Emulator

If you use Force 4:3 in a native widescreen game you'll find that it does not do the same thing as Auto.

JosJuice wrote:

This is intended behavior. The Force 4:3 option is intended to give you the same aspect ratio as on a 4:3 TV, not to make the active area of the image exactly 4:3. See issue 9024.

It's more like pixel perfect mode, instead of 4x3. It preserves the internal resolution, but ignores active area. Why not add an option to make active area exactly 4:3? The emulator already has it anyway with "stretch to window", it just doesn't work in fullscreen mode.

It's more like pixel perfect mode, instead of 4x3. It preserves the internal resolution, but ignores active area.

If you mean Force 4:3, that isn't actually what it does. It uses the pixel aspect ratio configured by the game rather than presenting the frame buffer with square pixels. This is console accurate, so if the circles don't look correct in this mode, that's a bug in the game which will also be visible on real hardware.

Why not add an option to make active area exactly 4:3? The emulator already has it anyway with "stretch to window", it just doesn't work in fullscreen mode.

Are you sure that what you want is not addressed by issue 9024? It seems like most games where circles currently look wrong would be fixed by that.

JosJuice wrote:

It's more like pixel perfect mode, instead of 4x3. It preserves the internal resolution, but ignores active area.

If you mean Force 4:3, that isn't actually what it does. It uses the pixel aspect ratio configured by the game rather than presenting the frame buffer with square pixels. This is console accurate, so if the circles don't look correct in this mode, that's a bug in the game which will also be visible on real hardware.

Why not add an option to make active area exactly 4:3? The emulator already has it anyway with "stretch to window", it just doesn't work in fullscreen mode.

Are you sure that what you want is not addressed by issue 9024? It seems like most games where circles currently look wrong would be fixed by that.

So 4x3 TV screen just crops image on 640x528 games to remove black bars on sides and sacrifice image on top and bottom?

Strictly speaking, no. CRTs are just inherently imprecise devices and will scan the image past the visible area of the screen in some undefined manner, so to compensate games simply didn't use all of the available screen area, but it varies by game.

Techjar wrote:

Strictly speaking, no. CRTs are just inherently imprecise devices and will scan the image past the visible area of the screen in some undefined manner, so to compensate games simply didn't use all of the available screen area, but it varies by game.

What I'm trying to understand is if 4x3 CRT TV did any squishing or stretching of an image in case of Gamecube and it was taken into account by devs.

I mean, I'm looking at this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4uVw1JTsk

and either there's cropping going on or image is slightly stretched horizontally. On RE4 it's hard to see, because it had this letterbox mode from the start. So if there's anything cropped on top and bottom (black space) it's impossible to know.

What I'm trying to understand is if 4x3 CRT TV did any squishing or stretching of an image in case of Gamecube and it was taken into account by devs.

The GameCube squishes or stretches the image before sending it to the CRT. It seems like some devs took this into account and some others didn't.

JosJuice wrote:

What I'm trying to understand is if 4x3 CRT TV did any squishing or stretching of an image in case of Gamecube and it was taken into account by devs.

The GameCube squishes or stretches the image before sending it to the CRT. It seems like some devs took this into account and some others didn't.

I see. Thanks for explanation. :)