Does Crop Overscan ON messes with resolution?

[JulianoFdeS]

Hello guys, I have a doubt about cropping the overscan and the impact it does to the screen resolution.

Before start, I want to say that I decided to play SNES games 8:7 instead of 3:4 because Nintendo itself point on Nintendo DS’s Virtual Console that 8:7 is the “pixel perfect” settings, and I’m a Pixel Perfect Hunter, so I don’t want to discuss about this.

Now to the main goal of this post: Retroarch offers an option named “Crop Overscan” and this confuses me.

8:7 Crop Overscan Off (native emulator set)

8:7 Crop Overscan On (custom user set)

Now to the questions (and sorry for too many questions at once):

Is both images 8:7? If both images are set to 8:7, why they have the same length, but different height? Why “Crop Overscan On” fill vertically the screen? Is it stretching the image vertically? Does DSVC crop overscan or not?

Thanks for you attention!

[hunterk]

Neither of those look like they’re achieving what you want. That is, I see some uneven pixels in both shots. I would suggest going to settings > video > scaling and set your aspect ratio to “1:1 PAR”.

The aspect ratio setting in settings > video doesn’t know anything about the actual core output, just the size of the framebuffer the core hands it. ‘Crop overscan’ in the frontend video settings is sort of vestigial and most of the cores have had it moved into their core options because 1 catch-all option doesn’t typically provide enough granularity for more complex situations.

However, in the case of bsnes, it does a very specific thing: it crops 8 px from the top and bottom of the image.

[JulianoFdeS]

Thanks for your reply and sorry my late reply, my job took too much time of my life past days…

Anyway, I realized you didn’t answered the questions I asked earlier, I believe that’s because both images are not 8:7 pixel perfect?

Well… actually, set to 8:7 or 1:1 PAR (DAR) results the very same image, as you can see:

The images above use Crop Overscan ON in-emulator settings, not the Crop Overscan from video settings, I’m playing on Snes9x Core. What do you think?

[SLOTH]

Not sure exactly what you asking here. There is no “correct” way. Fiddle with the options and use the one that looks good to you. This thread makes some good points:

Retroarch and Snes9x 4:3 problem

Hello everybody I come to you to ask you a question, I tried to compare retroarch with snes9x to see if the rendering was identical I realize that the 4: 3 format does not make the two the same with the same settings, how is that possible? it looks the same if I put the 5: 4 aspect ratio on retroarch Retroarch 4:3 [Retroarch CT] vs Snes9x 4:3 [Snes9x CT]

Personally, I play all these older systems at 4:3. That’s how they were displayed to me on actual hardware growing up, so end of story. I do find discussions about “how creators intended”, “circles that are round” and “internal resolutions” all very interesting though.

[Jamirus]

You may have to restart the core/content to see the effect of the overscan core option. With 5x vertically you don’t see a difference in the active display on a 1080 display, because with overscan on it’s just more than 1120.

You either have to stick to that or use 4x scaling, having borders, assuming pixel perfect.

[JulianoFdeS]

As I said earlier:

Before start, I want to say that I decided to play SNES games 8:7 instead of 3:4 because Nintendo itself point on Nintendo DS’s Virtual Console that 8:7 is the “pixel perfect” settings, and I’m a Pixel Perfect Hunter, so I don’t want to discuss about this.

I’m not saying 8:7 is correct, I said I want to play SNES games Pixel Perfect, as own Nintendo points in it’s own Nintendo DS’s Virtual Console settings:

Nintendo did it as well in NES/SNES classic mini:

I want Pixel Perfect as Nintendo points, I don’t care with how they are displayed in hardware at the time the games or consoles was released, so end of story.

Please, if you back to reply here, don’t come with “the correct is this or that” I don’t care with the correct, I do care only with Pixel Perfect.

[hunterk]

I think your missing element is enabling integer scaling. Without it, the image is being stretched vertically to fit the screen (whether you crop overscan or not). 1:1 PAR plus integer scaling is indeed “pixel perfect”, as it makes square texels that will line up with the pixels of your monitor.

[JulianoFdeS]

I didn’t see any difference, look, scaled x3, pixel perfect:

Crop off

Crop on

Still looks that Crop ON is stretching, but at the same time, Crop ON looks exactly 8:7, too confusing to me.

[JulianoFdeS]

I enabled 1:1 PAR + Integer Scale and tried Crop Overscan, I restarted the emulator and no matter if ON or OFF, the screen looks exacly the same, there’s no difference at all.

1:1PAR+Integer Scale+Crop Overscan Off

1:1PAR+Integer Scale+Crop Overscan On

Maybe Snes9x Crop Overscan is buggy?

[hunterk]

@JulianoFdeS

Maybe Snes9x Crop Overscan is buggy?

Possible, yeah, though I would say less “buggy” and more “nonfunctional”. I know the last time I messed with it, I wasn’t able to get it to pad the the image properly and it put all 16 lines on the bottom of the screen instead of half on top and half on the bottom. I think some of the snes9x flavors do that and some do nothing at all.

[JulianoFdeS]

This is odd, I tried Crop Overscan ON/OFF in bsnes-mercury (v094 (Accuracy) d232c6e) and it doesn’t take effect at all, no matter integer scale or aspect ratio. But I realized that bsnes mercury settings come with “Allow settings to reduce accuracy” toggled OFF and “Crop Overscan” toggled ON as the main settings, and this core focus on vanila snes experience, so I deduce that I must turn this settings ON in Snes9x to have the Pixel Perfect experience.

One last question, when turned Integer Scale ON, I guess the final result is a small square in the center of the screen, is it possible to have Integer Scale ON and get an even higher video in my screen?

[Jamirus]

It makes perfect sense that it looks the same. Overscan ON would show you only something if a game actuually uses it. But because most don’t, there is just the black border area there. Overscan off = 224 vertical res Overscan on = 239 vertical res.

You would see a difference on e.g. a 900p monitor - having overscan on would only allow 3x integer scaling in that case vs 4x with off.

[JulianoFdeS]

It makes perfect sense that it looks the same. Overscan ON would show you only something if a game actually uses it.

Do you know what SNES game actually uses it? If you know a title that uses it, let me know.

[Jamirus]

Tetris & Dr. Mario show something there other than black.

[SLOTH]

I don’t know why you took offence to anything I said. At no point did I say you should use anything particular, merely stated my preference just like you did. Sorry to bother you.

[JulianoFdeS]

I didn’t took as offence, I would say I felt provocated because I said on the very beggining I didn’t wanted to discuss about 8:7 vs 3:4 and you brought the subject matter, but now I realized it wasn’t your intention and I have exceeded myself for no reason, I’m sorry.

[SLOTH]

I do not know a lot about this stuff so I enjoyed reading that thread and wanted to share. I just threw my opinion in there for… well no reason at all LOL, wasn’t really thinking I guess. I hope you find your solution

[JulianoFdeS]

No prob. I guess I found the solution. Thank you.