FM-Towns in RetroArch

Yes, I had an “epic mix-up” (normal for me). I mistook it for a strangely named childhood syndrome. Sorry about that. :see_no_evil:
The isolated production thing, I didn’t know that, but on this side, they give that name to things that pile up (like turtles). A good tip.

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When I played Myst on the PSP around 2011 or so to see its differences I remember reviewers saying it received a “wide screen” treatment" and etc, I wondered how that was possible, unless the original developers rendered each of the original scenes in a wider aspect from the start, which was very unlikely. Out of curiosity, I just tried it out and interestingly it has smooth transitions very similar to the ones you mentioned about the MAC release, I took a screenshot from the PSP release followed by the DOS one, then I thought that by using the DOS release in full screen looked correct to me, the big cog uphill doesn’t seem stretched and when I set it to 4:3, which was something close to the CRT monitors, it didn’t look right, everything got squished, so I compared the PSP and the DOS side by side they look identical as far as aspect ratio goes, while the PC release is much sharper for obvious reasons:

PSP Screenshot at 1x resolution (full screen)

DOS PC without shaders (full screen)

Out of curiosity I’ve tried the Saturn next, it has borders and the image is indeed wide, so funny that my brothers and I played it and Riven a lot on the console in the 90’s but I didn’t remember the game had these borders on the CRT:

Saturn, no shaders (full screen)

I used the Mega Bezel shader to remove the top and bottom borders as much as I could and it almost fills the screen, I think that filling the whole screen like in the PSP and DOS versions probably stretches the images a bit.

Saturn, Mega Bezel used to increase the image (full screen)

And lastly, a PS1 raw screenshot just for comparison, looks really sharp, too, much more than the Saturn release. This is also true for Riven on both consoles, though on CRTs I don’t think it would matter much.

Myst (PS1)

The bottom line is, Myst is a 1993 wide screen game, not true 16:9 but close, something like 16:10 maybe, this is something I wasn’t expecting, but I noticed that many DOS games have wider horizontal resolution compared to consoles, while this is not always true, it does happen. Another unexpected game that is actually widescreen is Super Street Fighter II (DOS), it’s so funny to think developers just ignored that this game looks weirdly squished on CRT monitors, the character selection and transitions are indeed close to 4:3, but the actual gameplay isn’t, this is a screenshot using the adjustment that I set RA to fill the whole 16:9 area. Another interesting fact is that this game is based on the console assets, too. I think even the Amiga version is also wide.

Super Street Fighter II (1996)

Sorry if this is a bit off topic but since you mentioned the MAC version of Myst, I went ahead and finally checked the differences I wanted to long time ago.

Edit: simple gif showing both the Saturn and PS1 versions filling the screen as much as they can, I think the Saturn version is a bit stretched and the raw PS1 images look more natural, so the aspect is not as wide as I expected, so the PSP version indeed stretches them quite a bit in comparison, but I could be wrong.

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Most DOS and early Windows games have a widescreen aspect ratio, because of the standard graphics modes of those times, VGA, EGA, etc. The most common format for games was 320x200 (1:6) which would be 1920x1200 (16:10) for example, in VGA:
640x480, 16 colors (4:3)
640x350, 16 colors (16:9)
640x200, 16 colors (16:10)
320x200, 256 colors (16:10) <- Also known as game mode.
It was similar to SNES but in reverse. This video has good info from 320*200

In this video you can see the main differences between Mac and Windows.

I have tested the console ports and I think they all have smooth transitions, even the Atari Jaguar one. And most of those ports are based on the 256 color Masterpiece version.

The problem was unique to Windows and was an Apple bug with Quicktime. Quicktime for Windows (practically) was released and promoted with Myst. It implemented an option that never worked with Windows and instead of fixing it in other versions, they forgot about it. Myst already had all the work and they couldn’t redo everything, trusting that it would be fixed, that never happened. That’s why the original Myst and Masterpiece carry that bug.

PS. Street Fighter is widescreen and can use Roland MT32 as sound, a deluxe version. :slightly_smiling_face:

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