ZellSF wrote on 2020-11-13, 23:17:
Jo22 wrote on 2020-11-13, 17:00:
- Internally, old consoles often used screen resolutions with another aspect ratio (5:4 or 8:7).
No, the aspect ratio of (mostly) all old consoles is 4:3. That's the aspect ratio any TV would display those resolutions as. It's also what the games were designed around, and thoroughly iterated on. Finding the occasional art asset that looks better stretching the image to 8:7 doesn't really change that.
Well, true, I won't argue.
It's just that some people used to emulators favour the raw output of emulators,
whithout any TV set emulation / aspect correction. Or rather, insist this to be the real thing.
Perhaps because emulators originally didn't feature a faithful TV simulation.
The popular 320x200 256c VGA resolution in DOS was perhaps too low for consoles of the 16-Bit generation also, not sure.
I always wondered what former developers think about this issue.
They developed games on a workstation, with professional RGB monitors (maybe VGA like even) and combined hardware/software emulators (say, a modfied SNES/MD with PC interface), EPROM emulators and so on.
For example, Nintendo had a SNES emulator
named Silhouette that ran on Macintosh platform..
On the other hand, they also had stock consoles with cheap TV sets (RF or Composite) for final testing and beta testers.
Many effects relying on dithering needed such a cheap setup, which also was the hardware configuration of the audience (kids rarely had luxury TVs in their bed rooms) .
Dithering (checker board patterns, gradients) and colour/rainbow banding don't work on RGB, but do work fine on NTSC via RF.
So in the end, the team had both 4:3 output and the unaltered pixel output on the workstation.
Now, the question is, for which one did they do their artwork for?
I don't know. I assume it's similar to the Deluxe Paint dilemma on DOS, in which the drawing routine for the circles malfunctioned.
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