Capcom Arcade Aspect Ratio (CPS1 and CPS2)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ค. 2024
- Observations and Analysis of the 4:3 Aspect Ratio of Capcom CPS1 and CPS2 Arcade Games. Background and Sprite Examination
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#Capcom #Arcade #AspectRatio - เกม
“The CRT doesn’t care - it just displays what it is given.”
That’s going on my headstone.
Thanks for this. As someone who grew up in the arcades, I almost have a stroke whenever I see someone playing old games in 16:9.
Just don't watch.
@@Brixman I see we found the person who plays Atari games stretched fullscreen.
Lol have you tried streching GB in ultra wide
Was wondering, im playing capcom in “pixel perfect” mode and almost look like a 16:9 ratio
it depends on a game, because some games were run incorrectly back in the day and ALMOST EVERY game had at least some elements being displayed incorrectly BACK IN THE DAY
how about oval earth in ufo? but the troops are made for aspect correction. obal swasticas in wolfenstein but the notsees are made for aspect correction. 3d engine in dungeon keeper was mad for aspect correction but they show you an oval cd that drowe me insane back in 1995 on my 17" crt screen.
old devs were insane. old hardware was insane. old software was insane. bruh yankees to this day still think that so called scanlines existed anywhere outside the yankeestan. we literally had honeycomb or vertical brick masks here
I have no problems using Chun-Li for any and all graphical comparisons. As a matter of fact I think it should be law.
It was kind of a missed opportunity not to compare Chun-Li's height at various stages in her flipping animations as additional evidence for the correct aspect ratio, though. Her height should remain consistent throughout, but if the display is meant to use non-square pixels then her height will vary on the frames when she's horizontal compared to the frames when she's vertical when viewed on a square-pixel display without adjustment.
221b And God knows she flips a LOT.
Yu Tubaru What? No, this is just keeping her proportions consistent across display modes.
He didn't use the thiccness of her thighs as a measuring tool. Trash video.
No matter the resolution, Chun Li's thighs are massive...
Another example using street fighter is ssf2t ports for Saturn, psx, and 3do. The Saturn's horizontal resolution for the ports is 352x224, so Capcom trimmed 16 pixels from either side an otherwise correct internal aspect ratio, however, when translated to 4:3, because you're only drawing 352 pixels horizontally instead of 384 the characters actually stretch a little at 4:3. There was also an issue with positioning screen elements because of the 16 pixels missing on either side for example characters in the select screen being 16 pixels closer to the mini portraits and other quirks character starting positions on battle screen are correct though so that's fine but background doesn't line up 1:1 to arcade. The psx is capable of displaying 384:224 so it's a straight 1:1 port. The 3do port uses rescaled artwork on the horizontal axis, so internal resolution is matched to 4:3, except 3do internal resolution is 320x240, so the game does keep the 224 height (8 black pixels top and bottom) and the width is adjusted to 300 iirc (10 blank pixels either side), so I'm effect it's both letterboxed and pillarboxed. With this port they didn't adjust some parameters, for example, character starting positions are closer, keeping their arcade initial positions, 42ish pixels closer to the center per character. Most of the artwork was resized, but not all, for example the checkerboard pattern behind character portraits in select screen or life bars (some other ports mess up this checkerboard pattern), finally, because of the mess in positions, some elements are misaligned (most notably speed selection in character select screen) when used in an emulator, so it was probably hackishly fixed in real hardware. Anyways, that's all I have on that. Sf2 ports was an obsession of mine for a while (I'm not even going to go into arcade release differences/regions etc). And then there the GBA turbo revival with it's incorrectly scaled sprites, man I love this stuff.
During the Mugen craze of the early 2000's, this specific aspect (heh) of character sprites ripped from Capcom fighters was the bane of my existence. Few seemed to understand that you couldn't port those characters without adjusting them, so you ended up with characters able to reach across the entire screen (either 320 x 240 or 640 x 480). Even now, some folks who should care don't seem to get it.
It's a shame mugen never evolved into a more widely-used and more accessible form, it was one of the coolest ideas I had ever seen but at age 11 it was hard for me to figure out how to do anything other than add stages and characters, never learned how to make them. Bless you for doing that work.
To say nothing of support for graphics with varying aspect ratios. You'd need INSANE resolution to have them all properly cohabitate.
any good tips or tutorials on how to adjust sprites that you know of?
for example, adjusting sprites from a game that runs on a 4:3 to look normalized on 16:9...
@@fr0ek I think it would be easier to just show more of the stage or extend it beyond the original 4:3 boundaries. Maybe that's just me but I find it easier to create extra detail, rather than remove it while still having the assets look "right."
This explains some of the sprite rips for MUGEN fighting engine sprites.
This made me realize that actual pixel perfect resolution won't be available without 4K or maybe more depending on how gross the ratios could be for some of these titles.
To compensate for 384x224 being 4:3, you need 7 square pixels for horizontal rectangular pixel and 9 for every vertical pixel.
So if you want proper 4:3 pixel perfect, you need a display larger than 2688x2016, so at minimum 4K.
If any games/consoles use anything weirder, then it can be way way worse.
Correct, the images of street fighter 2 shows in video are not 4:3. Just a screenshot to verify it. Anyway great video
i think 1440p gets close enough with 5x wide and 6x tall
Should have included Mai Shiranui as a benchmark too as she has perfect example of a circle.
she has several
SFIII double impact has a 16:9 mode!
Even on the sf collection
Shame it wasn't re-used in 3rd Strike. The 16/9 mode looks amazing.
When the 16-bit era started having arcade ports come to them, those were some amazing years.. Mortal Kombat being probably the biggest example of that. The ability to play finally arcade games at home was pretty nuts.
I really appreciate your thorough analysis of this sort of thing! You’re particularly good at making a potentially dry topic compelling.
This is sort of a minor thing, but at 3:22, it would have been interesting to hear more about why you chose those specific settings for Mame (disabling bilinear filtering, disabling unevenstretch, and so on). For one thing, I don’t even know what any of those setting do. 😅
Hey Ashley. Thank you!
I included the notes about my settings as a bit of a quick fyi for those that would be interested. I held off going into the details for the sake of the video's pacing.
Bilinear filtering seems to be enabled by default for MAMEUI64. It is intended to smooth the graphics out - something that is nice for 3D gaming that has textures but not as much for games that use pixel art. When applied to games such as those presented in this video, it just makes them blurry.
Unevenstretch is a default setting that essentially means that there doesn't have to be a uniform scaling method applied to each pixel. At a glance, the image might look OK - but the scaling of individual pixels might be different as you move across a line and/or down to the next line. People generally like to favor integer scaling on the vertical and let the horizontal handle the unevenscaling where necessary. I think someone has a video out there on this and zooms in on the images. I am not sure if it is something I would cover in the future or not. Pictures tell the tale.
The default gamma setting for MAME is too high, imo. The long story short is that the colors look a bit washed out and don't have the depth they should. I lowered the setting to help pull things down. That is the very non-math explanation, ha! There is a much more technical explanation for this, but I would say that if you use MAME... load up one of your favorite games at the default setting (1.0), play a bit, quit, and then drop it to 0.8 or 0.7 and see if you like it better.
It is possible that the original 1.0 setting felt appropriate for your typical CRT monitor back when mame was being developed, but it feels a bit too much on the backlit flat panels of today, imo - at least for the old 2D arcade games I play.
Displaced Gamers Ah, that’s all really helpful-thanks! And for what it’s worth, if you were to do a video sometime that went into more detail on unevenstretch, I’d totally watch that :).
Thanks, Ashley, for bringing scaling / stretching up! And thanks, Displaced Gamers, for the notes!
Scaling and stretching in MAME (actually I only use GroovyMAME now) are really driving me crazy. To most users scaling and stretching are all about filling up the screen. Some might know briefly those are 4:3 games so they are okay with "some" black space on the sides but "hey, top and button, please fill them up" even doing that would actually be uneven / non-integer / no longer 4:3.
I have gone over this video and the SNES AR one a few hundred times back and forth. So now in all emulators:
Keep Aspect Ratio
4:3 or square pixel - 4:3 (If the emulator has such setting. In MAME it's in the tab menu in-game)
No uneven scaling
All filters off
I don't mind black bars. I need fidelity and authenticity. I understand integer-scaling retro games won't fit 1920x1080 well. .
But I found something interesting that I'm not so sure. Some games in MAME are still wide and fat with screen at 4:3 instead of the games' own pixel ratio. For example, Robocop.
Keep AR, no uneven stretch, use 4:3. Wheels on vehicles, the "c"-in-circle copyright logo, the title screen's Robocop logo, or Robocop himself (itself?), are fat. I don't recall they're that wide when I played the game 30 years ago in arcade.
Then I switch to its pixel rendition 16:15. Huge black bars on the sides. It looks even more like 4:3. The objects' proportion become more correct.
This is what driving me crazy. So after all it depends on the games? The original designs? Or it's something similar to the full moon in MD's Castlevania? Or it's just me getting all these wrong?
I just don't get it. Now, no matter what I have in mame.ini, I just toggle around 4:3, square pixel, non-integer scaling, x, y, x or y, etc, in every game.
Oh, I haven't even got to GroovyMAME on CRT monitors. I thought resolutions now become native to the CRT and scaling is less painful ... no. It's just the same. Toggling around the above would give different looks and proportions as well ...
It'd be really great if Displaced Gamers could dive into all these ...
@@lycheelok Thanks so much for all that handy info!
thank you for this video. sometimes i feel like an old man yelling at clouds whenever i go to a fighting game even and we got some folks playing cps2/CPS3 games fully stretched to 16:9 on flat panels. hopefully this video educates more people into fighting games.
Thanks, Dave! I hope this video does as well, although I fully acknowledge that there are a lot of people that shrug off aspect ratio - so long as it runs, it doesn't matter to them.
Although of all things - it seems like fighting games would be one of the most important genres to maintain a consistent aspect ratio, frame rate, and lagless game play!
This is so true. I hate when people play classic fighting games in 16:9 for the simple fact that everything gets deformed. Perfect example would be a character standing up is 6 feet tall, then when they get knocked to the floor they magically become 10 feet tall. How can they not see this. Ugh, anytime I try to watch a youtube video of these games and I see the stretched format I immediately leave the video without a second thought.
Imagine my disgust whenever people upload playthroughs of old games that were meant for 4:3, fully stretched to widescreen for some reason.
Fun fact: Street Fighter 3 Second Impact for CPS3 does have an option for widescreen, and Third Strike does not.
me too, I also go for the circle rule, whatever makes most of the circles round demonstrates the true aspect ratio intended..
Now we're two... Yeah seriously, nothing irks me more than a fighting game with an incorrect aspect ratio for fighting games. You can't judge your distances and the whole game looks awful.
Great content, man!
This is great for any pixel artist to know -- Ironically, I'm quite experienced in pixel art/animation (18+ years) in the Capcom style and wasn't aware of this technicality!
Please keep up this oldschool content slant! -- New-schoolers clearly need more in-depth technical knowledge before it is lost to time!
The Zelda / ASM coding practices were an amazing insight into how programmers (who often doubled as pixel artists) handled 'unusual' creative problems back in the day!
Awareness is a super helpful tool and I'm happy to see the video on the topic. In fact, I believe it was one of your earlier videos that really gave me a respect for what aspect ratio meant, or more specifically that "square pixels" are a modern connotation brought about by modern hardware, and that older pixel art understood this and took advantage of non-square pixels for, as you've described, detail, that is sometimes/often lost in direct square pixel ports.
I can't believe that I found you channel not years ago... It's F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C! You provide so much information and knowledge that I soak in every video you put on TH-cam! Thx a lot!
Omg, now it makes sense why the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs characters look so much muscular in the game than in the comics that it's based on.
Damn this is interesting. I never realized so much went into adapting the graphics for Super Nintendo!
I mean who would have thought that these games were intended for 4:3 displays, it's not like 99.9% of all CRT monitors in existence were 4:3 at the time
I think a lot of people just don't notice or they figure the original game was letterboxed due to the approach with the home ports using 256x224.
@@DisplacedGamers It's just my reasoning for why 4:3 is intended. The only other displays at the time were insanely expensive Sony 1:1 monitors that were used in like flight control rooms and a few 16:9 hdvs monitors in the early 90s in Japan.
Displaced Gamers Or they simply naturally assumed that all pixels were supposed to be square because why go out of one's way to make them look "ugly"?
@@DisplacedGamers To further prove your point about, 4:3 being the original aspect ratio: Just look at the machine that the arcade SF2 was originally made on the X68000 by Sharp. It came with a...... drumroll please..... a 4:3 monitor.
I think a lot of people just grew up in the modern age of fixed-pixel widescreen displays and just assumed it was always like that (they might be aware that 4:3 displays existed, but that's the difference between factual and practical knowledge). If you had never used a 4:3 television/monitor and only ever played such old games via emulation, what reason would you have to assume there was anything wrong? Once you see it in the intended aspect ratio enough times something just "clicks" (especially if you saw the 4:3 first) but if you never had... most games don't actively look 'ugly' when stretched 16:9, so again, why assume anything's wrong?
It would really grind my gears when ever I would see a SNES emulator running in square pixel mode.
I don't know how that made sense to anyone, especially back around 2001/2.
I even saw some people say it's how the developers wanted their games to look and the 4:3 crt TVs made the games look wrong. I didn't know what to say to that sort of ignorance.
This is a great video and I hope it helps correct people's misunderstanding about pixel size/shape, especially in regards of gaming and it's legacy.
Oh my god man thank you for doing this one. I could NOT figure out why final fight looked like it was fine in 16:9 when I knew very well it was NOT meant for that aspect ratio. I spent many hours standing at the actual cabinet as a kid and in MAME I was kinda confused why the aspect ratio behaved so strangely. I had also already been down the rabbit hole of properly displaying a modern 16:9 sprite art game I am working on with proportions that were correct. I wanted the 16:9 ratio to only provide some additional viewing space horizontal without the vertical res making it look zoomed out to far etc.
Absolutely smashing video mate! Really interesting and full marks for staying on point. Seeing 4:3 games stretched out on a 16:9 gives me nightmares. This video is a great explanation! Thank you. *subbed!
What an awesome analysis! Matched by the quality of the capture footage!
Thanks, oskrcr989!
great video, very entertaining, I have not seen one like this before, that looks so deeply into pixels and aspect ratios.
Just what I was looking for! Thank you very much for this valuable information! Very detailed explanation and great edition! :)
This channel was a find. What a great content. Just subscribe. Found it a few minutes ago.. this is the third video I watch. Love this stuff.
I appreciate the video, I know it'd be really easy to go in the weeds with this but you kept it on the Narrow Path. I'm working on my arcade machines I want the colors and the monitors to be exact responsible to what they would have been straight out of the factory. Sometimes it's a pain in the butt to get everything just right but once you see it incorrectly like taking the pill in The Matrix you can't unsee it
Fascinating and thorough! Thanks for setting out a sometimes complex topic in a very simple way - I knew the NES/SNES aspect ratio was unusual, but I hadn’t even thought about various arcades cabs!
Thanks, Pug Hoof Gaming!
Very interesting video. Thank you for all your effort that you put into this!
Awesome video, can't wait to watch more! Keep up the great work man! (Watching Chun-Li lose practically all of her features nearly made me cry omg...I can't look at these sprites the same anymore.)
Love this! Subscribed!!!
The CPS2 Mega Man games (Power Battle and Power Fighters) also bring up an interesting case, where they used modified sprites from Mega Man 7 that are stretched to compensate for the different internal aspect ratios.
Great channel!
So glad yt recommended it to me.
Almost got tears in my eyes when you said that modern standards cant be applied to CRT era
Just heard of this channel from Bob of Retro RGB, subscribed and threw all your past videos into my watch later list. Ready for some nice viewing this weekend, thank you for all of your content!
Thanks, Scott!
Another great content. The same thing applies to other arcade games, like the Mortal Kombat series. If you rip the sprites from the arcade version of UMK3 and do the same thing from the Sega Genesis version (which has more horizontal resolution, comparing to the SNES), you would see a major difference in width.
Interesting video! Hope your channel grows fast in subs, you totally deserve it!
This is very useful for developers who want to imitate the Old Arcade aesthetic.
Awesome video. Very informative and helpful.
Great stuff! I love how CRTs just squished that resolution in the screen no matter what into the already determined CRT 4:3 aspect ratio. Resolution wasn't even a thing to considered at the consumer level and was only a restraint for the developers themselves. This video definitely proves that the game was made for a 4:3 aspect ratio, the bicycle wheels in Chun Li's stage proves this irrefutably.
Amazing peace of work, beautiful presented. My buddy's use to talk about this, I always said ever arcade cabinet I play back in the day was always 4:3. I dont think widescreen tvs and monitors existed in the early 90s.
Very interesting !! Thanks for this quality content !
One thing of interest worth noting is why many of these games had a much higher horizontal resolution as opposed to what is normally standard has to do with a trick of adding in more visual infornation to the game's appearance. I remember some article talked about this on note of crt's because they always work as 4:3 in spite of the aspect ratio and this was used as an advantage. SNK games like KOF end up looking blocky because they insist on 340.
Dude! Thank you very much!!!
I'm creating a humorous homage to SFII, and...
First of all, i've been beaten quite a ton of times, trying to grab needed screenshots. While I knew that it's resolution is odd, I never new why!.. So it was a fatality, to contiue to be beaten by a hardware specifications rather then an unfare old AI, made for crazy hardcore players, not FOR ME...
So I roared, googling "why does cps-2 arcade had that weird resolution" and your video was at the very top.
I'd have eventually found it out by myself somehow, but you saved a cluster of my broken crazy nerves. Thank you!
How come this channel has only 15k subs?? The content quality is really impressive!
I had this doubt, very cool video thanks!
Brilliant mate. Thank you!
Sweet, glad I came across this video because Arcade tricks are very interesting
Excellent video. Thank you so much!!!
Wow! It's fun learning about this! I like CPS2 games such as MVC1, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Progear, and Darkstalkers 3.
What's funny is they used this inner coordinate system even well into the NAOMI era, though all are drawn at 640x448. MvC2 to my knowledge is the only Capcom game that is natively in 640x448 right down to the coordinate system (with the exception of character sprites, of course; those are CPS2 res). I have not checked CvS1/Pro yet. In CvS2 on the other hand, the internal coordinate system that is used for object positions and by extension velocities and hitboxes is 358x224. Have no clue why it's something so drastically different for that game when in CFJ (which uses the same engine) they go back to the expected 384x224 for the internal coordinate system.
All this complexity around hardware & resolutions puts me off from wanting to get into the arcade scene, but at the same time I love Bubble Bobble and desperately want to play that.
Bubble Bobble is awesome!!
Thank you so much for this video sir!! I'm doing direct capture with a Datapath E1s where you have to input all the settings manually for the resolution and the aspect ratio. I never thought aspect ratio was that important as long as you had the correct resolution and I was so wrong! Thanks for having opened my eyes!
Would be nice if you showed how to grab the correct resolution for most of the system, then after we just have to ouput it in the correct aspect ratio :)
I swear to god i asked you to make this video. Thanks you so much!
Ha! Sometimes people share their idea for a video and I either have it in the works or on my to do list. I want to say, "working on it!" but would rather it be a surprise in case my schedule changes.
Glad you wanted this video and that you enjoyed it!
@Displaced Gamers Awesome video! I've been talking about this about CPS 1&2 games for years, and couldn't find any real info. But you should have done horizontal PAR to go along with aspect ratio. Also to note; each arcade unit for a game could be calibrated to whatever horizontal/vertical sizing, because it's one arcade 'unit' per game (unlike the Neo Geo), so it's possible each game could have been made with a different aspect ratio settings.
Dude you are a legend!
Watching this with 14 inch CRT Monitor.. and it feels so Nostalgic.. Thankyou so much
thank you, awsome video
What makes this discussion more complicated is that some early arcade games with non-square pixels like the first Street Fighter game (I mean not 2) were produced without horizontal squash in mind and look more correct in the 1:1 square pixel ratio. I think the square pixel ratio should be applied when it comes to the emulation of this kind of games.
Amazing.
It always seemed like PlayStation and Saturn port of CPS1/CPS2 games missed the point of those large screens.
They literally re-used the arcade sprites from Street Fighter II in the Street Fighter Collection on those two consoles, for a 4:3 aspect ratio, and it just looks wrong when you're used to the arcade version. Thank god the Dreamcast put an end to all this.
Saturn can do a 352 horizontal resolution. Capcom decided it's close enough to directly use arcade assets with only minor stretch. IMO it was the best solution, as DC ports suffer from shimmering,
Bro, thank you for this video! I recently got that Ultimate Arcade and have been slamming my head against it trying to figure out why “pixel perfect” looks off. Now I know.
This is super interesting.
I think another good test for CPS2 fighting games is to compare 4:3 and pixel scaled character sprites to those in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, specifically the 16:9 port on Xbox 360 and PS3. Given that that port is extended (not stretched) to have native 16:9, it is highly unlikely that the character sprites are stretched or squished in any way.
Years late, but while I didn't look at MvC2's 360/PS3 port, I _did_ do some comparison with MvC2's original arcade version through MAME.
I compared how Ryu's sprite was displayed in MvC2 with a square pixels 640x480 screenshot (since AFAIK NAOMI/Dreamcast-based games would use square pixels) to a screenshot of Ryu in Street Fighter Alpha 3 stretched to 4:3 from 384x224 (as supposed to stretching from 384x240, which would give a 10:7 ratio), and the 4:3 stretch was basically a perfect match for his MvC2 appearance.
Excellent Video.
When 4:3 TV was the norm you had to think in "pixels per line". If you wanted better resolution you had to increase the pixels number per line because lines number was fixed. It results in different pixel aspect ratio NOT like todays LCD with fixed Native resolution (1920x1080 for exemple) and square pixels. Pretty simple.
This has been a delightful bane of mine recently, trying to do some graphics analysis of old games, and to get to 4:3 to show what the player saw, you often need some monstrous integer scales, like 14x : 15x.
I'm not sure what information was supposed to be conveyed here but I did learn a lot about varying Chun-Li thigh thicknesses.
What a cool channel.
Subed :)
Man ! This is research!!! Awesome!!
5:13 Left = Skinny girl and active service member
Right = Thicc girl and retired beer gut army guy (sitting on the brown box, holding the cigarette)
Personally I prefer the chunkier sprites. Also 2nd Impact for the CP-III does have widescreen capability, despite not being used in the final game.
This is good to know as I want to create some capcom style sprites within the limitations
Just a side note, the only software I know that can customize non-square pixels and is a pixel art software would be ProMotion NG. And if you use that software, the pixel size to achieve the aspect ratio would be 5:6. Unfortunately that software doesn't draw circles using the adjusted aspect ratio so you would need to either draw a specific size of oval (for example, 24x20) to compensate it, or eyeball the result when drawing to make it circle.
Awesome
At 3:45, the top view of the F-20 is 138px tall, and the side view is 176px wide. If you multiply 176 by the pixel aspect ratio (300:384), you get 137.5, which matches the height of the top view. In other words, the diagram is designed so that the two views of the plane look the same length on a 4:3 display, taking into account the pixel aspect ratio.
This reminds me that even for old 4:3 games, the panels used to display them should be as high resolution as possible so that scaling to fill a 4:3 region of the display can do a good job without artefacts. That means all the retro gaming handhelds with 320x240 or even 640x480 panels are inadequate. A 4K 5” panel and a SOC with a GPU capable of scaling to fill it at 60fps on top of rendering a frame would be a much better basis for a retro handheld targeting the 4:3 era even though these panels are usually 16:9 at best and so would be plagued by borders.
You should make one about the NEO GEO's aspect ratio
THAT is why the sprites always felt stretched on Mugen!! :0
I've made up a rule for myself, if the game was meant for a CRT, FORCE 4:3 AT ALL COSTS.
Unless it's a Nintendo developed NES/SNES game ;)
@@sheik124 especially for a Nintendo developed NES/SNES game as the internal resolution of 8:7 was meant to be played in a 4:3 CRT.
he's talking about games like Super Metroid and Super Mario world witch looks better in 8:7
@@Obscure_man31 All of those games were specifically designed to be seen on a 4:3 screen. It's personal preference I guess, but I can't see how anyone could think they look better in 8:7.
@@cj694x2 I mean those look proper in that resolution since it's proper circles unless it's a third party game
You're an absolute legend. This totally proves any square-pixel argument wrong imo. I like the way you put the resolution choice - the CPS hardware could produce 384 samples per line so they used it.
I hope more people know about this. In some recent Street Fighter rereleases I think I’ve seen some oddly proportioned art that felt wrong.
Thank you.
I just set the aspect ratio to whatever looks correct. So it's a game by game setting for me.
Most games look correct with 4:3 AR and black bars on sides. But there are some games which even though designed for 4:3 screens originally, actually looks better at square pixels. A good example of that is Mortal Kombat 2 arcade. On 4:3 the HUD and menus look correct but the fighters look squished. But with square pixels, the fighters look proportionate. For this particular case, I use square pixels because I like it that way personally.
There are many SNES games that suffer from these issues as well.
I just realized this also would have wreaked havoc on any diagonal stuff in a game
Nice video! Could you do one on groovymame / calamity drivers and the "super resolutions" with 6 times the horizontal resolution?
Great video. I use custom original resolution switching in MAME but can't get Street fighter 2 to look right at the 384 resolution, enforcing aspect ratio causes the graphics to look bad. I don't understand these people who like the scaling on LCDs, it's horrible. It's easy to find the resolution of the game in MAME as there is a information option, then you just makea custom resolution and get MAME to switch and it looks soo much better on a LCD. the other advantage is you can use higher hz at that resolution and even G-Sync for low latency or ULMB for no motion blur. Some emulators do take your desktop resolution and hz, so best putting your desktop resolution and hz matching the emulatored game resolution and hz.
The reason for the exotic 384 px Horizontal resolution is the way the CPS1/2/3 graphics chip renders the image.
Street fighter 3 2nd Impact actually has a dip setting for widescreen, the only version of sf3 that specifically has a widescreen mode
Not only do CPS2 games look wrong when you display them with square pixels, but if you're playing, e.g. Giga Wing with square pixels, the horizontal movement speed will be a lot faster than the vertical, which will feel wrong.
Interesting, just last week i was ripping SFII sprites from the cps1, i had to change settings to native output and immediately noticed the unusual screen ratio.
I'd be interested in seeing more on arcade porting to home console and the considerations needed
Did you have any specific games in mind, PowerStreak?
I enjoyed this video.
After all these, there is still no monitor manufacturer making 4:3 aspect ratio monitors. 4:3 ratio monitors will be far better for office, home, movies and gamings than other aspect ratios monitors. Many old arcade machines are now without 4:3 LCD/LED monitor replacements. Sadly, new arcade machines these days are created with the wrong aspect ratio monitors. I am not talking about 21 inch 4:3 ratio monitors DELL made. I am talking about 25 inch or 26 inch 4:3 monitors for retro gaming. TV/Monitors are selling very cheap these days with deep discount, so I don't think they are making much money off them anyway. I am sure many people out there are happy to pay premium price for 25 inch or 26 inch 4:3 aspect ratio monitors. No one is willing to supply this demand. SMH.
It's funny, in final burn. The scan lines show best when set to 4:3 for both horizontal and vertical. On my wide screen and left at keep ratio. If I set monitor to 16:9 even with ratio set I get rainbowing unless wndowed
Great video. I'm having problem with MAME and Bezels, I want a bezel that not cut part of the game screen. Even forcing the aspect ration in MAME settings, some games fit the default bezel and other ones looks they are drawn wider, not fitting the bezel perfectly
Fantastic video. Even though I grew up in the 90s, I was confused as to why different systems used so many different resolutions and what that meant in terms of correct aspect ratio. Now I understand that a forced 4:3 aspect ratio is almost always the correct setting for these classic games. Thank you.
good
"CPS games are widescreen!" Says the person born in 1998, who has no idea that widescreen displays were not really a thing until after 2000
Interestingly Tekken 1 & 2 on Namco's System 11 Hardware (Based on PS1) runs at 512x240 and so do the PS1 ports. And Tekken 3 on the System 12 (minor upgrade from the System 11) runs at 512x480 interlaced while the PS1 port runs at 384x480.
CORRECTION: The PS1 port of Tekken 3 runs at 364x480.
Hey Daniel. Thanks for your comment. One thing interesting about Tekken 3 on System 12 is that you can change it from interlaced to non-interlaced in the service screen. The System 11/12/PSX relationship and the sunset of arcade vs home console in the mid to late 90s would make a great video. I don't know if anyone has produced one yet. I'll have to see what is out there.
I think 19XX should have been widescreen because the scene is bigger than the screen, and scrolls horizontally when you move towards the sides.
i always though that vertical resolution was reduced to give more room for horizontal resolution, sicne these were meant to be played on a 4:3 crt and the display will correct the aspect...
This is awesome! Thanks for the clear and in-depth explanations and examples. I have 2 questions I hope you can answer for me that are related to this.
1 - So certain games have aspect ratio selection. Let's take the SF 30th Anv. Collection. It has Full, Wide, and Original. Let's ignore Wide because its crap and we know that. How are the aspect ratios of Full and Original different? Why does Original have full windowboxing around all for sides? Wouldn't Full still also be 4:3, the exact same aspect ratio as Original? It seems redundant. If Full is just a bigger 4:3, why have Original? If they are different, how are they different? What am I missing here?
2- (Not really a question) Any chance you could demonstrate this with some SNK fighting games? Or get into 5:4 vs 4:3? Or both!
So, artists had to draw the characters using non-square pixels, or do they draw them in square taking the deformation into account?
The artists would be using a CRT (4:3) and work in the target mode (256x244, etc.) so it was simply a case of "draw circles to look round". You would only deal with oddities for conversions like the examples in this video.
Probably "hand-draw/shoot without worrying first, then convert".
I chose to go with a CRT monitor when building my MAME machine specifically so it would look correct.