Different BIOS revisions draw the BIOS-related images in different ways. The later BIOS revisions generally have fewer graphical glitches. You really should only be using scph-550x BIOSes with Mednafen unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, too.
I am only using the BIOS files that you recommend with mednafen and it picks the right one on a per-region basis. My PS1 is SCPH-102 so it’s quite late yeah.
Oh, ok, my mistake, I was mistaken about what BIOS revisions and regions that “a” in “PlayStation” distortion occurred on when I wrote that.
Updated build in updater with resolution fixes. Tested on Tekken 3 and Medievil 1 which allowed me to find the last cases for 256 width and 364 width.
Mednafen: Any hope of getting this fixed in upstream? Currently I have to do this to avoid black padding: http://pastebin.com/dRCHGSYN
You do realize not all games have the same horizontal image placement for a given mode? And you’re not messing up the aspect ratio, are you?
Just for reference, PS1 is one of those systems that can change horizontal resolutions mid-frame, though I doubt any games are crazy enough to do this intentionally.
Ye, games changing their resolution mid-frame sounds crazy, and would need a complete scaler for every frame. Not worth it :\ Never heard of any games doing it though.
The changing of horizontal position sounds new. You have any specific examples of games that do this? Does that explain padded 350 width for 320x240?
Games in general? There are a handful of PC Engine and PC Engine CD games that do it.
Sega Genesis games probably would have done it if not for the video output becoming unusably unstable for a period of time when switching mid-frame on the Genesis VDP.
I was thinking about PSX. Can games change the horizontal position at will, and if so, does any game really do this?
As for PCE (we use PCE-fast), I haven’t done much on it, but anything involving CPU scaling would be too slow performance-wise on consoles. Don’t think we encountered any issue with multiple resolution in one frame yet.
Asuka 120%, Order of the Griffon, and Ryuuko no Ken are the PCE(CD) games that change resolution mid-frame. It’s a pretty big part of the gameplay for Ryuuko no Ken, too.
Added optional overscan cropping for PSX. I didn’t realize it was really supposed to be non-square pixels.
At any rate, I feel it’s worth supporting square pixels as well to be able to use NN-style output on conventional displays.
Tested the new core. Everything looks as it should. Well done!
And yeah, sorry if I came across as overly anal about aspect ratios and such. Just trying to help in any way I can, and well, I did take the time to more or less learn how various PS1 games output their image, so I thought I’d share what I found out here. As for pixel-perfect scaling, well, some things there’s just nothing to do about, nor is it really worth the time or headaches trying to get everything perfect, unless you’re, well, a perfectionist. Things like FFVII’s menu can pretty much be patched up with the CRT shader, anyway, which hides the imperfect scaling pretty well.
My turn to sound anal I guess. Ore! Tomba looks a bit off now. You can take a look at the sides:
Also, would it be possible/feasible to let the user crop the picture manually on FMVs on a per-game basis? A lot of games, or at least some of them, have FMVs that are hardcoded with huge black bars on the top and bottom to make them look right on a 4:3 display because they are really 16:9. Not a huge issue, but it would be nice if we could crop away all the black stuff and let the FMVs fill the whole display. Here’s an example:
Uncropped: http://i.imgur.com/SP6AQLI.png Cropped: http://i.imgur.com/Msg6SUd.png
Eh, no. 
That very thin black bar was already present in the previous version of the core IIRC, so I chose not to make a fuss about it. Other emulators seem to scale past it, resulting in veeeeeeeeery slight distortion. It’s honestly nothing to get worked up about.
I don’t see it on 0.9.26 though:
Anyway, no it’s not a big deal, it’s just that it wasn’t there before and now it is. I can live without a fix, just thought I’d mention it.
Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I have the latest Mednafen-PSX core for RetroArch (20130629) and I’m seeing resolution/scaling issues with Tales of Phantasia (which changes its resolution/mode frequently. The main 2D gameplay is fine, and the main menu displays correctly (in high-res 640 x 480), but the 3D over world map is compressed to the left side of the screen (huge black bar on the right), as are all the menus, and FMVs (and the opening Namco logo) play in a small window on the left half of the screen (centered vertically). Is there some option somewhere I’m missing that will fix this and scale the different resolutions up to the full 4:3 aspect ratio I’m running RetroArch at?
EDIT: NEVERMIND, that’ll teach me to post before thinking. Forgot I had a bsnes CPU-based filter still in the video chain. Taking that out solved things fine. That’ll teach me to post too hastily.
That’s an easy thing to overlook, so I’m glad to hear you got it figured out. Thanks for posting your solution, as well 