Using overlays as borders

RetroArch Nintendo consoles
#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?

#21

Cool ! I’ll try those borders later. I didn’t knew Dragon Warrior Monsters had a border, it’s awesome.

Both, the Vague Rant pack and mine come with the .PNG and CFG for each border. They are ready to use as long as you put them in your SD/USB xD.

#22

Great!

#23

I’ve been “collecting” more borders this afternoon (Well, arternoon in Spain at least) and now I have a little more than a hundred counting the others that I did before.

I still have to apply transparency, and create the config files, so expect to have a Link in a day or two (Two if I can’t take the free time to do it).

For example I have what I think are all of the Wario Land 2 borders (Very detailed, each one shows the world you’re in. I love them), Classic Konami borders with series like Gradius or Castlevania, a few from Dragon Quest too, and more of course.

The most interesting thing was to discover that there are animated borders for several games or by doing secret things. IT’S FREAKIN’ CRAZY. Things like a drive-in Theater with it’s very own Day-Night cycle, another indoor Theater where the public suddenly fall asleep, or grab a newspapper and starts to read, or even two guys playing their GBs… Others are really weird like the Mario Paint thing or the “My game is Birds, your argument is invalid” kind of effect.

Now that I think about it, between this and the GB Camera… Nintendo was weird man. I love it, but weird nonetheless xD.

#24

Ok, here it is: https://anonfiles.com/file/eb16598707ca88845f30d3191a5d9f0f

105 borders from Super Game Boy.

The list goes like this:

A Bugs Life Adventures of Lolo Aladdin Animaniacs Aqualife Arcade Classics Arcade Classics 4 Blaster Master Bomberman Collection (2, Normal and Unused) Bonk/Genjin Collection Captain Tsubasa Castlevania Legends Chase HQ Desert Strike Detective Conan Donkey Kong (Game & Watch Style border) Donkey Kong Land 1 Donkey Kong Land 2 Dragon Quest (4 Borders with different styles) Galaga & Galaxian Game&Watch Gallery 2 GB Donkey Kong GB Toshinden Goemon Harvest Moon Hercules Killer Instinct (It’s quite cool) Kindaichi King Of Fighters ‘96 (4 Borders, different colors) Kirby 2 (2 Borders, Japanese and International) Koguru Konami Collection (6 Borders, Antartic Adventure, Castlevania, Contra, Frogger, Gradius, VicViper) Lil’ Monsters Lodoss War Mach GoGoGo! Mario Picross 1 Mario Picross 2 Mega Man V Mickey Mouse Magic Wand Millipede Mini4Boy (2 Borders, Normal and Unused) Molemania Money Idol Mulan Nettou Real Bout Nettou Samurai Spirits Nettou World Heroes One Piece 1 One Piece 2 Pac-In-Time Page Master ( I find it really ugly, but whatever) Pocahontas (Ugly too) Pokemon Red Pokemon Blue Pokemon TCG (3 Borders, Japanese with “Pocket Monsters” in the border, the US/EUR one without text, and one unused) PuyoPuyo 2 Quest : Fantasy Challenge/ Quest RPG: Brian’s Journey (I didn’t knew that there was a GBC version, I hope it’s any good!) Revelations: The Demon Slayer Rock’n Monsters (Cool title xD) Same Game Small Soldiers Space Invaders Street Fighters 2 (9 Borders, based on the stages of each of the playable characters) Tetris Attack Toy Story Urban Strike Wario Land 2 (9 Borders, from each of the worlds of the game) Yu-Gi-Oh Capsule Monsters

I added others that I can’t relate to any game: Handheld (The border is like a handheld console or some kind of Pokedex) Unknown (It’s a border with fossils) Spaceship (It’s quite nice)

I tested every one of those in my Wii and I didn’t have any problems, I hope everything is correct for all of you and.

Well, that’s it. And of course, the borders are ready to be used so no worries, and enjoy them.

By the way I tried to not include any border that was previously made by Seam or Vague Rant because I didn’t want to disrespect their efforts , although I have the impression that one of the Pokemon TCG borders may be already done…

Sorry for that if it’s the case, I hope it doesn’t presents any problem.

PD: I really don’t know if “Presents a problem” it’s correct, but whatever, it’s not like my english is good to begin with xD.

#25

Awesome job, thanks to everyone!!

#26

Thanks very much guys, these are lovely!