pixel width (even though the TV doesn’t know or care what a pixel is, the pixel timings determine how long before the next pixel starts) which determines the aspect ratio in concert with that of your TV.
What did games look like on my old TV as a kid? How can I replicate that accurately?
Nobody knows what your TV was like, even you. This question comes down to what your TV was like when you bought it, what you did to the settings yourself, how old the TV was and how much use it got. You can replicate it accurately to whatever extent you remember it by doing whatever you feel makes it look right. If you’re happy at this point, you can stop reading.
So what’s the correct aspect ratio for all consoles?
Pff, no, not even … what. It’d be really, really nice if this was something that had an answer, there just isn’t one correct aspect ratio. Even if you assume the display is 4:3 (this is fine for most consoles and horizontally-oriented arcade games), the console is a major variable factor. The resolution and pixel timing of each individual platform is what will determine this, and there are almost as many aspect ratios as there are consoles.
Bleh, this sucks. What do I do then?
Yeah, it does suck. The easy answer? Quit caring about it, just use 4:3 and call it close enough. It’s usually going to look pretty OK. But it’ll almost never be “correct” (whatever that means). Plus, emulators introduce problems here; e.g. most SNES emulators will hand the user a 256224 image, even though the actual signal produced by the console was 240 lines tall (usually the remaining 16 lines were automatically filled in black). If you were going to force anything to 4:3, it would be that 256240 image, not the cropped 224-line picture the emulator gave you.
That’s not good enough, I’m a big asshole and I want the right answer. What is it?
Welcome to the asshole club. At this point, you need to run around finding the pixel timing for each platform you want to run at the “right” aspect ratio, keeping in mind that this will be correct in a mathematical sense based on the assumption of a perfectly calibrated contemporary television, which none of us had. The Pin Eight wiki has an excellent resource on dot clock rates, which can be used to determine the console’s pixel aspect ratio. You can multiply the PAR by the width of the image in pixels to find a width that matches the “correct” aspect ratio of the original platform (again, on your magical perfect TV that you don’t own).
Let’s use the NES as an example. You’re playing Kirby’s Adventure (because there’s circles in it!), at the NES’s 256240. Your monitor’s pretty big, so you’re displaying at like 5 scale, 12801200. You need to do 8/71280, which rounds out to about 1463. This gives you an exact (display) aspect ratio of 128:105, which is actually quite a bit slimmer than 4:3.
You big dumbass, how come all my old NES games fit exactly on my 4:3 if the picture’s not 4:3?
Two answers.
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You or somebody else set up your TV to make it look that way by twiddling some knobs somewhere. This is fine, I’m not critiquing your choice, but whatever you did required you to distort the image more horizontally than you did vertically (it looked wider than it “should”). I want to stress that this is a fine decision, but pushes the picture away from the expected ratio on the last question’s magic TV.
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It didn’t, you just thought it did. The most obvious reason for this is that some of the picture was actually off the edge of the screen. This is totally normal and even expected behavior: witness the leftmost column on scrolling NES games or the black emptiness on the top/bottom of many games; not to mention the large gap between the edge of the screen and where things like healthbars are usually placed. They’re not right on the edge because nobody would have ever seen them off in the overscan area (one of the old NES Castlevania games famously screwed this up and the HUD is a bit illegible).
Anything else?
Probably. There’s always something else.
