Using overlays as borders

RetroArch Nintendo consoles
#1

To be more specific; using GB Player borders as overlay borders.

I made some rips of the GB Player borders and tested them on RA with the overlay feature as you can see it’s not exactly practical but it works.

All the GB Player borders are 608x448 the width seems to be quite important here because RA cannot be set to this resolution and then there’s the black borders which block about 32 pixels of the overlay border.

I also hooked up the GB Player to see how it should look and the black borders are hardly noticeable compared to RA, if I scale the overlay higher than 1.33 it will get covered by the black borders on both sides of the screen. I’m not very interested in this feature myself just thought this should be said, even if it’s not a supported feature. Moreover GBA games don’t look as wide as they should when compared to the GB Player. If you check the Pokemon Box borders you’ll see that unlike the other borders these are already designed to show a 2x scale 480x320

EDIT: I’ve looked a bit more into how it should display and get the border to align without editing the border. RA has a few new options for adding a custom viewport on a resolution other than 640480 Now we can use 512480 or 530480, I tested 530 with a viewport of 480320 with point filtering and this gave me a flawless image without artifacts but it was too stretched due to being under 530. I have no idea how to calculate it the same way Nintendo does without trying out different numbers. Of course the logical width resolution would be 608 the same as the border + the scale overlay option, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same as Nintendo’s but not as wide as I did with 530. 608 should get GBA games to be correctly wide, instead of the current 640 which makes them look square.

Screen Resolution: 608x480 Custom viewport: 480x320 Overlay Opacity: 1.00 Overlay Scale: 1.40

Using the GC Player Startup Disc in Dolphin while of course it doesn’t work, it does tell me the resolution it uses and it’s 596x448, as well as using a demo disc with a GBA game it outputs 596. No idea why this is, the 12 pixel difference would throw off the viewport by 8 pixels. This info might not be useful but I think it’s worth mentioning.

In this link you’ll find most if not all of the borders for GB Player, Pokémon Box and a few misc. GBA-GC releases:

#2

Not a bad idea. Could you also rip all the super gameboy borders as well? It’d be nice to have all these packaged together with all the supergameboy borders and Godlances scanline overlays in one nice neat .zip maybe with a readme included that suggests what settings to use with each. Good work btw

#3

I appreciate that since some of the borders have their own way of “building” themselves and I had to recreate most of them with an image editor, some were quite time consuming but quality should be exactly the same as in the GB Player.

I am not familiar with the Super Gameboy but I did notice RA has support for 512x480 so I gave it a go and got a random border from the internet(Pokemon Blue256x224), in an image editor I upscaled it to 512x448 and added the transparency in the center 320x288 The only downside is no 240p support but everything else seems flawless. You’re better off getting a screenshot(256x224) and editing it like I did. I’m quite pleased at the result and I am now certain that including 608x480 can give us an ideal GBA output.

In this link I put all the things needed but please note I had some trouble using overlay0_rect, I still have no idea how to calculate it and it was pretty much trial and error. “0.0,0.01,1.0,0.978” gets the border to look fine over the game but doesn’t seem to be vertically centered correctly. https://www.mediafire.com/?8a2ptgmsaw3u2a9

**Once you have everything done you have to switch RA to 512x480 because this setting does not get saved.

#4

The correct overlay_rect0 for 512*448 Game Boy borders appears to be about 0.0,0.012,1.0,0.976.

Why? No friggin’ idea, it doesn’t match any math I did.

Are you sure that GBA games look too thin compared to the Game Boy Player with 480×360 viewport in a 640×480 window? That’s an exact 3:2 ratio, just like the GBA itself. If the Game Boy Player makes it look wider than that, Nintendo screwed up pretty hard. I’ve got a GBP, too, and RetroArch looks right to me at 640×480.

Here’s a photo of the Game Boy Player (top screen) and RetroArch (bottom screen) running simultaneously. Besides the obvious CRT vs. LCD differences, I’d say they look roughly the same, and I get a similar result to RetroArch when I hook up my GameCube to the LCD TV.

GBP borders are obviously a hassle because they need editing (for the benefit of those who don’t already know, the borders are actually more like backgrounds on the Player; some are just repeating textures, but even those that are full images actually have more content that’s covered up by the GBA screen. Given the way overlays work, this “extra” area needs to be cut and made transparent or else it will just sit over the image.

That said, I got it looking the way I wanted with the following overlay config:


overlays = 1
overlay0_overlay = gbp_block.png
overlay0_full_screen = true
overlay0_rect = "0.049,0.0,0.902,1.0"
overlay0_descs = 0

I believe the reason for this scaling is to correct for the difference between the viewport’s 3:2 shape and the roughly 4:3-ish border, which was how I calculated my original numbers. My math sort of held up better when making this config than it did for the Super Game Boy one above, but was still a few hundredths off–I still don’t understand why, but it caused a four-pixel difference which I had to fix with some small tweaks and trial and error.

#5

I am quite certain, I’ll use your overlay0_rect to demonstrate how it looks vs. Nintendo’s way.

Compare As you can see it does fit around the viewport perfectly but because it’s in 640 it doesn’t fit the entire screen. I would also like to note that the compare is not using the GB Player but one of Nintendo’s demo discs, like I’ve said before there is no difference between their scaling so it was a perfect match to compare against RA. For even more accuracy they use the same exact border.

It might be a hassle but those borders are not intended to be used with RA, the borders in /Misc. gfx/RA ready/ are the usable ones. What is in Misc. gfx is the picture frame that goes atop the 480x320, the GB Player adds a bit of transparency to that frame however.

EDIT: I have more evidence, finding a good screenshot of the GB Player is quite hard but this one outlines the issue perfectly: GB Player screenshot It shows all the pixels and is 640x480, if we calculate the width it is not 480 and the height is not 320 it’s much wider and taller. But if we change the image size to 608x448 it is a perfect fit. The Full option in the GB player is 570x380 if you also throw an image of this size into the screenshot and center it you will get an exact fit with the (Z Button : Options) image.

#6

Sorry for my delay in this reply, my computer locked up on the first attempt and I didn’t feel like re-typing it right away.

I definitely see the issue you’re pointing out and I think I might recognize the issue. Before that, though, a hacky fix: to make the RetroArch image look more like the Game Boy Player, use all the same settings from above, but set the custom viewport to 70,80: 499×320

Comparing those shots, I came to the conclusion that Wii/GC pixels are actually thinner than they are tall. I confirmed this by drawing two overlays for RetroArch: one a 460×460 “square”, which displayed in RetroArch as a tall rectangle. The second came after I’d measured the original to 371mm×390mm; I used those measurements to draw up a second, at 484×460, which resulted in a much truer square.

Using those figures, I calculated the “expected” scaling to be about 673.5 … since this is an ugly number, I’m happy to blame my ruler math and say a more likely figure is 672, a much more friendly and divisible figure: it’s 32 pixels more than 640, and turns the Wii’s 20:21 pixels into 1:1 squares when displaying a 640×480 image.

From a quick check of a few of my GameCube and Wii games, it does look like the vast majority of them are using video encoder scaling to a value somewhere very close to 672, so I think this should probably be RetroArch’s new default. That would provide the expected square pixels, making further manipulation much easier. Platforms like the Game Boys and most other handhelds use square pixels, so this would be ideal for those.

That said, there’s also the matter of other pixel widths unsupported by RetroArch. For example, the NES and SNES use 8:7 pixels; we can do some simple math to calculate the ideal video encoder scaling for those: 7/8*672=588. I had previously calculated 585 as a “rough guess” aspect by eye using Nintendo’s official emulators, so to get a figure as close as 588 with this somewhat more scientific measurement was certainly satisfying. The best way to deal with PARs like this would be to allow the user to make direct adjustments to the video encoder width.

#7

Impressive, I would like to see such a feature implemented, I admit I don’t fully understand but I can think of a few more video related issues that this feature might fix. I mentioned in another thread that TurboGrafx-16 games are not scaled correctly and there are no settings for fixing it, two games I tried are supposed to run under 512x224 but using that res. causes scrolling artifacts and is missing some pixels from the bottom. The problem comes from the image displaying 3 pixels vertically lower, those three pixels are never seen in whatever resolution I try. Here’s a compare that shows a RA screenshot vs. the expected output/VC The screenshot taken defaulted to 232, using this res. in RA does not cause artifacts but is still missing 3 pixels. I didn’t bother much with this problem because it seems like something so tiny that I found pointless to pester the devs about.

If I understand correctly changing the video encoder would not fix this because it has nothing to do with the width and as a whole this a different issue but I would rather mention it as well. This happens in the fceumm core, Kirby’s Adventure should run at 512x224 but shows scrolling artifacts and is also missing some pixels.

EDIT: I think I’ve established enough the why but for further reference Kirby’s Dream Collection which has two GB games which run at 400x360 and runs as a whole at 608x456. The border proves it and Dolphin also proves it. Nintendo seems to be consistent with these preferences, as the GB Player’s Full option also uses 400x360 for GB© games. I know Sega isn’t as consistent; Sonic Adv. DX has GG games at 635x433 but Sonic Gems Coll. uses two different sizes and both sizes use a blurry filter unlike DX.

#8

This is kind of an insane request, as there are several hundred Super Game Boy games. I ripped 30 borders that I thought seemed interesting and was already bored by the end of it.

The games I ripped were mainly Game Boy Color games which also have SGB support, because I don’t play standard Super Game Boy games on Gambatte. Here’s a full list of titles:

[ol] [li]Azure Dreams[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Balloon Fight GB (2 borders)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Bomberman Quest (2 borders)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Classic Bubble Bobble[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Columns GB[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Conker’s Pocket Tales[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Donkey Kong Land 3[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Game Boy Gallery[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Game & Watch Gallery[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Game & Watch Gallery 2/3 (these two use same border; lazy, Nintendo)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Legend of Zelda, The: Link’s Awakening DX[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Monkey Puncher[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Pokemon Yellow[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Pokemon Gold[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Pokemon Silver[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Pokemon Pinball (2 borders)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Pokemon Trading Card Game (3 borders, one is a cool debug border that delineates GBA tiles, try it if you like this kind of stuff)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Puchi Carat[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Shutokou Racing, The[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Super Bombliss DX[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Survival Kids[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Survival Kids 2[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Tetris DX (2 borders)[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/li][li]Wario Land 2[/:m:1hvwkwgr][/ol][/li] I know, some of these are obscure and weird, and I missed some big-name stuff. I chose largely based on games I like and then threw in a few that I thought people might want like the Pokemon stuff, Survival Kids, Azure Dreams. As I mentioned, most of these are GBC games, because playing Super Game Boy games on an emulator without SGB support is kind of a travesty, go do something else. I know people probably want stuff like Pokemon Red, Donkey Kong, Kirby’s Dream Land 2, etc., but you’re not getting the full Super Game Boy experience for those games, anyway, so why half-ass it. Play them on something with real Super Game Boy support.

EDIT: I’m not sure about the TurboGrafx-16 problem, but for some of the rest of that:

All NES games should be running at 256240 (so for RetroArch, 512240 or 512*480). There’s a misconception that NES games run at 224 lines, but really it’s just that a lot of games don’t put anything in the extra 16 lines. They’re still always there.

Game Gear is a weird case because it’s one of the very few LCD screens that don’t use square pixels. So even though the resolution is the same, if you look at a real Game Gear, the screen is actually wider than a Game Boy. It’s weird that Sega would use multiple resolutions, but I suppose some devs catered to the ratio and others didn’t?

#9

I was wrong about the nes core and I blame Nintendo for that. At the time I wrote that, I wasn’t sure what height to use so I went to Nintendo’s site and got a screenshot of 3D Classics Kirby’s Adventure I cropped the image out of 400x240 and got 256x224

http://media.nintendo.com/nintendo/bin/ … Gd6TNj.jpg

I still haven’t found a fix for the PC Engine games but it’s not big problem since I have them as VC.

#10

Playing around with overlays as borders today, these are really cool. Do you know anywhere to get a full pack of these borders?

#11

There are 20 frames in the Game Boy Player, the link in the op is only missing five borders. This is because one frame is just the color black repeated all over the screen and the remaining four are recolors of the AGB border. The recolors are done on-the-fly by the GB Player, the geometry and flower borders are also colored in real time so I would have to do this manually instead I supply the raw images and let the user color it if they want.

In that link there’s a folder called Misc. gfx, inside it are some graphics for making the sleek frame that goes atop the game display. There is also a folder called “RA ready” this folder contains already edited and usable overlays for RA.

If you check my other thread there is a link for the GB cores with 608*480 support, this will allow the border to fit your screen. The only thing left is to change the video encoder to something higher than 640, what Vague Rant suggested, 668 should do the trick.

#12

Great stuff, I will be sure to download those. Thanks man.

#13

This is kind of an insane request, as there are several hundred Super Game Boy games. I ripped 30 borders that I thought seemed interesting and was already bored by the end of it. [/quote]

Well, I wouldn’t call it an “insane request”. First off, I have no idea what it takes to “rip” these borders. Maybe its as simple as using some utility to rip them all from the supergameboy rom in a matter of seconds. I’m assuming this is not the case. Are you guys just loading up an emulator, taking a snapshot, then cropping out the borders and saving them as a png? If so, then sure thats more time consuming unfortuantely, but still not crazy. If you upload 30, and I upload 30, and a few others do the same, then we’d have a nice package for people to use.

#14

See my previous post. I’m sure we could put a decent pack together. We should just agree on a method of creating them first.

#15

Sounds cool, it would be great to have these included in the next point release for Wii.

#16

OK, so it’s not insane assuming you don’t have any knowledge at all of what you’re asking for and have assumed that it’s an easy and automated process. I’m not aware of any automated tools for this functionality, so yeah, it does mean loading up the game and taking one or more screenshots. Many games switch between multiple borders as you play, which means you’d need to get at least that far in the game to capture the border, e.g. Pokemon Trading Card Game actually shows your current badges (or something; I’ve never played it) in the border, so there’s borders for every possible badge combination.

There’s a total of somewhere over 650 games with Super Game Boy support, counting all region duplicates. Obviously, that’s less if you strip out games released in US/Europe/Japan/etc., but that’s not always going to be correct as a number of games have different borders based on region–e.g. probably every Pokemon game, weird conversions like Bomberman GB (Japan) -> Wario Blast (USA, Europe), etc. Then there’s games that are Super Game Boy compatible but don’t actually provide borders, which you probably won’t know anyway until you test them, so they take almost as much effort for no results.

If you do decide to organize for a group of people to start releasing borders, then that’s admirable, and clearly a lot more reasonable than asking SuperrSonic to do all 650+. Most emulators with Super Game Boy support should be fine for capturing screenshots. BGB, bsnes/higan and VBA-M should all do the job, among others. (Make sure to set your colors to their uncorrected versions in emulators that attempt to duplicate the original color output).

I think this would be cool too, although I’m not sure if the RetroArch authors would want to take on the potential legal burden of distributing tens or even hundreds of copyrighted border artworks. But who knows; it’s unlikely anyone’s going to create legal trouble over some old Super Game Boy borders, so they might consider it a non-issue. Still, given the trouble they had over on Android, they may be wary. Even if it’s not possible to distribute these with RetroArch, a single package here on the boards would certainly be sensible.

#17

I think I’d prefer borders to be a separate download. Maybe a fan pack or something here on the boards. Including all those borders in retroarch is just going to balloon the size of the .zip file, and for me personally, it’s just another thing I’ll have to delete.

#18

Using the borders that Seam made as an example ( I hope you don’t get upset for it and Thank you for sharing it with us), I made 25 more borders from Games Between letters A and H. I excluded some because they were Japanese Only Titles without that much interest in their borders, or they were a little… bland ( Just the name of the game, for example, although I let Tsubasa pass to show one of those kind of borders).

In any case, I’ll try to make more but I don’t know when that will be.

What you will find in this “Pack”:

A Bug’s Life (Just for kicks, lol) Adventures of Lolo Aladdin (Again, just because it has one xD) Animaniacs Aqualife Arcade Classic 1, 2 and 3 (Have the same border) Arcade Classic 4 Battle Arena Toshinden Blaster Master: Enemy Below Bomberman Collection (There are two for this game, the normal one, and one it was unused) Bonk/Gengin Collection Captain Tsubasa Castlevania Legends Centipede (Actually the border was for Millipede) Chase H.Q. Secret Police Desert Strike Donkey Kong GB Donkey Kong Land 1 Doneky Kong Land 2 From TV Animation: One Piece 1 (I knew about this one, and since the look kind of cool, I added to the list) From TV Animation: One Piece 2 (Same as above) Harvest Moon Galaga Hercules

https://anonfiles.com/file/d2af47b1f17b3d0c16f7407fdc8bbdc6

I tested them in Retroarch WIi and they worked fine, I hope nobody has problems with them. Something I would like to try is custom borders.

------------ If by any means this cause problems please tell me and I’ll delete this post. ------------

#19

Here’s borders for another 10 games, plus one from the Super Game Boy itself:

[ol] [li]Beauty and the Beast[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Cross Country Racing[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Dragon Dance[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Dragon Quest Monsters[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Hello Kitty no Sweet Adventure[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Loppi Puzzle Magazine (this is actually a series of games, but they all use the same border)[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Pocket Bomberman (2 borders)[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Pro Mahjong Tsuwamono GB[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Super Game Boy (2 borders, these are the Game Boy-looking border/s when running normal, non-SGB games)[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]TNN Outdoor Fishing Champ[/:m:1vbahbzp][/li][li]Wetrix GB[/*:m:1vbahbzp][/ol][/li]Isn’t Aladdin a weird case? That game came out on GB and GBC, as two separate, essentially unrelated ports of the console version. Anyway, there’s actually two borders in that Centipede/Millipede game, one for each.

#20

Thanks for doing this. Does the pack contain the config files aswell as the pngs?