Correct Geometry - Aspect Ratio for different systems

RetroArch General
#115

I’m not sure if this is the right thread to post this, but I’m unable to make a new thread (new user restriction I’m assuming):

In both the PSX Beetle and Beetle HW cores, none of the core options related to crop and overscan have any effect on the displayed image. This includes Initial/Last Scanline, Crop Overscan, Additional Cropping, and Offest Cropped Image.

I am trying to get rid of the garbage pixels that appear in the upper-left corner of the PSX game Ogre Battle, as seen here.

No matter which adjustments I make to any of those settings, the displayed image is exactly the same in both cores.

Is this a bug with the cores, with RetroArch, or am I missing some other setting?

#116

Hi. I’ve installed Lakka on a PC I have here and I want it to work with my VGA TV. The resolution is 1280x1024 and I can’t get it to work. It just keeps saying “out of range” but it works through HDMI on my 4K TV. I tried editing the config but it still says it’s out of range anyway. Do I have to do anything special to get it to work?

I have an i3 2120 and an ATI HD 6950.

I wanted to make my own post but for some reason I’m not allowed to do that.

#117

What a wonderful thread!

A few things need to be clarified.

  1. PAR = Pixel Aspect Ratio.
  2. DAR = Display Aspect Ratio.
  3. Why we want to play the games as the developers actually saw them, and what our old TVs did to the image that distorted it.

This one is more of a question:
So the developers viewed the image on a 1:1 pixel ratio monitor (NOT a TV) through the system with it’s corresponding Clock Rate so they saw perfect geometric shapes while developing… but why didn’t they use an actual TV (not 1:1) ???

Same question but a little differently:
The devs saw the console image output on a 1:1 pixel aspect monitor like a computer CRT, while we saw the final game on a 4:3 pixel aspect consumer TV… correct?

#118

Yes, and some developers (the few) accounted for the distortion, and others (most) didn’t. Back then people weren’t as anal as today… well, probably we are still the same seeing how many -console- gamers plainly ignore (and/or give a damn) about game resolutions, 900p? fake 4K? 720p on XONE? sub 30fps -cinematic experience-? Even people in this forum don’t care and just set everything to 4/3 DAR whatever that leads to (not necessarily how they played it on their CRT)

Also some games back then mixed assets that accounted and not accounted for the distortion, probably from different developers within the team.

#119

Thanks.

Two questions:

  1. What kind of monitor did they use to develop on? How did they connect the console development kit to this particular 1:1 pixel aspect monitor?
    In other words, what RGB monitor handled 15kHz 240p and has 1:1 pixel aspect like the devs had in the early 80s in Japan?

  2. Did our TVs stretched all horizontal resolutions like 256 and 320 right to the edges of the TV using the H-Sync pulse? If so wouldn’t it be more correct to actually view the games in 4:3 like we did back then?

#120

Different studios used various processes and equipment during development, but frequent testing on consumer gear was undoubtedly part of the process, if not the main way of testing. This is evident in a number of effects that abuse composite signal and CRT display characteristics, along with frequent reliance on undocumented and/or obscure console hardware quirks and edge-case behiavor that would not be evident from non-consumer gear.

There are also shots of Nintendo’s SMB development docs, which show grid paper with pixels significantly wider than they were tall, so fat circles definitely weren’t a product of laziness or lack of awareness of what hardware end-users would be using to consume the content.

Also, while consumer CRT TVs had a nominal aspect ratio of 4:3, they varied wildly in actual geometry and overscan, not to mention that many had hardware dials for adjusting horizontal and vertical size, so there was no way to ensure that everyone would see the exact same thing.

Another issue, still, is that studios didn’t always want to create entirely new assets for PAL releases (PAL has a significantly different resolution vs NTSC but the same nominal 4:3 aspect to the physical displays), so rather than have everything look correct on NTSC displays but look excessively tall on PAL sets, they would sometimes purposely make them slightly fat on NTSC so they would only be slightly tall for the subsequent PAL release.

#121

Yes, that is all perfectly clear on the consumer side.
The real question I’m trying to ask is how can we really know on what display the devs drew their ‘perfect circles’…
What display was that in the early 80s?

#122

According to this guy who claims to have done some NES development, it was all bog-standard PC hardware that they did the development on, but that was all coding and they never actually saw the output on their PC display. With that in mind, it was probably tested on either a regular consumer TV (pretty likely, I think), a PVM-style broadcast monitor, or a composite-compatible PC monitor like the one that came with Commodore 64s.

You can see some development shots here: http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/weekly/Stars_of_the_Family_Computer_p2.html

How did they connect the console development kit to this particular 1:1 pixel aspect monitor

It’s worth noting that CRTs don’t really have a concept of pixels, so the pixel aspect ratio doesn’t really exist for them.

#123

Thanks, but the question still remains.
The artists drew perfect circles in 256x240 resolution and saw these perfect circles on what display back in the early 80s?

Isn’t the whole point of this thread to see the game exactly as the devs/artists saw it, or in ‘correct geometry’?

Can we really be sure the devs EVER saw the true 1:1 PAR image from the console?
They may very well drew perfect geometrical shapes mathematically without ever seeing them as intended, as we can now.

#124

Nope. That’s what I was getting at with my earlier post.

CRTs don’t have a concept of pixels, only Hblank and Vblank, and everything is stretched to match the screen. 4:3 is as legitimate as any other reasonably close aspect. Lately, I’ve seen a number of people throwing around 64:49, which is 3% less wide than regular 4:3, as a good “universal” aspect.

However, Dogway et al can do whatever they like and whatever aspect he comes up with is equally legitimate and could feasibly have been achieved via adjustments to H/V pots.

#125

I would assume that most characters and sprites of the 2D era were hand drawn on a grid paper with 1:1 square ratio, only then programmed and viewed on a typical 4:3 monitor CRT.
So the devs actually created and saw the characters in 1:1 pixels aspect not on a monitor but rather on a grid paper.

There is a possibility they may have actually seen the 256x240 image on a 1:1 pixel aspect computer monitor but it was less likely a full RGB/VGA monitor if we are talking early NES 80s era.
The assumption that the artist never saw the image in it’s original 1:1 aspect on a CRT display was too bold on my part, as said, it was probably a PC monitor but not full RGB.

To really answer these questions we would have to ask a game developer from the early 90s or late 80s, how did they create the graphics for a 2D game and what was the original aspect ratio of the art, even if it was a grid paper and pencils.

With all that said and asked, I only saw the games in their 4:3 display aspect ratio so that’s how I shall continue to play them even though the devs questionably saw them in 1:1 on an unknown monitor.

#126

The devs were indeed drawing 1:1 square pixels on a NEC PC-98 monitor with a consumer CRT near it as secondary monitor.
For NES I would assume the development proccess was also on some older revision of the Japanese NEC PC98.

#127

At Nintendo, at least, they used (hand-drawn?) grid paper with boxes that were wider than they are tall when designing the levels for SMB1 (notice the fat question-mark blocks):

#128

I don’t think this image is legitimate. Grid paper is always 1:1 aspect.
I shall research more the Japanese NEC PC-98 monitor where I assume most of the games for nes, snes and megadrive were viewed on as reference by the artists.

#129

lol it came from this article about SMB1 designer Takashi Tezuka. Also, check out the booklet that’s bundled with Super Mario Maker:

It’s very clear on page 83.

#130

Ah, in that case indeed it is.
I’ve also measured this Nintendo grid paper aspect ratio which is 1.3, very close to 4:3.
So can we say that the artists in the NES era actually created the games in native 4:3 on this particular paper?

Anyway, the Sega Digitizer System looks like it has 1:1 PAR as reference and the artists drew the characters directly on the screen. It might not be the case with Nintendo 4:3 PAR grid paper but perfect geometrical shapes in actual nes games show otherwise.
Most games on the SNES and SEGA have clear reference that the games were actually developed in 1:1 PAR and not on this 4:3 PAR grid paper, yet some games were compensated for the console video output clock and 4:3 DAR TVs like stated in the first post.

Yet still, none of us actually saw the games outside a consumer TV with 4:3 DAR till emulators came along, so seeing the games as the developers saw is nice indeed, but personally I shall continue playing in 4:3 as I was for 25 years.

#131

I have been looking around for some answers this topic talked about, so i’ll ask it here.

With the SNES/Genesis emulator on a 1080p TV if Smooth Games is OFF because i don’t like the way it looks, i’m NOT using any shaders and the AR is the core provided 4:3, should Integer Scale be on or off?

What about 3D games on the PSX? Is the whole 8:7/PAR Integer Scale stuff still a thing?

#132

Integer scale is always needed if you want evenly sized pixels with nearest neighbor scaling. If you want to use the full vertical resolution of your display, you can use a shader like pixellate, sharp-bilinear or AANN to antialias the pixels when necessary. Tbh, if you’re using a 4:3 aspect ratio, you’re probably going to want to use one of these anyway to prevent “shimmering” on the horizontal axis.

Another option (assuming a 1080p display) is to use 5x integer scaling on the vertical axis and 6x on the horizontal axis. That looks pretty good (i.e., not as fat as 4:3 but not as skinny as 8:7) and has no shimmering without needing any shaders.

PSX switches between a lot of different horizontal resolutions but the most common is ~320x240, IIRC (this is why Mega Man X Collection has pillarboxing on the SNES-origin games), so you should be able to treat it similarly to Sega Genesis if you’re following the OP formula.

#133

So if have it like:

Recalbox/Retroarch resolution 720p (I mean the CEA 4 HDMI option in the config file.)

Smooth Games OFF

Integer Scale ON

Aspect Ratio 8:7 (1:1 PAR)

Crop Overscan ON

No shader

I’m good? Would that be the exact same for all non-arcade 2D systems? Same for PSX as well, be it 2D or 3D games?

#134

If that’s how you want them to look, yeah. That’s giving them square pixels, though, which will produce an image free from “shimmer”/“pixel warping” but some consoles will look fat (Genesis, CPS1/2/3) and some will look thin (S/NES) and very few (none that I can think of, really, outside of handhelds) had actually 1:1 pixel aspect ratios.

If you’re okay with that, then yeah, you’re all set. <- I don’t mean to insinuate anything by that. It’s a subjective topic.

Personally, I set all of my non-handheld systems (i.e., any system that was designed for use with a CRT) to use custom AR with 5x by 6x integer scaling. Other people, like Dogway, like to use a different AR for each core based on various calculations.

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