Super Nintendo Aspect Ratio
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ม.ค. 2017
- An examination of the arguments for/against and the reasons behind a discrepancy of aspect ratios for the Super Nintendo. Discussion also applies to several other retro platforms.
Primary focus is on the wider appearance on a CRT at 4:3* vs the 1:1 square-pixel , 8:7 "internal" aspect ratio seen in gaming assets and as-represented in emulators. This video does not dive into the scaling methods or horizontal vs vertical scaling arguments for 240p presentation on a modern, HD, fixed pixel display.
* Technically there is no perfect 4:3 aspect ratio on these consumer CRT sets as geometry, overscan, etc., play a roll in the imprecision of 4:3 presentation across various sets. That is beyond the scope of this video.
#SNES #AspectRatio #PixelPerfect - เกม
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I find it very amusing how the only ones that never seemed to take the stretch into account when making their games was Nintendo themselves.
Maybe they were so forward thinking, that they made all their games with future, non-stretch displays in mind. Maybe someone told them LCD's were right around the corner.
If I'm not mistaken, there are no first party games with widescreen options on the Gamecube, even though most other triple A games came with the option. Nintendo knew kids don't care.
I's not just Nintendo. SNES game developers that made the effort to take that stretch in account are an exception.
Super Metroid did, but only for Zebes when you see it from space.
@Clout Gang This is such a dumb fucking comment.
It's interesting that no one has mentioned the curve of a CRT. When I was going to computer graphics school in the mid '90s, we had to be mindful of the curve on a CRT when doing a final render that would be put to tape. For some reason, I'm thinking that the overscan area is for the differences in image processing and variables in curves of different tube tech (like the Trinitron).
This is a very underrated point. Thanks for sharing it, MrVolksbeetle. I think the curve of CRT screens - especially those that people had around the time the Super Famicom/Nintendo was released - are an important part to visual design to what is seen on screen. The overscan is different depending on manufacturer and model, and older TVs had much more of it.
@@DisplacedGamers The curve is vertical too (unless trinitron), so I suppose that argument doesn't hold.
When I asked for a "flatscreen monitor" many years ago I meant a flat panel display (i.e. LCD), but my dad said I already had one because the screen was flat despite the monitor itself being boxy.
You can see this a lot in the art for PC-98 games. They were designed with the curve and CRT blending in mind. Gods, I wish I still had my old computer and monitor.
@@Jannemandevries Dude you are wrong an this. The Problem is, if you lock straight on the screen its 4:3. If you look from the Side its curved. This is because the "Pixels" on a Crt are not a square. They are longer than high. So the problem is that some developer did think about it and other didn't. Try 5:4 on lcd or something like that. You will get the right aspect ratio.
About the Chrono Trigger remake on NDS :
the NDS resolution is 256x192 (4:3) but since the SNES is 256x224 they did a pixel perfect port to not redo all the sprites. So it is in "cropped" 8:7 (at the top and bottom). HOWEVER they changed the shape of the moon so that it looks circular on NDS.
It's interesting how the DS has a lower resolution screen than the SNES. That explains why they redid all the sprites for Kirby Super Star, and are smaller slightly. (though they are still really good sprites and somehow look cleaner and more detailed than the original, so good job to the artists!)
@@GBDupree And the standard resolution of the SNES is smaller than the NES one (256x240)!
@@Frenchnostalgique oh wow I didn't know that! I suppose the extra colors made all the difference. And it must be because TVs around that time were slowly becoming more of the standard 4:9? Or what reason would its resolution be shorter than to fit a more widescreen-ish look?
The NES vs SNES resolution is a bit of a moot point given the amount of overscan most CRT televisions had.
You could lose up to 20% of the image due to overscan.
Incidentally, PAL snes consoles typically ran in 256x240, and the programmers could choose to use either.
(it's just that 224 vs 240 lines barely matters when most of the extra lines are in the overscan area anyway - on NTSC screens 224 lines is about the most you can expect to see onscreen with a CRT. On PAL, even 240 lines still leaves you with black bars...)
@@GBDupree well the new sprites were already being used by other new handheld kirby games, which is why they also kinda lack the old charm. new bigger-eyes kirby is just not as good as old narrow-eye kirby.. but the new sprites have _more frames_ and are just higher quality.
I die a little inside every time I see a retro game stretched across a widescreen tv
Good
If you go to any sub Reddit for retro consoles you are going to see posts by a bunch of idiots using modern flat screens in 16:9 with AV to HDMI upscalers, and if you tell them they should be playing in 4:3 they get mad and whine how they can play it how they want and they have eyesight problems and need it stretched.
Well.. I know it looks horrible but I do use 16:9 on my Plasma because that I do not want any burned in thing in it. But on the LCD I run games in 4:3
@@repaterion3611 I don't blame you Plasmas have a reputation of screen burn in just from something being paused.
@@repaterion3611 Plasma TVs in 2019 gross
That’s interesting. I always remembered Mario looking fatter when I was a kid than he looks now, this may be the reason.
Nah fam, Mario just lost weight
It also affects the feel of playing the games. It took me a long time to realize that it was the 8:7 aspect ratio that was making classic Mario feel 'off' to me on emulators.
Also it depends on the game itself.
Compare Mario Galaxy Mario to Mario Odyssey Mario.
He's way fatter in Odyssey
@Zoe Kin It really depends, if you haven't played them on the original console then it can look better but if you played the originals 4:3 might look more authentic
The difference between the metroid and chrono examples are that the morph ball is a sprite and the moon is a background. Sprites are bound by tiles and it would be more difficult to squish the sprites in this way.
Yeah. They would have had to go out of their way to even try to make things look even.
Is that why some games aren't even consistent in which graphics look good stretched and which dont?
backgrounds use tiles too
@@poudink5791 backrounds have so many tiles they can be a canvas, while sprites are typically 1 to 2 tiles big.
@Lucas that's because it's exclusively a Nintendo problem. All the games mentioned in 8:7 are from Nintendo dev houses.
Interesting; so some developers designed for the CRT stretch and some didn't. Kind of surprising Nintendo didn't recognize the problem.
Or maybe they just assumed people would have high(er) end TV that would easily allow to adjust the image width. Some had a handy knob for that.
wasn't really a problem for me back then as my tv had knobs that were used to adjust width & height (and h+v position) of the image right at a fingertip -edit: oh and it wasn't some fancy super expensive tv.
It’s not really a problem, and certainly nobody cared about it.
xg223 honestly, I just want you to play the game. I don’t want youngins to even think it matters, because it doesn’t in the slightest. Graphics back then was about colors and how many you could have on the screen at the time, we didn’t care about square pixels, we barely knew what the hell a pixel was. We just cared that Sega had Blast Processing (tm) and that SuperNintendo had 16 bits.
I remember renting a tank game about desert storm and cutting out a box to sit in with a slit through it like a real tank commander would have and I played on that muddy mess of a tv all weekend not caring a lick for the “fidelity” of the picture and didn’t worry a thing about how round the circles were.
@xg223 No your an idiot, 8:7 is cleaner and crt TV's are horrible
You can see how in SMW, the sprite artists purposefully made the sprites on the wiggler and the logo vertically stretched so that when stretched out to a 4:3 display the shaped would appear naturally proportioned.
I prefer to have correct aspect ratio in the final image, not the internal resolution.
So if a SNES game looks squished in 8:7, I resort to 4:3. If it looks stretched on 4:3, then I resort back to 8:7
Same with basically any pc or console game I play.
I prefer 8x7 because i have a ton of megaman fangames clogging my laptop
The problem is games like Super Metroid which look better in 8:7...but then also have a squished version of Zebes (when seen from space). It's a lose-lose situation for that game.
@@Schwarzorn Yeah, honestly, I just play everything in 4:3 and call it a day. It's how I always played back in the day and it looks natural to me.
Bseraph
The problem with 4:3 is that 99% of the time the games will look NOT as intended. You’ll have oval-shaped morph-ball Samus and energy-balls, an oval-shaped Kirby despite him being a circle in his previous games for Game Boy, logoes that don’t match the one on the box, and various other other inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
THIS is the correct way, at least in terms of viewing the art properly at the ratio the artist created it and thought it looked good at.
Regardless of personal preference--and people can stretch it to utterly f'n fugly 16:9 if they like--anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
Even if an artist took the time to make circles look correct in 4:3, systems like snes & nes use tile-based graphics and every square tile in the game gets stretched, just look at the blocks in mario etc.
Yes. In retrospect, I do wish I had talked a bit more about size and "grid" of sprites as a more specific, focused topic - but I was mostly focused on trying to make a point that horizontal lines consist of samples rather than strict pixels.
That's not a problem, because tiles and blocks aren't necessarily square, but circles are necessarily round, not oval. So if you have an object that literally everyone expects to be perfectly round (the sun, for instance) and it's not, it sticks out, but tiles, blocks, and bricks come in all sorts of forms in IRL life.
@@3DMegadoodoo the question mark block is square
Displaced Gamers
Could you maybe do I follow-up video? I quite liked this one. (For reference, I’m new to this channel)
Yes, so they would make the pattern in the square tile map look squished so it would be perfectly square post-display, similar to the "round" shapes in the square tile maps. I don't see the extra point you are making.
Sounds like one of those cases where design choices need to be accounted for on an individual game by game basis to determine if the final 4:3 output was actually leveraged or ignored (I would wager the latter was more common). Have fun trying to document that.
Reminds me of instances where certain games on the Nintendo 64 actually look worse with the anti-aliasing (software and hardware) turned off because of the exposure of dither patterns not normally visible, even through RGB. Though, this is a bit in reverse since, with little exception (Quake 64), every developer expected the anti-aliased output since it was hardware and software-embedded by default.
Super Metroid did both. I believe the cutscene that shows the planet in the beginning of the game is squished to appear round at 4:3 ratio.
Was there ever a reason as to why Nintendo chose that ratio? Especially considering Sega chose 4:3 for theirs.
A combination of supporting hi-rez background modes, wanting to have exactly 256 (or 512 in hi-rez) dots per scanline, memory bandwidth, and supporting NTSC and PAL with the same graphics chip.
The Sega genesis aspect ratio is actually really wide, close to 16:9.
Resolutions up to that point were still governed more by hardware limitations such as available memory. The NES had 256x240. The Atari ST, Amiga and PC/VGA all had 320x200. The Playstation had 256×224. Sega Saturn had a bunch of modes out of only one (320x240) had a 4:3 ratio. In short, it was only with SVGA that video modes with a 4:3 ratio (and with it, square pixels) became a standard: 640x480, 800x600, 1020x768.
Nintendo never followed standards until more recent years. Yamuchi shot dead an engineering employee who said 4:3 in the office. Infact Yamuchi invented 8:7 as a fuck you to TV manufacturers.
Jason Scarpace
What?
I for one vote for a database file that is community driven aspect ratio selection per title. The "true" aspect ratio to me is the aspect the developers would have tested on...which to my knowledge would have been on a PVR CRT, and any "8:7" perfect circles are simply oversight or lack of concern due to the simplicity of drawing a circle using single focus instead of foci.
My thought exactly.
Mario World has a mechanic in a few levels where you can run up the side of blocks, rotated 90 degrees. They actually use a different set of sprites for this, squished a little bit so the 4:3 horizontal stretch will result in the same proportions as the normal upright Mario. I guess it's just a matter of if developers were thinking about it when they made any particular asset!
I mean, its a pretty simple solution
Games designed for stretching should be stretched, games not designed for stretching shouldn't be
I know right, pointless ultimatums when choice is freely available are dumb. Just use what looks best for the game.
Not inherently true, developers clearly only designed for stretch if it was noticeable.
Just because the games were playtested and stretched does not mean they didn't know it was stretching, its that the developers didn't care. If it didn't significantly affect gameplay, it was not an issue that concerned them. Doing a bad job at designing for stretch would be clearly evident in internal renderings in 8:7. Such as how the moon cutscene is obviously scrunched. Even if the scrunching was done slightly, it wouldn't be something you would miss. If developers cared enough about the graphics to be true to internal development, they gone through the effort of warping the art accordingly. If they didn't care, or felt like it didn't matter, they just dealt with the stretch.
@xg223 The fact that something got through testing phase and got released doesn't mean it is as it was intended to. The fact that something was "targeted" for 4:3, doesn't imply it was designed for 4:3 nor that it is best experienced as 4:3.
If something was designed without accounting for that the pixels won't be square on CRT screen than by simple logic: it was designed with the assumption that pixels will be square; it was designed for 8:7. And that is the case for many sprites for SNES games.
@xg223 I'm sure they playtested on a CRT but that doesn't necessarily mean they cared or noticed. I think the circle test is fine. I don't think any developer intended their circles to look like ovals as an artistic choice.
@xg223 did you see the Mario coin example? That was just art, it wasn't part of a tile. There was no reason for them to not adjust it if they wanted to. Maybe Nintendo thought ahead and realized that the graphical issue was temporary and decided to ignore it because they wanted the games coded in a way that would last for posterity. They even seem to acknowledge the fact that the 4:3 ratio was imperfect by having the pixel perfect option for their emulation.
That Secret of Mana music almost brought tears to my eye. It's been so long since I've heard it, yet I immediately knew where it was from.
Still on my list. First I need to finish Chrono Trigger though.
Yeah, never had any consoles back then. Kind of making up for that now. ;)
Funny enough, Zebes is a perfect sphere in 4:3 in Super Metroid whilst the Morph Ball is ovular. One could argue developers intended planets to be more ovular like in reality (not *that* ovular in reality though), but developer intent is a very difficult intent to argue when no evidence exists.
Furthermore, I've been told that 64:49 PAR is a more accurate and faithful figure. It's similar to 4:3 in that it is not so squished, and yet close to perfect linearity of 8:7. Best to size up by 8x7 widthxheight, then scale down for those without 1568p or higher displays.
Hey Jack! Your point about it being difficult to focus on intent of a developer when no evidence exists is my philosophy for all of these subjects. Even if we had 100% feedback on graphic intent for every game made, user opinion will still overshadow facts in many cases.
Although I used Super Metroid as an 8:7 example from the community, it is common for the smaller sprites to have the square AR and the larger assets (backgrounds) to have AR compensation due to the number of pixels available. (Like in the Link sprite example)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Same thing for Donkey Kong Country as well, the rareware logo looks the same as the renders in 8:7 but the K-O-N-G letters look extremely squished. I have a hard time choosing which ratio I should use because of that.
@@DisplacedGamers Smaller objects like character/item sprites would often be "square" du to the tile-based way graphics worked on these systems. Even if you could make a character any size you wanted (which you typically couldn't really), background graphics would have to be aligned to a 8x8 grid. Drawing characters with "non-square" proportions could cause issues when it comes to collision.
Would that 64:49 ratio only work for NTSC games or also for PAL?
I only found your channel about a month ago. I want you to know that your videos are right up my alley and I have enjoyed absolutely every single one of them. I quite literally watch your videos right before going to sleep every night. I hope you continue to make these wonderful videos for a long time to come and I wish you the absolute best of luck with your channel. Thanks for sharing all of this interesting stuff with us. ❤️❤️❤️
Regardless of various games having or not having round circles, the most fundamental fact of the matter is that consumers didn't have access to 8:7 displays on which to play the games, and so that could not have been the intended viewing ratio.
back in the late 1990s my father bought a 16/9 CRT TV, I remember playing SNES, PS1 and N64 with a stretched picture all the time without noticing that it was "wrong". Then I discovered 4/3 at my friends' house
Fantastic quality editing and great script! Subscribed and I hope you cover lots more stuff like this
This is one of the most interesting and informative retro gaming videos out there! I keep coming back to this one because it's just always a pleasure to look at and listen to.
In Retroarch, I split the difference between 4:3 and 8:7, and use 5:4 for the SNES. That way, every game is only slightly distorted, but it's virtually unnoticeable.
lawful evil
Or maybe a chaotic good? xD
The equal temperament of SNES scaling 😂
The reality of the situation is the Super Famicom was a consumer gaming system designed in the late 80s and released in 1990. The VAST majority of consumer TVs were CRTs designed to display a content with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Very few, if any, of these TVs had any form of geometry control.
A game developer must have had this in mind when designing a game. I think in the cases where circles look better in 8:7 is mostly because sprites were 8x8 or 16x16 and correcting for aspect ratio would have wasted detail or been impossible at such a low resolution. (additionally, imagine trying to tile sprites that only used 7 of 8 or 14 of 16 horizontal pixels to compensate for aspect ratio. There'd be gaps all over the place!) Hence why Metroid SPRITES aren't circular, but MK2 and Chrono Trigger BACKGROUNDS are.
The Super Gameboy being the wrong aspect ratio is a technical limitation. The SNES didn't use square pixels, the GB did. You can't cite one game system's aspect ratio as evidence for another's. They're different systems. The Super Gameboy was just a convenient way to show Gameboy games on a TV screen, not necessarily an accurate one (it also ran games 4% too fast)
Exactly people only start caring about this kind of thing after the fact. Same situation as the case of 50 vs 60hz. It's a matter of practicality. Most developers would see game consoles, as a toy with virtually disposable games that would be sold in Christmas season and then forgotten when the next sales season comes around. Some devs did take it more seriously but the fans are the ones that tend to take it way too serious.
And yet most programmers, if they didn't have to consider worldwide distribution would probably tell you they'd rather work with the PAL system.
Granted this is accidental, and ironically caused by the fact that most PAL home computers and consoles were lazily converted NTSC machines that didn't properly account for how the PAL television systems worked...
But the thing is, when you have, in many cases, 80% more VBLANK time to work with, on those old systems that was the difference between being able to pull off some complex graphical effect or having to dump it entirely.
Generally speaking NTSC games ported to PAL machines would always run even without any real adjustment, albeit if you were lazy with the conversion they'd often too slowly, and with aspect ratio issues, and sometimes colour issues (because some machines used inconsistent relationships between colour values in memory and the output colour)
However, PAL games that actually exploited the specific capabilities of a PAL machine to their fullest?
These are often extremely difficult if not outright impossible to get running on an NTSC machine.
And even if you can get them running, it's often through extreme compromise.
For instance, if you were to somehow run a video sequence on a SNES (how you'd manage to store I'm not sure), you could get 25 fps video working at a resolution of something like 256x160 or so...
To be able to get ANYTHING to show up on NTSC hardware, you'd need to drop to more like 256x80 or less, massively drop the framerate, or make other major compromises.
And this is a fairly simple issue.
While it is an entirely accidental quirk of design, it's almost universally the case for any 8 or 16 bit console or computer that hooked up to a standard television, PAL versions of the system are vastly better at any task where there is extensive interaction between the CPU and graphics chip than the equivalent NTSC machine.
on older machines it's typically way more general use CPU time (since the graphics chip and CPU both share memory and cannot access it at the same time)
On newer systems it's a massive increase in available DMA time per frame drawn. (as I said, it can be an 80% increase)
Still though, It's rare for console games to be made with PAL machines in mind (home computers less so because various computers were just way more popular in europe than the US, and there were a lot of bedroom coders who didn't think about stuff like international distribution) - the reasons for this are fairly obvious;
1. Relatively few European console developers.
2. Over-use of PAL specific advantages may make it outright impossible to ever convert the game to run on NTSC hardware.
So... I guess it depends on your perspective.
As a homebrew developer I love PAL systems...
But as someone that did play with these things when they were new, I definitely understand the frustrations of what the lazy NTSC conversions were like.
Not all conversions are that lazy though.
Did you know that Mario Kart runs at the same speed in both regions? in spite of the change from 60 hz to 50 hz, if a developer actually changes the timings properly it won't be a major issue. (it's not the framerate that matters here, it's the fact that game logic is tied directly to framerate, this without adjustment the game runs too slowly.)
There are also known examples where the 'faster' gameplay of the NTSC version is objectively incorrect. (even though people somehow assume the faster version is always the intended version)
Then there's the half-assed fixes.
Sonic had music that ran too slowly, but the whole game ran too slowly.
Sonic 2 fixed the slow music playback, but not the gameplay.
(SNES basically never had music problems because it's audio chip had it's own clock and wasn't synced to the framerate anyway.)
It's all a matter of perspective really.
Other amusing observations as a homebrew dev:
- black bars on PAL consoles actually mean the image is naturally very close to a 16:10 aspect ratio, and thus with minimal cropping, 16:9
- PAL visual artifacts are quite different to NTSC ones, and some effects work much better on PAL machines. (Atari 8 bit computers for instance. PAL tends to blend adjacent horizontal lines together, thus the various hacked 256 colour modes work better on PAL than NTSC)
- Widespread availability of RGB capable televisions and higher probability of the console/computer having RGB as an output option.
- generally more complex games possible, due to different CPU/Graphics timing ratios.
Basically if you write your own stuff on 8 or 16 bit hardware, for your own purposes, you definitely want a PAL system.
If all you do is play games made back in the day, then you probably want the NTSC system...
@@trinidad17 agree. Developers didn't really care about half of the world playing their games slower and slightly squashed, pretty sure most of them didn't care either about their circles looking like ovals. Until mid-late 90's, console games were products for children and preteens, not the audience that would care about that kind of issues. Proof is multiplatform ports like The Lion King, for example. When displayed on a 4:3 CRT TV, the Megadrive game looks vertically stretched with skinny characters, because it was a port of the SNES game and developers didn't care enough to redraw the sprites for the higher horizontal resolution of the MD. It happened almost every time with ports, the port was stretched compared to the original, weirdly enough sometimes getting a realistic aspect ratio right by chance.
4% faster?? That's unplayable! (I'm joking XD)
@@elbitxo5945 Sounds like a dumb mistake with the Lion King, since the Mega Drive had a special 256x224 graphics mode which most SNES ports used. It was a bigger problem when porting in the other direction, since the SNES didn't have any options in that regard.
I’ve found instances where Nintendo did take into account the rectangular pixels. In Super Mario World, sprites for Mario running up walls are drawn using less pixels along his height and more along his width than upright sprites. In fact, that kind of compensation is found as early as in Super Mario Bros for Famicom: sprites for hammers that Hammer Bros throw are drawn differently in vertical and horizontal orientation. Horizontal hammers take up less pixels.
I really appreciate the thoroughness of research in these videos. Thank you.
I've just recently discovered your channel, and I gotta say, stellar content!
I knew there were plenty games utilizing the quirks of late 20th century CRTs, still I thought pixel perfect 8:7 aspect ratio would be a no-brainer on modern displays. Seems like I now have to look up a list of 4:3 optimized games like Chrono Trigger. It was basically some variant of early anamorphic widescreen before the term was coined.
Screen aspect ratio should be 22:17 rather than 4:3 or 8:7.
The reason for this is that the NTSC timing of a scanline is 52.6us active video out of a 63.5us total - so 82.8%, and there should be 240 lines. But since TVs intentionally overfill the screen, and video time is precious on a SNES, the SNES actually underfills the picture a little, displaying for 75.1% of the scanline and 224 lines. So it's underfilling by 6.7% vertically, and 9.3% horizontally, making the picture ever so slightly narrower than expected. So fans of 4:3 are 80% right, and fans of 8:7 are 20% right. The pixel's aspect ratio is about 17:15.
what the fuck? the correct ratio is 8:7 if you're a pixel perfect purist because that's what the SNES draws, or it's 4:3 if you want to play games as they were actually seen in the 1990s.
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 if you're a purist you'd play on a CRT TV ;) which, by the way, is also "pixel perfect"
More detailed calculations here, involving the pixel rate: wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Overscan#NTSC
And all that stuff only works for NTSC, which wasn't the only display standard at the time
this video deserves way more views
2:33 I used to play with Snes emulators in the late 90s. Emulators didn't do the aspect ratio because then CRT monitor existed, which would had displayed a 256x224 or 512x448 natively with the AR of 4/3.
Nice. I think my monitor at that time used analog dials for Horizontal Width. It was pretty easy to just give it a spin in order to "4:3 it." Took a bit longer to do with the menu-based adjustment I made in the video.
Really interesting, I would love to see more of this ! Great pacing, visual explanations, everything just works. Again, I would love to see more of this !
I've seen 8:7 as an option, and I didn't know why. So, thank you. Nintendo Switch's retro game player also has these options.
I feel like I should be sitting in a desk with a notepad and pencil taking notes lol. School jokes aside this was an interesting watch and real interesting to know that devs took consideration of the stretch issue with CRT's. Thanks for the video!
Great video. Your examples makes it very easy to comprehend. The more I learn about this stuff the more I wonder if ignorance is bliss. I never noticed this stuff when I played in the snes prime.
Thanks, J J.
Wow, I honestly had no idea. Very cool how Chrono Trigger and MK2 were made to account for the 4:3 stretch. Now I know what the eff pixel perfect mode is! Thanks for the vid!
A 4K HDR display has enough pixels for perfect looking 4:3 scaling as well as a good looking CRT filter with enough brightness.
I don't care about circles, but 8:7 looks clean and sharp, while 4:3 looks fat and blurry
The blurriness you're seeing is likely a byproduct of this video's editing. The scaling that's done by the emulator itself is sharp. You wouldn't notice a difference between the two
Nah, on Analogue Super NT, I actually prefer the '8:7' mode to the usually recommended '4:3 for 16:9' mode. And I might agree that it may be less 'proper', but it looks much sharper and more striking to me.
That's because the supernt isn't doing a good job to interpolate the image.
As an old school gamer I use 4:3, as this is how the games were sold and played by all people. Thanks for the explanation about 8:7, now I understand why I conceived Link looking a tad stretched, still 4:3 is the way to go and preferably on a real CRT, which lets the games look awesome.
Thank you for making the videeo, was very informative. Next time I play on emulators I will notice the scan filtering and speed of in-game graphics when they're stretched in-game.
Like some people have mentioned in the comments, Super Metroid actually favors 4:3 in some places. These are exclusively tilesets, as opposed to sprites (like the Morph Ball example). Things such as the opening narration cutscene, the Planet Zebes flyby after the initial escape, the "Samus" screen when you pause the game, and also the Screw Attack symbol at the very end of the game. All these look squished in 8:7, but scale properly in 4:3. It's interesting that the in-game sprites didn't get the same treatment. Maybe by the time they considered the game would be stretched on a TV display, it was already too late to change.
my games are fine in 21:87
You monster.
:)
21:87 = 7:29
@B Watts 21:87 is the same ratio as 7:29
@B Watts math is... hard?
That's a very good video and I like how you simply explained the concept of sampling, which I was trying to understand. I wish other TH-camrs like MLiG and Bob from RetroRGB would make vids about that.
TH-cam’s algorithm has been showing me this video’s thumbnail for two years. Today I actually clicked on it. Great video. :)
Short answer: it depends entirely on the individual game. Some are meant to be played in 8:7 because the devs didn't design their sprites with the 4:3 stretch in mind and others are meant to be played in 4:3 because the devs did design them with the stretch in mind. As for which games, you're just gonna have to experiment with your emulator options and see which ones look better for each because it really is different for each one. An easy way to find out: look at how circular sprites appear and adjust the aspect ratio settings until they look like a perfect circle instead of a vertical or horizontal oval.
Ideally you'd have to change per game then? If i play Metroid then 8:7 but Chrono Trigger would look better on a 4:3 due to game design?
I never knew about this and I've been gaming for almost 30 years. SNES was my first home console and I feel like I got to know it and love it a little bit more by watching this video.
THANK YOU for making this... its drive me nuts looking it up before.
Looks like it just depends on the game. Some games were designed with the stretch in mind, and some weren’t.
I love this channel. Just had to tell you that.
im working on a game in unity that mirrors what snes games looked like on a crt. i had no idea about the aspect ratio changing from the system to the tv. this video helped a lot with capturing the same old snes feel
So back in the day, retro games always ran with stretched pixels in CRTs (uneven pixels)? I am trying to determine if I should have integer scaling on or off for Retroarch.
Super interesting stuff! Subbed.
"Dis-play"
"Hai-gan"
I'll bet he says "INsurance"
"Snes"
PRO-nunciation
"Sc-Rolling"
That's easily one of the most interesting videos I have ever seen concerning pixel stretching on emulators.
I have a question and hopefully you know more about this. SNES games with 256x239 resolution. Is there an overscan on CRT TV's while displaying these games? If so, are 7 pixels on top cropped and 8 on the bottom, or is it vice versa?
Thanks
Hi Paulie. Overscan (caused by horizontal/vertical size as well as positioning) is rather subjective on CRT TVs. It was perfectly normal to go over to a friend's house and watch TV or play a game system and experience more or less overscan on their set than you would experience on your own. The precise number of pixels lost on top vs bottom of the screen isn't directly relevant vs a fixed pixel display as the adjustments are not on a per pixel basis. The games that were designed to use all 239 pixels for their vertical resolution would lose a certain amount of their visual information due to overscan on a CRT, and the amount of image data you couldn't see would vary from CRT to CRT. Your CRT may allow you to pull in the vertical size via a knob or menu if you want to "underscan" it a bit in order to see all the image data, but I don't know anyone that went to that extreme back in the day. The only example I can think of with obvious top overscan off the top of my head is Super Castlevania. The item box typically has the top cut off on a CRT because it is all the way at the top of the image. I don't know the resolution of that game in particular, though.
Thanks, yeah I know all the pixels are there. It's just that NTSC TV's
hide them. PAL TV's show everything but to a cost. It fits 239 or 478
height into 4:3. Every sprite looks like a compressed can lol
The resolution for Super Castlevania IV is 256x224
Really good quality love it
Third309 So much quality for a not known channel, it really deserves more subscribers!
The HI in HIGAN is pronounced like the English word HE. It's the Japanese word for FIRE (which is the logo, by the way).
While that is good to know, I can't help but feel a little bit disappointed at the correct pronunciation,
火
@@plasmaoctopus1728 Personally I prefer the Japanese pronunciation even as an English speaker but I have been exposed to a lot of Japanese words (so to speak).
@@plasmaoctopus1728 Why?
@@xmaverickhunterkx Probably because it doesn't have "high" in it, as in "hi-fi" (high fidelity). Makes it sound a bit more "impressive" or "high quality" when pronounced that way.
The subject is VERY interesting to me, and while yes, there is tons of info out there I can read, it wasn't until watching some of your videos that everything just clicked. Reading technical stuff is difficult for me on account of having ADD. I honestly would LOVE it if you would do a video on dot clock etc.
This is the second video on your channel that's blown my mind!
I like that most emulators allow for a choice. The best option would be to also allow for a choice for each game, and that preference can be saved per game, so that you don't have to change it every time when switching games, and all games can look as they originally should have.
RetroArch allows you to do this.
@@toysandjunk Nice! 👍
When it comes to having to choose between 16:9 and 4:3 on a television, I don't. I still have an old CRT TV for older systems and a few flatscreens in 16:9 for more modern systems. But if I'm running an emulator on my computer, what aspect ratio I use is dependent on the game. If a stretch doesn't negatively impact the look or feel of the game, I opt for 16:9. If it does, however, I use 4:3.
*Updated view below*
On the 3DS VC, I do have Mega Man X and Super Mario Kart. I always leave Perfect Pixels on, because I don’t like the blur presented. I generally prefer a sharp image 90% of the time.
*Nov. 2021 update*
I still partially agree with that original view. However, on a higher resolution display like 1080p, the blur is mitigated enough to make a true 4:3 aspect ratio infinitely more appealing! But on a lower resolution display, like a 3DS or the PlayStation Portable, I prefer an unscaled look. I find it can actually make some games harder to play on such a low resolution. But I’m very happy that it’s an option for those who like it!
Woah, nice video!
You deserve more subscribers :D
It's cool that even NES/SNES Online on the Switch even has the option!
I think for people that grew up playing these games in the 90s, they’re always gonna prefer 4:3 because it’s what they’re used to, but for younger people who mainly experience the games on emulators, 8:7 will look better for most games.
Nah, I emulate them and I prefer 4:3
If you play Chrono Trigger on DS, that background was actually redone for "sqaure pixels" instead of the assumed stretched displays of TVs.
Great as always! Thanks for that video!
If you have a display that runs 1280x???? natively, you can perfectly strect the native resolution of 256x224 to 1280x896. For example: I have a video projector the run 1280x800 and a monitor that runs 1280x1024.
What about 256x239, one of the most common resolutions for the PAL version? That would give a scaled resolution of 1280x1195, which doesn't fit on common 1280 screens.
Well if the Snes pushed enough pixels to display a proper 4:3 aspect ratio like the Genesis with its 320x224 resolution...it wouldn't have this problem. Funny how a system that is 2 YEARS older, is more technically advanced in some important ways.
It's a big deal that doesn't get brought up enough. Being able to see more of the playing field is a huge deal when playing any action based game. Genesis does. :)
I like both systems, flaws and all, so i don't give a flying fuck about resolution. I'll always put controls and gameplay as the most important aspects of a game. If a game fails to be entertaining and/or it is rubbish to control, then your game is an absolute failure in my eyes, but that is just my opinion...
@@tartuffethesprywonderdog5883 Well, you can just design your world to be slightly more dense horizontally. A higher resolution allows for more graphical detail, not actually more "world". (Unless it's a port)
@@tartuffethesprywonderdog5883 Ports are obviously a different story, as they're not designed from the ground up.
But if you make a new game from scratch it can be compensated for -- in ports too, if you go the extra mile, see many ports for the C64.
Man, this is a great discussion on whether you sound adapt your media to the current environment, or make it future-proof. Since Nintendo didn't alter their graphics for the medium, the don't need to do any extra work after the fact to make their stuff look good. And it looked fine at the time!
100th subscriber. Keep it up!!!
Just a question: why developers games or developers of snes at all desided use 8:7 as a native, while all users at world can play 4:3 on their TV as possible? 🤔
I guess it's because that's just the resolution the SNES can output. They can't use a 4:3 aspect ratio if the console the game is running on wasn't supported in the first place.
@@PScoopYT OK, it is seems to be logical) but why they choose this resolution of video chip/unit? - to play on special monitors or Sony pvm as correct without deformations of aspects ratio??? - it'strange....
Using rectangular pixels (horizontal stretching) is a pretty common trick to make the picture look bigger (and more impressive) on a limited system. They probably figured that they could print 256x224 pictures reliably and then the TV would strech them if needed.
There might also be deep technical reasons for it, since the width of a SNES pixel is _exactly_ 2/3rd (or 1/3rd in high-res mode) of a cycle of the 315/88 MHz (~3.58 MHz) NTSC color burst carrier. Most likely this ratio has to be something nice to be able to generate colors conveniently.
256 pixels can also be addressed using 1 byte exactly.
And computers generally prefer working with values that are even numbers of bytes.
Of course, the SNES has a ton of 9 and 10 bit values in it's graphics chip, so this seems a little silly.
But you'd be surprised how much it simplifies programming tasks (Especially when your computer has an 8 or 16 bit CPU) if the numbers you are manipulating fit within a single byte.
If the horizontal resolution was say 320 pixels, now you need to do 16 bit calculations on anything which involves screen positions.
At 256 pixels you only need to do 8 bit calculations.
This video was really well made only to not be seen by many people.
Thanks for the analysis. I'm a bit confused on how the internal 8:7 aspect ratio interacts with the 4:3 display ratio. I'm designing an 8-bit NES Mario for 3D printing, and don't know what aspect ratio to use for the pixels: 4:3=1.333 or (4/3)/(8/7)=1.167 or (4/3)*(8/7)=1.524. I want it to look as close as possible to what was displayed at the time on CRTs. Anyone have any thoughts as to which aspect ratio is most authentic to the original look?
This calculation says 8:7 for INDIVIDUAL PIXELS, so scale an image with square pixels horizontally by 1.143 afterwards. wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Overscan#NTSC
What is the song used in the Link becoming a chonker part?
So, is this why they have the pixel perfect setting on the NES Classic?
Possibly. I would assume they also wanted to mitigate scaling artifacts depends on the display. 1:1 square pixels help with that.
4:3 is the closest way to play on modern screens, to recreate the look and feel of the original hardware being displayed on a crt
And if you gonna capture video you have to make it 4:3 stretch because back in the day crt's were the only displays available so everyone played the games and games become famous being played like that.
me, if i see any video of a nes or snes gameplay here on yt captured on 8:7 for me, its wrong and it looks weird, nothing like i rememered. i stretch the video when i can manually.
Developers on that time really didn't care that much on aspect ratio, so let's leave it like they looked originally on crt's
Krankysimo 4:3 is faithful but not worth it for most games unless designed for it. I don’t know anyone else who likes improper ovals over pixel perfect circles
Blank Blank Do you also add weird filters to make the picture look “better”? Don’t get it why some people are emulating an old console and then change the experience.
VisionThing I don’t add those AA shaders but I do use certain CRT shaders that add a very minor brighten effect to mimic a Trinitron. I also use the gba-colors shader for GBA games that weren’t designed for a backlight screen
Blank Blank Yeah those are good as they make the picture look more like it used to. I was referring to stuff like 2xSAI and Super Eagle ,P
great explanations with very useful examples! 👍👍👍👍👍
I believe that 8:7 is the intended aspect ratio...MOST of the time. Just look at Kirby. A character from a Game Boy game. Kirby is round in Dream Land 1 and 2, but ovular in Adventure for NES and 3 for Super NES. Or look at Mother 1's logo in-game. It's stretched out and ugly in 4:3. I think worrying about making it look good was only SOMETIMES bothered with, for a similar reason as to why the GBA versions didn't bother trying to make the games look like they did in 4:3. It wasn't worth it.
xg223
So are you saying that the logos on the boxes are wrong, and that the stretched out version in-game was what the logo creator intended?
Are you saying that Kirby’s roundness in the first two Dream Lands was not as the creators wanted?
Are you saying that the sprites in Super Mario Maker are incorrect?
If you want to see how the game was intended to be played, grab a crt, plug in the console, and play. How it looks was as it was intended. There's other proof of this beyond aspect ratio, such as overscan, and how some games would put junk pixels on the very edge of the image. It's not that they were lazy, it's just that consumer level crts had a degree of overscan so the very edge of the image went unseen. Honestly it's this type of imperfection of a crt, the curve of the screen, ect, that makes it so charming to play old games on. They were never intended to look pixel perfect as our modern displays are capable of.
@xg223 Meh 4:3 looks stretched and ugly
this is the kind of content i want to see more of on youtube. subbed!
Thanks, shiken. That means a lot.
Stepdad had one of those Rear-Projection Big Screen TV 45 or 55 inch. It was great playing my SNES on it!
Good and very informative video!
FYI, “higan” is pronounced like “hee-gan”. Like 火 in Japanese.
He-gun.
To me the real issue is getting your emulation away from having being forced at standard output resolutions that don't match up. I wish there was some type of software program that would automatically switch up for games without even having to bother writing hardware profiles and taking all the hassle out of it.
Consoles don't have hardly any chance with this. Industry standards (480p,720p,1080p) are etched in stone and it's because of this the 'emulated' appearance and incorrect scaling with terrible filters are certainly doing what they can do to ruin the experience.
Hell just look at all the ports Capcom did through the years. You'd think 3rd Strike looks bad on current systems? Look at how they handled it on Dreamcast, trying to cram everything in 640x480.
There is certainly some irony involved in these higher resolutions of today as they are actually quite limiting when it comes to representing the sample sizes allowed for a horizontal scan line in the lower resolution, CRT days. 720p and 1080p are woefully way too small as catch-all resolutions for scaling. The scaling methods make a huge difference, but more resolution in general would help out quite a bit.
Part of the problem is that 'HD' resolutions are framed as being higher resolution...
But actually they're lower resolution than 4:3
This becomes clearer when you write 4:3 in it's non-standard form:
16:12
And it should be fairly obvious what that means.
What's the 4:3 resolution equivalent of 720p?
Well, 1280x720...
Divide 1280 by 4, multiply by 3... You get 1280x960.
Yep. That's right. 16:9 and 16:10 are 'cropped' 4:3, NOT scaled up 4:3.
Your HD widescreen image isn't a 'wide' version of a 4:3 resolution, it's a vertically cropped version of a 4:3 resolution.
1920x1080? It's equivalent 4:3 resolution would be 1920x1440
Of course it's hard to scale a 4:3 image cleanly here, because the 4:3 image scaled up would be an issue.
And then when it comes to scaling cleanly with images that originally had non-square pixels...
Well, if you're trying to scale from an NTSC machine with 7:6 pixels...
256x224 won't scale cleanly until you can reach...
Well technically 896x720 works, but it doesn't fit nicely on any common resolution (plus technically this is a 3.5x horizontal scale)
From there you'd need to move to
1792x1344 (1440 if your system actually puts out 240 lines)
Which of course requires a 1440p display.
It gets worse if you wish to replicate the look of a PAL system though. (not many people do, but that's another issue)
The pixel aspect ratio of the PAL snes is 25:18...
Unsurprisingly the only way to scale that cleanly is to use a very high resolution display indeed. smallest integer scaling of 256x240 would be 6400x4320
And if you're thinking that's not a 4:3 image... You'd be correct.
It's a really awkward aspect ratio indeed.
However, an interesting observation here?
With a 25:18 pixel aspect ratio...
What resolution is equivalent to 16:10? Well, that's 256x222.22
(very close to 256x224 in fact)
And what about 16:9? That happens to be exactly 256x200
so with the loss of at most 40 lines, (and being able to tolerate what PAL games looked like historically), you could scale this to 6400x3600
And... Well, that's just about doable on an 8k display.
Though in spite of this being a 16:9 image, it does NOT match the likely resolution that 8k displays will have... (which will probably be 7680x4320)
Yeah, this whole scaling thing works out pretty badly.
Oh, and of course being able to display both PAL and NTSC on a single display either requires variable refresh, or... a 300 hz capable display.
Something which probably explains why the mini consoles don't offer a PAL/NTSC switch in the options menu...
Granted modern televisions (And even many computer monitors) in PAL territories generally DO support 50 hz modes...
But how many cheap microcontrollers would be able to support output at both 50 and 60 hz?
Trying to get this 'perfect' on modern equipment seems like it's something of a lost cause, honestly...
Your 300 Hz note is a good point. I'd even go to 600 Hz to add in 24 fps movies. 600 hz is perfect 25x 24 Hz, 24x 25 Hz, 20x 30 Hz, 12x 50Hz and 10x 60Hz, so no matter if it's a 24 fps movie, a 25 or 30 fps progressive game or 50 or 60 fps interlaced game, they all display perfectly fine without need for any 3:2 pulldown or stuff like that. Which also ties in into the one-monitor-for-all-old-games solution.
TL;DR: by going to 600 instead of 300 Hz you have perfect multiplers for 5 instead of 2 display standards.
Another thing, what were the monitors that the creators were using, testing on, etc.?
Unless they weren't working or testing on CRT's, then they would have seen/known the "stretch" as well (even while drawing the shapes initially), despite their computer (or snes) hardware.
It's probably ever only in 8:7 out of laziness, and 4:3 optimized fully or partially accordingly.
The box art of the title for SMW matched the 4:3, as do the square blocks, but not the oval (at 4:3) coins, so mixed.
I never knew it was slightly stretched. Now looking at the comparison I see how it looked when I played on the SNES and realize Mario wasn't meant to be as pudgy as he was shown. 3:10 Does anyone know how it was handled on the Wii virtual console?
4:30
The Mortal Kombat circle at 4:3 is on my screen 240 pixels tall and 255 pixels wide.
The Chrono Trigger moon at 4:3 is on my screen 155 pixels tall and 160 pixels wide.
It's possible that true output aspect ratio is between 8:7 and 4:3. That is the image does not fit 4:3 screen perfectly, but slightly tends to overscan on the vertical and underscan in the horizontal directions. In fact the true pixel/screen aspect ratio is something that can be calculated from known pixel clock, and i could do that, but i'm not even sure anybody will even read this so it might not be worth my effort.
Why don't you take a SNES and make a capture on an EasyCap or display on a CRT TV and actually measure it? Otherwise it's just speculation based on "this looks better than that".
this is so fucking stupid. the correct ratio is not "in between" 8:7 and 4:3. do you really think game developers tried to make the circles perfect after they've been stretched from 8:7 to 4:3? you're an idiot if that's the case.
I was actually wondering something like that, but it seems to be very close to 4:3: The SNES didn't use the entire frame, but it used 448 (or 224 with double spacing) of the 480-486 lines of active video in NTSC, and about 47.7 us of the 51.2 us of active video in each line. That means its aspect ratio is within 1% of that of NTSC.
Ah, but apparently the story is more complex than this due to overscan. There's more insight further down in the comments.
Someone further down in the comments mentions an aspect ratio of 22:17, which means that showing in 4:3 would make everything 3% too wide. 160/155 ≈ 1.03
@@MatthijsvanDuin OK let me fish out the data.
The SNES NTSC master clock is 21.477 MHz, and a pixel is emitted once every 4 cycles. This sets the pixel clock to 5.369 MHz. NTSC standard would have imaginary square pixels come out to 6.135 MHz at half the vertical resolution, so the pixel aspect ratio is about 1.14 or approximately 8/7. Picture aspect ratio from that is (256/224)*(8/7)=64/49 or approximately 1.306 or 13/10 or 17/13, something like that. In comparison, 4:3 picture aspect ratio is 1.333 and 8:7 is 1.14
So SNES aspect is indeed closer to 4:3 but about 3% short which corresponds to finding of another person you mention. There is a small error in my calculation because SNES actually outputs one line per field pair fewer than NTSC in order to not destabilise oscillator of the TV when resetting the field, but i thought 0.2% error was OK :D
0:53 wait really?
*looks over at crt im conveniently sitting next to*
huh. guess your right.
Great explanations! Thanks for this!
Non integer 4:3 with pixellate interpolation is what I use in Retroarch for my games; it looks more natural in my eyes and gives an almost Framemeister/Super NT look.
For me it really depens on the game im playing.
Example: Mario world needs to be Pixel perfect for me but Mario RPG Just feels wrong in any other than 4:3, Same with chrono trigger
The intendo resolution was 4:3 since every TV was 4:3 but play how ever you want.
no pun intendo?
You're actually not correct. It's not 4:3. But sometimes the game devs would design the game for 4:3
Thank you very much. It was a fantastic explanation
Thank you very much for making this.
Honestly, the games were made for 4:3 screens. Even if the pixel artists didn't understand that their square pixel art wasn't being accurately designed, on the technical side of things the game developers knew the details of the screens they were developing for. No one was making games with the mindset of "One day when TVs have square pixels, people will finally be able to enjoy the true majesty of my creative vision!"
the only thing that 8:7 was good for was to eliminate inconsistent horizontal pixel sizes which cause shimmering while scrolling. This is an issue right up to today. For an example, look at the background details as you scroll the screen side to side on an NES Classic in 4:3 mode where they didn't implement a filter of any type. (as mentioned in the video)
There are ways to subtly smooth that out with filters via emulation. Such as a quick and dirty bi-linear filter that will hide the problem without slowing down emulation. But today there are better solutions available. Look at the SNES Classic in 4:3 mode and scroll a scene side to side again. It's nearly undetectable.
Use whichever ratio YOU want to use. That's a matter of preference. But no matter what you personally prefer, and regardless of occasional pieces of pixel art that look like they were made with square pixels, 4:3 is the proper, original, intended look of the game.
Many words, much truth. Voice of reason, this person is.
There is one possible exception: games that were originally developed for a system with square pixels, and then ported to the SNES. They most likely didn't redraw all the art, though they might have redrawn some that stood out (large circular objects such as moons).
@@todesziege But nothing in the era _had_ square pixels unless you're counting the Game Boy. There was virtually nothing that ran on LCD panels as we know them today except for Game Boy and that's one reason why it was revolutionary. Game Gear and Turbo Express both came later and those were running games coded for TV consoles anyway. I believe the Atari Lynx was the first true dedicated handheld after the Game Boy came out.
Even PC games often didn't have square pixels.
@@shona-sof It's true that few systems of the day had perfectly square pixels, the exception being some arcade and computer games. Although y the time of the SNES many PC games were moving from 320x200 to 320x240 as well.
But for instance the Mega Drive had _almost_ square pixels, especially compared to the SNES/NES. While not _exactly_ square, they were close enough to not really require compensating for in most cases.
Games originally made for systems with almost-square pixels would often have noticably 'squished' shapes on the SNES.
Whenever I start any SNES game I try to find a circle or square on the game's menu so I can decide whether I'm gonna chose, but for the vast majority of cases I've been using 8:7.
Edit: this is the second time I'm watching this video, it completely changed my perception about retro gaming 2 years ago, so, thank you!
I just set up crtemudriver on my pc to display on my crt tv. Mines 16:9 so I wasn't sure if it was displaying at 8:7 or 4:3. But it turns out it does render at 8:7 then stretch to 4:3, like a real snes would.
On a similar note, I hate seeing people play CPS2 Capcom arcade games in 4:3. "But thats how it looked in the arcade!" yes but it squishes the pixels which displays the image incorrectly. Despite being the standard way we viewed them for decades, it is technically incorrect.
EDIT: I just noticed you did a video covering this very topic. Sweet!
Quite interesting details there, I wasn't aware of the 8:7 aspect ratio myself until further details about the SNES Classic/Mini saw the light of day.
And given I'm less of a graphics junkie than I am for say good sound, I actually prefer having a screen being fully used by the game than having black boarders thus I'm playing games in 16:9 all the time.
Still it's nice to know why for example the picture looks different on SNES9X than it does on Higan.