As someone who's spent far too much time fiddling with DOS game aspect ratios, I appreciated this video immensely. There are _so_ many variables to consider on a per-game basis, so I'm constantly tweaking captured footage to address this stuff!
I wonder, if you can scale screenshots by first increasing the height and width 10-fold and then changing the aspect ratio, is there a way (script or emulator) to do it in real time to prevent bad scaling while playing?
As someone who's spent far too much time buying and playing old PC games I missed out on in my youth, I appreciate LGR videos immensely. I have a feeling I'm going to be watching a lot more Displaced Gamer videos too!
@@LEXXIUS If a 1600×1200 window is used, it would use most horizontal resolution of Full HD, and 1600/320 is exactly 5 and 1200/200 is exactly 6, so there should be no scaling issues, am I right?
this reminds me of my dad's "I paid for the whole TV and I'm going to USE the whole TV!" which results in him stretching EVERYTHING to fit no matter what the original ratio was.
I see we had the same dad. My response always was "well then call the cable company and get the HD tuner box!" But he never did. Had to put up with stretched 480i on our 1080p TV for *years.*
One should also consider that this may sometimes be an artistic choice, because many developers used odd proportions to make their characters more recognizable with limited pixel definition.
One thing I remember from old DOS days - Car & Driver game had special test screen which would display a circle, you had to adjust your monitor image stretch dials so that the height and width of the cirlce were equal, at this point you would know that the aspect ratio of displayed image was as intended by the game programmers. Also I always use aspect=true in DOSBox while playing 320x200 games ;)
I agree here, there is no such thing as PC early-mid 90s games made for 16:10 or 16:9 monitors, no one had them back then. Why the hell devs would even make games for monitors that didn't even exist on the mainstream consumer market? Simple answer, they weren't making games for wide screen monitors it was all 4:3.
Just to be pedantic, so people don't make the mistake of thinking 16:10 didn't exist in in the late 80s early 90s... John Carmack had a 16:10 CRT which ran at 1920x1200. VESA standards outlined plenty of 16:10 resolutions as well. For example, 1600x1200 is UXGA, while 1920x1200 is WUXGA. In 1990 the XGA standard was created, which was 1024x768. Along with XGA you had WXGA, which was defined as 1152x768.
Wasn't that a next station thing that he used to program DOOM on? That PC from steve jobs that never really caught on? UNIX/Amiga/industrial world had huge resolutions long before 1080p was a thing. It came down to cost. Most people would not want to buy a $5000 to $10000 pc for their home if there where not many games for them. Yes rogue etc is a kick ass game. The only reason why people would have the next (or similar systems) was for gfx or programming. Most other use cases didn't need the screen size at home and most games where played at home.
I can't stand incorrect aspect ratios. Same goes for getting the correct refresh rate on DOS games. I setup my old PIII with a CRT recently for this reason.
@@DisplacedGamers Oh, good for you! Do you remember what frequency DOS runs at, isn't it something strange like 70hz? As for games:all the star trek adventure games (DS9 Harbinger is underrated), Duke3D, Blood, Star Wars Sims. For Win98 Omikron Nomad Soul (with David Bowie by the Fahrenheit and heavy rain studio), Outcast which is a cool open world voxel based game, Hardwar an elite type game on a planet, and system shock 2! Any games you'd recommend? Great channel!
@@lrochfort lowres is usually fixed to 70 Hz, higher resolution (640x480) usually 60 Hz. games that use VESA modes (up to 1600x1200) default to 60 Hz, but depending on your graphics card it may be possible to use tools that force higher refresh rates, e.g. 85 Hz or even 100 Hz if your monitor can support that.
@@ladislavzima8382 Hexen used a modified Doom engine, which originally was capped to 24fps tops... Although there are source ports that removed this cap. Some source ports that run in DOS include Boom, dosdoom and Zdoom. Although I'm not sure, but of these three, Zdoom might be the only one to support Hexen.
Your Lure of the Temptress point, about it being made on a PAL Amiga makes perfect sense about the ignored pixels, converting PAL games to NTSC alters the fact that, in Europe, 99% of all PAL games were letterboxed by at least 28 pixels top and bottom. Its something American retro gamers don't really take into account as when played in NTSC the games fill the screen. It was the same on later consoles as well, even up to Final Fantasy X on PS2 looking almost like VHS widescreen movies did.
Yeah, I just realised how much me being in a PAL region has distorted my expectations of what SNES games look like. Also, the realisation just struck me that unless the developer enabled 240 line mode for the PAL release... All of us PAL gamers from that era have more or less been playing games in 16:10 aspect. The pixel aspect of a PAL snes is 25:18 Work that out for a screen resolution of 256x224 and you get very, very close to 16:10 (to be exact 16:10 would be 256x222 given how a PAL snes and NES scale things.) So... Yeah. 4:3 wasn't the norm in Europe it turns out. Not in a historical sense anyway.
The Chocolate Doom project had a big argument over whether to apply aspect ratio correction to screenshots a few years ago, and the solution was to upscale 320x200 shots to 1600x1200, basically non destructively giving each original pixel its own 5:6 aspect ratio
Yep. CRTs just drew horizontal lines on the screen and didn't really care whether you gave them 160x200 or 3200x200. In this case, it would naturally just draw each pixel for 1/320 of each line.
Dawid Itrych Hmmm I always thought CRTs drew 320x200 actually as 640x400 with two lines (and columns) per pixel, and that’s why the pixels looked “pixelated” (squares with hard edges). I think making the CRT scan at 200 lines would be below the minimum refresh rate?
Jazz Jackrabbit is an interesting case - it doesn't actually use the 320x200 mode, rather a hacked 320x240 with only 199 lines used in order to gain a 60Hz refresh rate. On a CRT, this does appear as widescreen when you have sizing set properly for 640x480 video modes.
It definitely is an interesting case! The footage I used at the end isn't stretched to widescreen, it is zoomed into that widescreen "window" that appears in the top of the 4:3 display. The menus of the game still use a standard 4:3, 320x200 @ 70Hz (if I recall correctly). I couldn't help but include Jazz Jackrabbit in the outro footage just because... it's Jazz Jackrabbit. The game deserves a video of its own!
It always bothered me to see people watching analog 4:3 broadcasts in widescreen TVs. Can't you see everything is squished? They didn't care. Some 3D games had settings to use a widescreen ratio in their calculations, so you could use your analog widescreen monitor with the same resolution as before, but usually the UI would suffer stretching. Once we switched to accelerated 3D with large resolutions and square pixels, the issue became moot. Great video!
my first lcd tv had a screen mode that streched things only as they were farther from the center. as a result, it fit a 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen pretty well, with the only major artifact being that anything you watched in it looked like you were playing a game with the fov slider a bit too high (a bit of fish-eyeing going on). but that was only very noticeable in panning shots. everywhere else it was a pretty damn good compromise. certainly better than just stretching the whole image. i wonder why no tv after did that.
Some 4:3 content is even cropped to fit 16:9 now! Not only are they scaling SD content to fill an HD display vertically, but they're FURTHER scaling it and CROPPING it to fit horizontally. It's pan&scan all over again, for a new generation!
@@GraveUypo Egh, those were possibly even worse! While it would make stuff in the center of the screen look right, things at the edges would appear even *more* stretched! And it would cause straight lines to appear as curved, mess with the speed of movement and wreak all kinds of havoc on the image...
The best thing is that the analog signals can carry a flag for aspect ratio. But they still pillarbox the old 4:3 image into a 16:9 and send that. Watch this on a 4:3 screen and you get additional letterboxing, resulting in a 4:3 video on a 4:3 screen that has massive borders around all sides.
Agreed! I have one model of Canon camera (and not a DSLR) that places "exposure compensation" -- perhaps the single most-accessed setting in a casual context -- on a dedicated physical dial with no alternative (onscreen menu) access. Part of the appeal of having dedicated physical controls is simply the convenience of immediate access (compared to time spent navigating a menu to find the same control).
Great video! I also prefer 16:10! Lure of the Temptress from GOG, using ScummVM, does have a graphical interface for you to adjust the options (as should any game using ScummVM from GOG). They just launch directly into the game for a more seamless experience. Press Ctrl-F5 and select "Return to Launcher" to get to the configuration screen. From there you can Edit Game and turn off the aspect ratio correction to correct the aspect ratio on Lure of the Temptress.
Your video doesn't go into *why* they used an odd aspect with non-square pixels, and some people may wonder, so I'll comment it for the curious: First of all, the two aspects mentioned here are 320x200 and (doubled) 640x400. If you add horizontal lines to those to create a 4:3 aspect, you'd get 320x240 and 640x480. (Probably familiar to most people, since we use those now.) So, what's on the screen is stored in video memory, physical memory chips on the video card. Memory is made up of bytes. 1 byte = 8 bits, and 1024 bytes = 1 kb. Memory chips tend to be packaged in a nice even number of kb that is a power of two: 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. And as to the actual drawing of the screen, the way pixels corresponds to bits and bytes depends upon the color depth: 256 colors is 8 bit (1 byte) per pixel, 16 colors is 4 bit (1/2 byte) per pixel, 4 colors is 2 bit (1/4 byte), etc. So if you do the math for how many bytes you need for a screenful of pixels: 320x200 @ 256 colors is (320 x 240) / 1 = 64,000 bytes. 640x400 @ 16 colors is (640 x 400) / 2 = 128,000 bytes. Well 64k = 65,536 bytes and 128k = 131,072 bytes, so we can use standard-size memory chips and have sufficient memory without a bunch left unused- there are just enough bytes. But now, do the same calculations using 4:3 aspect ratios: (320 x 240) / 1 = 76,800 and (640 x 480) / 2 = 153,600. Uh oh- those numbers are slightly *over* the size of standard chips. If we wanted 320x240 @ 256, we'd need 75k- that's a 64k chip plus a 16k chip, with a whopping 5k left unused, or a larger number of smaller chips to save on unused memory (like nineteen 4k chips). So to keep things simple, they picked resolutions that were an even number below what their memory chips demanded, and stretched the pixels to fill a standard screen. But if you get to video cards with larger amounts of memory, giving multiple pages for lower resolutions, this granularity issue becomes moot. CGA cards could be either 320x200 @ 4 or 640x200 monochrome because they had a measly 16k of memory on them; an SVGA card from the mid-90s may have had a megabyte or more. So... square pixels.
If you're on Chrome, there is an addon called "UA-cam Aspect Ratio Control" for exactly that. You can corret the ratio, but also zoom in and out. So watch widescreen videos that are uploaded letterboxed in 4:3 without letterboxing. (Or pillowboxed 4:3 videos in 4:3)
The reason is very simple. 320x200 = 64000. 65536, a 16 bit integer, could store that. Anything larger would require more complicated paging routines to draw the image. 320x256 blows out the size of an unsigned 16 bit integer. I used to do a lot of this in x86 asm, and once paging was introduced, everything slowed down. (640x480x8bit). mov esdi, 0xa000; mov di, 400; lodsb 15; (Been a while) That should set row 2 column 80 to color 15. They did it for speed, and the speed worked. There were lots of great games back then.
I love the 16:10 format. Great to have tall screen real estate on a PC. Still use the Samsung 2232BW screen. PC FPS games is a joy. You can spot players up top or down low much better, without moving the mouse. Nice DOS video! =)
It's even weirder in 640x350 EGA high-res mode. Non-square pixels were not an artistic choice in games, for many years that was the only kind of pixel available on a PC, and so some artists made their game art look correct in non-square pixels, while others simply let it be whatever it is, even if it looks wrong. So when correcting aspect ratio, not everything really looks best, it's on per-case basis like LGR said. You can, however, get perfect 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 on a 1600x1200 LCD panel, though those are generally larger than any CRT that was meant to use 320x200 with. Likewise, 1920x1200 LCD panel is suitable for 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 with black bars on the sides.
Also worth noting that games from the transition period in history where aspect ratios were changing, or which by chance were intended for something other than 4:3 often had a 'calibration' mode, or at least something in their settings which made it possible to adjust the way the image was drawn to fit different aspect ratios. Many late era n64 games do this (helped out by the fact that the n64 can do hardware image scaling as a post-processing step) An extreme example would be Perfect Dark, which gives you manual width and height adjustment, screen positioning, 4:3 and 16:9 video image output options (eg, settings to output the image correctly at those aspect ratios if your display was that ratio), and, independently of this, standard (4:3), widescreen (16:9), and cinematic (2.15:1) image output modes that crop the image using letterboxing, taking into account what your screen aspect ratio settings are. (eg 16:9 if you set your screen mode to 4:3 will have letterboxing, while 4:3 on 16:9 will have pillarboxing. But if you get it wrong and set your TV output to 4:3 when you actually have a 16:9 television, then unless your television is applying pillarboxing, you'll get a stretched image) Incidentally if you make homebrew for old systems and want to use a non-standard aspect ratio (like say, 16:9 on a PAL snes, which works out to roughly 256x200 due to the pixel aspect ratio) it's a good idea to include something in the main menu that not only makes note of the fact that your game isn't intended for 4:3 aspect as you would expect for that era, but also displays a calibration image that can let people visually identify whether they've got all their equipment set up as intended - typically by using a series of squares and circles to visually show stuff is being drawn as intended.)
Thanks for making this. I have been trying to re-create the look of 320x200 art as it would be seen on early 90's VGA monitors and the brief moments when you showed CRT footage was surprisingly helpful. Perceived gamma and the faint scanlines that are still visible are an important part of how I remember these graphics, but its just so hard to find good examples of how this looked on the internet with period-appropriate hardware. Everyone seems to have a different idea about this stuff in hindsight and perhaps from using meme filters/shaders for decades now also. I love the deep dives into niche topics on this channel so much- keep up the great work!
It is so fun programming in 13h mode. From time to time I still fire up Turbo C++ in DOSBox just to remember the good old times. There's a hidden 320x240 mode called mode X, but I never tried it.
@@PiesliceProductions yeah Quake was one game that supported all kind of weird resolutions. From 320x200, 320x240, 320x256, 320x288....up to 320x480 - and then all the same for 640x200 and up. I think (not 100% sure) that some configuration files could be edited, so you could have more or less the resolution you wanted.
God your editing is getting so much better. Timing, scripting, pacing... You deserve to blow up. Easily one of the highest quality tech channels on the platform. Your hard work does not go unappreciated!!!!
Even worse, some TV's have a "Panoramic" stretch mode, so the center of the screen is a bit thinner, and the left & right are too wide. My grandma on her TV somehow always has it on, even after me fixing it, and it bugs me a lot. TV motion smoothing is also a feature I hate.
Interestingly a lot of gaming magazines in the nineties published their screenshots without any aspect correction, so I've instantly knew that the game was in 320x200 resolution and I could also deduce if a game had 640x480. Even when the game or demoscene stuff ran in those exotic x-mode resoulutions. One interesting tidbit: our older monochrome PC monitors all displayed 320x200 as 4:3, but they've displayed 640x400 as a widescreen resolution. When we've upgraded to better, high-refresh rate CRTs, the widescreen effect ceased to be on those modes, too. And 1280x1024 was also displayed in 4:3, mostly. I remember an icon of a particular Windows 9x application had balls/circles squashed in the opposite direction than with 320x200. That's why I preferred 1280x960 on that new monitor.
Even worse were the screenshots of the 1990s DOS text mode programs that redefined the character set to create a more "GUI-like" appearance. Few magazines at the time ever reproduced this properly -- most selected the option in the program's configuration to revert to standard text mode characters, and some ignored the redefined characters and printed them as standard characters, causing their DOS text mode screenshots to be filled with garbage characters!
@@vwestlife Oh yeah, I remember my first exposure to Linux was a library book (that came with a copy of the Linux distro in question, because why not) that had clearly recreated all of the text mode screens in a nonstandard font because I guess there was no way to produce fully-digital screenshots of actual text mode. I remember being confused and disappointed when those screens just used regular CGA text mode instead of the cool font that was in the book. Ironically, now we're living in the future and Linux _does_ use a custom higher resolution mode for its internal "text mode" for the benefit of UEFI PCs that no longer support classic BIOS graphics modes natively, and while I no longer have access to that book, Iswear the font they use looks almost exactly like my memories.
Thank you for this. I started doing computer art in the 80s when there where the “graphics contests” that required you to submit your [usually BASIC] code that generated the graphics. When I started doing raytracing in the 90s and got my first FTP Warez copy of photoshop, I used to get into arguments with people on IRC about pixels being taller than they are wide but I wasn’t sure of the ratio, and they thought I was crazy. I knew I wasn’t. I had notebooks with the best quarter-circle patterns for every radius that I painstakingly figured out on my own.
I have graphics programming books from the early and mid 90's and they ALL explicitly mention pixel aspect as an issue when writing any given graphics routine. (plus the performance cost of doing the aspect correction vs ignoring it. - adjustment for correct aspect ratio is far from free. And especially when you don't have hardware multiply/divide, it can be non-trivial.)
"Personally, I'm a 16:10 guy" the algorithm has blessed us, instant sub. also, as a fellow 16x10 guy "nobody knows, the trouble..." - as monitor tech advances we get less and less love. I feel like my HP Z24i and Z24x G2 might be as good as it can get without breaking the bank. is 120 Hz and native 10 bit output from a VA or IPS panel too much to ask for at 16:10?
Unfortunate. Personally I don't use 16:10 but used to have one such monitor for a while, I can see how the additional screen space would be useful for productivity tasks.
@@sheik124 Eh, it doesn't bother me at all compared to when I first tried it. It's just essentially trading screen size for correct aspect ratio (or no LCD upscaling blur if you choose to not scale at all)
This is a great reason to bust out a CRT if you have one. On one of my modern computer setups, I actually still use a Sony Trinitron through an adapter as my daily driver. After putting DOSBox into fullscreen without any scaling, it can be indistinguishable from an actual old PC hooked up to the same monitor.
CRTs still have superior image quality, IMO. I've been waiting for over a decade for technology that takes LCD/OLED and adds in the benefits CRT had... but it hasn't happened yet.
Good video. There are a few instances of games that I've run into that do seem to be designed with square pixels in mind; whether that was accidental or intentional I'm not sure. Some examples would be Dreamweb and Overkill. Both of those are clearly distorted/stretched vertically when viewed in 4:3, but are correct in 16:10 - circles, squares, faces... they're clearly wrong in 4:3. Such cases are definitely few and far between though.
I have to admit that this issue never crossed my mind. Makes perfect sense and I'm sure I will notice now if I play a classic game without the proper 4:3 aspect ratio. Great video as always, I have learned a lot about video in your channel, your videos are very well thought and produced, kudos.
Again, thank you for educating a new generation on this. This is one of my pet peeves. DOS gameplay footage being presented as if it was widescreen. URGH.
Quite literally zero DOS programs were designed for widescreen of any kind. Almost all monitors (and video adapters) available were 4:3 or very close to it. Widescreen simply did not exist. I'm pretty sure 320x200 stems from ye olde CGA monitors, which had 200 vertical lines on screen at any time. CGA had a 320x200 mode as well as a 640x200 hi res mode. EGA also supported this, and was backwards compatible (in low resolution modes) with CGA monitors. VGA almost certainly held this over to help keep backwards compatibility with CGA and EGA, as well as make the memory layout simpler.
Thanks, you helped me understand something I didn't "get" for a long time. I put your tips to use when recording and upscaling Stunt Island films in 320x200 mode.
One might ask (and something you didn't cover) is _why_ they chose that strange 320x200 resolution for mode 13h, which has non-square vertically-elongated pixels, rather than the much nicer 320x240 (which would have square pixels). The reason is that, at 256 colors per pixel, 320*240 = 76800 takes 75 kilobytes, while 320*200 = 64000 takes 62.5 kilobytes, which fits within a 64-kilobyte segment, and thus can be entirely addressed in 16-bit mode without the need to change segments. (The maximum 320xN resolution that would fit within 64 kilobytes would be 320x204, which takes 65280 bytes, ie. just a tad bit less than 64 kilobytes, ie. 65536 bytes. I don't know, however, why they decided to go with 200 lines instead of 204. I wonder if it's because 320/200 is such a nice round number, ie. exactly 1.6, while 320/204 has infinite recurring decimals. Maybe they thought that a resolution aspect ratio of 1.6 is better than one of 1.568627450980292...)
They chose 320x200 because it was the standard multicolor resolution compatible with both CGA and EGA, which was already used by the vast majority of all games. If they wanted the maximum number of 8 bit pixels addressable with a 16 bit uint, they would have gone for 256x256, but they didnt. 320x200 made it easier to make games backwards compatible with the older cards, AND the MCGA that came out the same year as VGA.
This is why I installed an extension that let's me change the UA-cam aspect ratio. Someone as big as Chuggaaconroy was using the wrong SNES ratio, and it bugged me.
Oh wow. You definitely took steps to make sure it met your needs. I've also seen some videos that appear to have the wrong AR on UA-cam - not even a let's play or an edited video but straight footage from the opening of an old TV show, for example. The uploader probably had the wrong flat set or it wasn't processed correctly.
QBASIC (MS-DOS) has a CIRCLE-command, that cares for the 4:3 ratio even in the 320x200 screen mode. (or did I try it on a 640x200 screen?) So I got a perfect circle on this non-squared pixel mode.
I'll never forget the day they made CRT's with an "auto" option which would attempt to perfectly center your image by finding, using and cropping the black edges around the displaying of your signal.
A huge thanks for this video. I've seen too many people watch 4:3 Cable TV on their widescreen TV sets without noticing, leading me to believe that most people simply don't notice until it's pointed out to them. Keep up the good work :)
And this is why I use my Thinkpad T60 for retro gaming. It's the last mainstream laptop with 4:3 display, that also had an IPS panel option. In fact that laptop is my main daily driver too. And that screen is quite frankly spectacular, even in today's standards.
I love all these meticulous analysis of pixels, aspect ratios, and other artifacts of our technological past that are not talked about as much nowadays.
I get the feeling that those that argue for 320x200 being 16:10 never actually used the hardware in its original setting. What about 640x200? 32:10 CGA?? SUPER-WIDESCREEN IN 1981?? The same can be said about DVDs. The standard NTSC DVD resolution is 720x480, but is clearly not a 3:2 aspect ratio, as it was designed to fill a 4:3 display. (or even squeezed to fit 16:9 on anamorphic DVDs. Wait a sec, have any of these people ever watched an anamorphic DVD on their modern display?)
16:9 enhanced/anamorphic DVDs are a GREAT topic. 640x200 CGA is also a great example. The Atari 2600's 160x192 is also rather interesting when viewed using square pixels.
I always try to match the creator's intended aspect ratio. I always cringe when I see someone using 4:3 content stretched over their modern widescreen display. It looks horrible. When I comment it the answer is usually along the line "I paid the whole screen, I use the whole screen". Okay, whatever, ruined image as long as it fills the screen I guess for most people.
4:3 content on a 16:9 screen means either stretching, cutting of the top and bottom, or having black bars. Stretching is never a good option, and the other two depends on the content. Some are fine being cut off, others have too much information in the top and bottom for that and are better viewed pillowboxed. Oh and for games it's very easy to setup a custom resolution with the screens native vertical resolution and in 4:3 ratio. Stufff like 960x720 (for 120x720 screens) 1440x1080 (for 1920x1080 screens), 1920x1440 (for 2560x1440 screens), etc
This was awesome! As a kid in the 90's I had no clue about the aspect ratio in my DOS games. It was fun to see what was going on. Nowadays I just use DOSBox to play them. The one I go back to the most is a weird game called Spacewrecked.
Something else to point out is the reason so many platforms went with such an odd resolution: While 320×240 _would_ make more sense in a lot of ways-and Sega's consoles managed it somehow-it also goes just over the magic number of 65,536, a power of 2. Which means the pixel count multiplied by the color depth would also be just over a power of 2, as would the number of character tiles, or any other method of dividing the screen up into smaller powers of 2 for performance reasons. So you'd need to bump up to the next highest power of two to store any screen information, and then have to find some use for all the space left over so as not to waste it-and processing it would probably be a pain too. It was easier to find some kind of compromise resolution that stays within the 65,536 limit instead. Nintendo's solution kept both dimensions under the smaller magic number of 256, which probably improved performance when managing sprite positions (which is kind of a pain on the Commodore 64), as well as filling the entire screen. Actual computers probably went with reducing the line count because it allowed them to keep everything well inside the TV's overscan "safe zone" while also maximizing the number of columns, which is ideal for anything text-based. Hypothetically you could make a system that uses 288×216, giving you an overscan safe zone _and_ square pixels as well as the choice of either one extra offscreen column or row for smooth scrolling. And it divides evenly into thirds both ways, in case anyone needs that.
I haven't compared the different versions, but it was developed by Core -- a British developer. European and US TVs of the time would have a different vertical resoution, and European consoles would usually "squish" the image into a letterboxed format to fit this standard. It's possible Core designed it for a European TV and thus the image would appear a bit stretched on a US version. Though like I said, I haven't compared the different versions (and haven't ever played a US one I don't think), so I have no idea if it actually applies here, but it's a theory at least.
I'll have to check out your video on SNES which you referenced. Another curiosity from the time of CRT displays was Capcom's CPS1, 2 & 3 arcade hardware, they used a 386x240 resolution (an extra 64 pixels horizontally from the more common 320x240 at the time) which gave their arcade games a seldom seen & recognizable *super crisp* look. Whenever they made console conversions they had to butcher the games to make them fit, with Magic Sword for SNES as a good example.
This makes me realize the first C&C and RA run on 320x200 in DOS and 640x400 in Windows. Usually it would run 640x480 with added bars, ruining the aspect ratio. I just hope the upcoming remakes know the original games uses non-square pixels, but from what I've seen I'm afraid everything will look stretched.
I never realized this! I think my brain compensates for the wrong aspect ratio or else I just never was bothered enough to really notice the strangeness. I love playing around with configs almost as much as playing the game though, so I'll definitely try out these options. Thanks!
I have major OCD when it comes to aspect ratios. If each DOS game had a single intended aspect ratio for all of its art (either 4:3 NTSC vs 4:3 PAL, for instance), I'd be content with picking the display mode that results in perfect squares and circles and calling it a day. No, the problem is when games have different aspect ratios for different assets. Doom is a perfect example: Sprites used for projectiles, powerups, and button and door textures look vertically stretched at 4:3 NTSC, as does level geometry. But character sprites and HUD elements look horizontally stretched at 4:3 PAL/16:10. So, I'm left with a Sophie's choice scenario where I have to choose the "most correct' aspect ratio. This issue extends to consoles as well. SNES is notoriously all over the place, with some developers correctly making art for NTSC standard, others making sprites at 8:7 and not taking into account the horizontal stretch on consumer CRTs, and still others who mix and match aspect ratios within the same game, like Chrono Trigger. Master System games struggles with this mismatching as well (the Sonic 8-bit titles are particularly egregious here). I think the absolute worst I've seen is the classic Tomb Raider games on PS1. On an NTSC set, all the 2D sprites and FMVs appear aspect-correct; however all the 3D geometry, including Lara's model herself, is vertically stretched to a _ridiculous_ degree. If I play the game at 4:3, in-game Lara becomes Jack Skellington. If I play it at 16:10, FMV-Lara becomes Oogie Boogie. I can't win. It's maddening.
My dad had an old Compaq Portable III with an orange CGA 640x400 screen which was in true 16;10 ratio. I'm forever gutted that he sold it when he got a new laptop in 1993. I fkn loved the design of that machine.
My favorite DOS games: King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island. I play these games on my old computer with Windows 98 and DOS) Thank you for the video)
This is something I learned playing Rayman all those years ago. The game runs at 320*200 by default, but there's a graphic option to set the resolution to 320*240. On my 4:3 monitor this just added black bars to the top and bottom and squashed the image. A few years later, I had some game-making software called The Games Factory that supported two resolutions: whatever your windows resolution was, or 320*200 (which I loved because it made the games look like "console games"). Creating games in the windows interface at 1024*768 then switching to 320*200 to play them made it very apparent that the pixels weren't square in the latter. My lovely square Mario blocks were suddenly rectangular. Even as a young teen I started making my "square" objects squat to compensate for the stretched resolution.
It's funny that right after "Tyrian" theme begins at 11:47 the clip of "Legend of Kyrlandia" subtitle goes "Please help Brandon..." - Alexander Brandon being the composer of music in "Tyrian" :)
12:30 OMG, the video features Jazz Jackrabbit! Best PC jump'n run ever. Maybe not best looking one or funniest one but I just loved the smooth scrolling and its fast pace; it was like playing Sonic on a PC.
Nice explanation. I suspect this explains why when emulating vertical arcade games they look skinnier than the expected 3:4 - they are probably incorrectly being shown as 10:16 and need a correction to their aspect ratio.
This is a big point in the RetroPie community where we're playing old 4:3 TV consoles on 16:9 widescreen TVs. Some people prefer their 8-bit and 16-bit console games in the correct ratio with black bars, and some crazy heathens prefer to stretch the games over their whole television.
The pronunciation of display sounds like it has 2 S's. Some people want the screen filled, I just want the game to look correct - with the black borders.
Same. It's not too much work to set stuff up right. You do it once and it's done. Especially when you go into the options anyway to make the game look shiny and adjust stuff like audio levels or mouse speed.
Some games that supported VESA extensions let you choose 320x240, a true 4:3 aspect ratio, among many other non standard resolutions. For exotic resolutions you cant go wrong with 640x240 VGA or 640x200 in EGA mode.
Modern display devices from NVIDIA(Colorfull Geforce GTX 295 PCIe) and ATI/AMD(Sapphire Radeon 7950 PCIe) comes with a VBE 3 Bios and a modetable with some modenumbers for a widescreen resolution wirh 16:10 (up to 1920x1200) and 16:9 (up to full HD 1920x1080) aspect ratio. Starting with my Geforce 4(AGP; VBE 3) i used some of the refrehrate controlled videomodes up to 160 hz refreshrate (for CRT analog monitor with 96khz capacity) in combination with hardware triple buffering for a flicker free movement on the graphic screen. Most of the older DOS games use modenumbers from an outdated VBE1.x bios for that the VESA consortium will no longer be mandatory to support these old mode numbers. Since VBE 2 we have to use the modetable from the VBE-Bios of the display device. Usefull public/costfree documents from vesa.org (need register/login): *vbe3.pfd* *EEDIDguideV1.pdf*
Me before fully reading the info beneath the video: Holy crap, is that some sort of Lemmings music remix!? Me after fully reading the info beneath the video: Yes! I am a genius!
I can't find the logic behind the thinking that videogame programmers thought about a video aspect ratio that was not yet considered to be used at the consumer level. Rockstar did it with GTA 3 but it was for the PS2, many years later after Doom's release. This feels like arguing whether a Black and White TV Show was shot considering color TVs... when color TVs were during development and much before even considering its public release.
@Evi1M4chine after re-playing some Snes games through emulation, I was able to corroborate that Alien 3, in fact, looks better without any form of picture stretching. A few other games also deform when stretched to 4:3 aspect ratio. So, could it be because of lazy programming or because they were looking into the future? Also, Goebbels was, thinking into the future, he is literally the father of modern propaganda by setting the basis for what will be later known as "Marketing". Those color recordings you mentioned were shot with the idea of being projected in cinemas, which they did, so much so, in fact, that using cinemas for propaganda was key for Goebbels' team. Yes, they were made preferably for the cinemas and used, preferably in cinemas.
lazy programming almost certainly. Worth remembering a few of the underlying technical aspects of SNES game development (also applies to other consoles and home computers) On snes The screen resolution is 256x224, and the pixel aspect ratio is 7:6 The obvious thing then, would be to draw your graphics with a 7:6 ratio taken into account. That's fine if your graphics are one large image, or can be arbitrary dimensions... But on a SNES? Your background is a tilemap - a collection of smaller pieces composing a larger image. These tiles are 8x8 or 16x16 - it follows that if the pixel aspect isn't square, neither are the tiles. Since re-using the tiles is a major factor in keeping storage requirements sane, you can't just make arbitrary numbers of tiles either. Fine and all, but now imagine you want to draw a square pattern in an 8x8 tile. If you draw some pattern that is say 7x8 pixels, then there will be gaps in your tiles. If you draw something that would need to be 10x8 pixels to be 'square', now you need multiple tiles to draw that pattern reliably. Either way you end up needing way more tiles, that all line up in groups rather than individual tiles. It's wasteful of memory, but you can save tons of memory just by 'giving up' on your patterns being 'perfect'... So it's no huge surprise given the technical limitations that frequently devs would choose not to compensate for the weird pixel aspect ratio. As doing so would create tile alignment issues. Sprites, since they are individually movable objects, can be adjusted more easily, though you'd lose some resolution in doing so I suppose. (but a 14x16 sprite that is a 16x16 sprite to the hardware with extra transparency is not such a big deal as the background alignment problems) The SNES of course can compensate arbitrarily when mode 7 is in use - simply stretch or squash the image differently in each axis. But you generally can't use mode 7 for an entire game. (if you could though, you could even make aspect ratio adjustment an option in the game's menus...)
@@NeonluxDJWorks Most SNES games that look weird in 4:3 do so because they're ports from platforms with other pixel aspect ratios. Alien 3, however, isn't -- it's completely unique from the other Alien 3 versions. It could however still be that at one point it was meant for another platform, or that the art started being created before it was decided to use it in the SNES version.
I remember mode-X, the 320x240 VGA mode, even though it was 60Hz instead of 70, and the flicker was more a problem. I'm also nearly sure it was possible to go 320x240 square pixel aspect, while keeping the linear mode 13h access (making the extra lines unaccessable, or perhaps by interrupt). As for Doom being designed for widescreen, perhaps it's linked to that pic of Carmack coding on his 16:9 (or 16:10?) CRT, but that was for Quake.
Yeah the pixel scaling trade off is one of many reasons why I use a CRT as my main display now. Using a Gateway VX700 with a Trinitron tube. Well not officially a Trinitron since they didn't license the name, but that's what it basically is and stuff looks great on it. Granted I don't really use my main PC for MS-DOS games though. I have Compaq Presario 4112 with 120Mhz Pentium processor. It's complete with original monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the main PC itself. Had original hard drive (which still works!) in it too and even the warranty sticker hadn't been disturbed on it. Found the thing on a local Facebook sales group for only $25. Glad I got it because it turned out to be a great machine for old games like this. I do my MS-DOS gaming on that now. DosBox and that other MS-DOS emulator can't compete with the real thing. :D I use my main PC's CRT as the monitor for my Nintendo Switch too. Have a HDMI adapter and a 2 port VGA switch I use in tandom with. Stuff looks great on it. Only OLED stuff can compete with the kind of contrast I can get on it. But gaming on OLED still sounds dangerous to do since they still can have burn in problems. :P I suppose CRTs have burn in issues too and that's why screensavers were a thing. But you'd have to put an image on the screen for hundreds or more hours before it becomes a problem. :P I've heard it only takes less then an hour on a OLED for a static image or element on a TV to have burn in.
I wonder, why even bother dealing with all these scaling issues, when there still exist a lot of nice CRTs idle. It might be a challenge to grab some 24" Trinitron, but for retro gaming 17" is more than enough.
Yeah any CRT PC monitor in the 20+ inch range will be hard to find. It's generally 15 to 17 inchers that you'll still find out in the wild now a days. The Trinitron type PC monitors are also a bit rare now too. It's mostly shadow mask tubes you'll find. Not to say the shadowmask ones aren't good. I have a 16 inch Dell e771p that is a shadowmask and things look great on it too. In fact the shadow mask ones seem to age a bit better. Don't have as much convergence issues on that one as my Gateway VX700 does. I had to make a lot of adjustments to my VX700 when I got it. The Dell e711p, is nearly perfect with just a tad convergence fringing on the very edges near the corners which aren't even bad enough to warrant messing with. :P Although I can't say the same for "flat" tube style shadowmask CRTs that were made post 2000s. My Dell e771p still has some curve to it despite being made early 2000s. Probably one of the last "curved" tubes they made before they joined the flat tube fad of the 2000s....I don't really like the flat screen type tubes. They were trying to be too much like flat panels during this time and the flat tube design came at the cost of having geometry/convergance issues. Especially the Trinitrons. The flat tube era Trinitron TVs tended to have some geometry issues that were noticeable with playing side scrolling 2D games. I suppose it wasn't bad enough to hinder standard TV content. Never owned a PC monitor Trinitron that was flat. I don't know if that carried over to monitors too. But for TVs it was bad on some models so I've decided to avoid them. My 13 inch Sony Trinitron TV (a KV1393R made in 1980) still looks great and have no serous geometry problems on it. :D
I started to play emulated DOS on retroarch. The sharp bilinear filtering is really good and fits well for most games, even if it means not getting the razor sharp image most people prefer
7:26. As a short person, I completely understand the feeling. So, as it turns out I'm not short... it's just that people need to interact with me in 4:3. :)
Although we seem to like to use 16:10 for that aspect ratio name, mostly due to 16:9 being a modern common ratio, Both the 16 and 10 can divide by 2, so the actual aspect ratio should be named 8:5.
@@vadnegru I do get that, but it doesn't make it correct. also my phone is apparently 18.5:9, even though it's a 2:1 resolution, because the damn screen it curved and looks slightly narrower....
interesting topic. when I hooked up my Atari ST to a widescreen CRT TV, the TV rescaled the typical Atari ST image (with a border) to fill the whole screen and it looked very fine (although a bit blurred). I thought that it was the proper way to display 320x200 image on a screen anyway...
fantastic and interesting video! :) I am using 4:3 17" LCD monitor and noticed that in the photoshop when I make a square the high and with are not equal in real life, when I take a ruler and measured them :D
One interesting problem is that 240p on a CRT TV for consoles with 240/224 scanlines doesn't match PC/DOS's 200 active scanlines, so the vertical is too small. So when you shrink the horizontal so you get 4:3, but all four sizes have black areas. Old CRT computer monitors were always adjusted so that 320x200 resolution was full screen at 4:3, the physical AR of the monitor. So old CRT computer monitors worked/displayed slightly differently than old CRT TVs, which didn't have decent adjustment mechanisms.
Good arguments for both sides, but I'm pretty much indifferent to aspect ratio differences in these old games. But now I'm bothered about the pronunciation of "display". XD
As someone who's spent far too much time fiddling with DOS game aspect ratios, I appreciated this video immensely.
There are _so_ many variables to consider on a per-game basis, so I'm constantly tweaking captured footage to address this stuff!
I wonder, if you can scale screenshots by first increasing the height and width 10-fold and then changing the aspect ratio, is there a way (script or emulator) to do it in real time to prevent bad scaling while playing?
Hey LGR! You've got great taste!
Clint, you're the reason why I like this stuff. I applaud you for that.
As someone who's spent far too much time buying and playing old PC games I missed out on in my youth, I appreciate LGR videos immensely.
I have a feeling I'm going to be watching a lot more Displaced Gamer videos too!
@@LEXXIUS If a 1600×1200 window is used, it would use most horizontal resolution of Full HD, and 1600/320 is exactly 5 and 1200/200 is exactly 6, so there should be no scaling issues, am I right?
this reminds me of my dad's "I paid for the whole TV and I'm going to USE the whole TV!" which results in him stretching EVERYTHING to fit no matter what the original ratio was.
...Maybe it's just as well that ultrawide screens aren't seeing widespread adoption outside of computer monitors.
As allergic as I am to improperly scaled video, that is an awesome and incredibly dad-like statement.
Ultimate badass dude.
@@DanielSaner definitely
I see we had the same dad. My response always was "well then call the cable company and get the HD tuner box!" But he never did. Had to put up with stretched 480i on our 1080p TV for *years.*
This explains why so many characters in old DOS games seemed strangely wide and squat.
Yeah just like me
Naw, they just thicc like that.
@@Mario583a I like em' THIIICC
@tutacat SNES and Genesis ports from one to the other have this issue, though less noticeable.
One should also consider that this may sometimes be an artistic choice, because many developers used odd proportions to make their characters more recognizable with limited pixel definition.
One thing I remember from old DOS days - Car & Driver game had special test screen which would display a circle, you had to adjust your monitor image stretch dials so that the height and width of the cirlce were equal, at this point you would know that the aspect ratio of displayed image was as intended by the game programmers.
Also I always use aspect=true in DOSBox while playing 320x200 games ;)
I really appreciate the purist (or 'historical accuracy') mindset that drives your writing and research.
I agree here, there is no such thing as PC early-mid 90s games made for 16:10 or 16:9 monitors, no one had them back then. Why the hell devs would even make games for monitors that didn't even exist on the mainstream consumer market? Simple answer, they weren't making games for wide screen monitors it was all 4:3.
Just to be pedantic, so people don't make the mistake of thinking 16:10 didn't exist in in the late 80s early 90s...
John Carmack had a 16:10 CRT which ran at 1920x1200. VESA standards outlined plenty of 16:10 resolutions as well.
For example, 1600x1200 is UXGA, while 1920x1200 is WUXGA.
In 1990 the XGA standard was created, which was 1024x768. Along with XGA you had WXGA, which was defined as 1152x768.
@@MisakaMikotoDesu agreed, but it wasn't mainstream. No one I knew used a widescreen CRT
Wasn't that a next station thing that he used to program DOOM on? That PC from steve jobs that never really caught on? UNIX/Amiga/industrial world had huge resolutions long before 1080p was a thing. It came down to cost. Most people would not want to buy a $5000 to $10000 pc for their home if there where not many games for them. Yes rogue etc is a kick ass game. The only reason why people would have the next (or similar systems) was for gfx or programming. Most other use cases didn't need the screen size at home and most games where played at home.
@@skilletpan5674 Again, the point in being pedantic is so people know there were 16:10 monitors, even if they were extremely uncommon.
Exactly!
I can't stand incorrect aspect ratios. Same goes for getting the correct refresh rate on DOS games. I setup my old PIII with a CRT recently for this reason.
Awesome. I have the last new CRT I purchased hooked up to my retro rig right now. What games are you firing up on your PIII?
@@DisplacedGamers Oh, good for you! Do you remember what frequency DOS runs at, isn't it something strange like 70hz? As for games:all the star trek adventure games (DS9 Harbinger is underrated), Duke3D, Blood, Star Wars Sims. For Win98 Omikron Nomad Soul (with David Bowie by the Fahrenheit and heavy rain studio), Outcast which is a cool open world voxel based game, Hardwar an elite type game on a planet, and system shock 2! Any games you'd recommend? Great channel!
@@lrochfort lowres is usually fixed to 70 Hz, higher resolution (640x480) usually 60 Hz. games that use VESA modes (up to 1600x1200) default to 60 Hz, but depending on your graphics card it may be possible to use tools that force higher refresh rates, e.g. 85 Hz or even 100 Hz if your monitor can support that.
@@brumm3653 My brother played Blood and Hexen in 640x400 120 Hz on his CRT ;-)
@@ladislavzima8382 Hexen used a modified Doom engine, which originally was capped to 24fps tops... Although there are source ports that removed this cap. Some source ports that run in DOS include Boom, dosdoom and Zdoom. Although I'm not sure, but of these three, Zdoom might be the only one to support Hexen.
Your Lure of the Temptress point, about it being made on a PAL Amiga makes perfect sense about the ignored pixels, converting PAL games to NTSC alters the fact that, in Europe, 99% of all PAL games were letterboxed by at least 28 pixels top and bottom. Its something American retro gamers don't really take into account as when played in NTSC the games fill the screen.
It was the same on later consoles as well, even up to Final Fantasy X on PS2 looking almost like VHS widescreen movies did.
Yeah, I just realised how much me being in a PAL region has distorted my expectations of what SNES games look like.
Also, the realisation just struck me that unless the developer enabled 240 line mode for the PAL release...
All of us PAL gamers from that era have more or less been playing games in 16:10 aspect.
The pixel aspect of a PAL snes is 25:18
Work that out for a screen resolution of 256x224 and you get very, very close to 16:10
(to be exact 16:10 would be 256x222 given how a PAL snes and NES scale things.)
So... Yeah. 4:3 wasn't the norm in Europe it turns out.
Not in a historical sense anyway.
Also neither PAL nor NTSC use square pixels, one uses "wide" pixels while the other runs "narrow" pixels, but neither are 4:3
The Chocolate Doom project had a big argument over whether to apply aspect ratio correction to screenshots a few years ago, and the solution was to upscale 320x200 shots to 1600x1200, basically non destructively giving each original pixel its own 5:6 aspect ratio
so basically the pixels back in the day of 320x200 where not really square?
Yep. CRTs just drew horizontal lines on the screen and didn't really care whether you gave them 160x200 or 3200x200. In this case, it would naturally just draw each pixel for 1/320 of each line.
Dawid Itrych Hmmm I always thought CRTs drew 320x200 actually as 640x400 with two lines (and columns) per pixel, and that’s why the pixels looked “pixelated” (squares with hard edges). I think making the CRT scan at 200 lines would be below the minimum refresh rate?
@Inareth Ah, yes. Technology Connections!
Upscale to 1600x1200, that's what I would do! Each original pixel made up of 5x6 square pixels.
Jazz Jackrabbit is an interesting case - it doesn't actually use the 320x200 mode, rather a hacked 320x240 with only 199 lines used in order to gain a 60Hz refresh rate. On a CRT, this does appear as widescreen when you have sizing set properly for 640x480 video modes.
It definitely is an interesting case! The footage I used at the end isn't stretched to widescreen, it is zoomed into that widescreen "window" that appears in the top of the 4:3 display. The menus of the game still use a standard 4:3, 320x200 @ 70Hz (if I recall correctly).
I couldn't help but include Jazz Jackrabbit in the outro footage just because... it's Jazz Jackrabbit. The game deserves a video of its own!
It always bothered me to see people watching analog 4:3 broadcasts in widescreen TVs. Can't you see everything is squished? They didn't care.
Some 3D games had settings to use a widescreen ratio in their calculations, so you could use your analog widescreen monitor with the same resolution as before, but usually the UI would suffer stretching. Once we switched to accelerated 3D with large resolutions and square pixels, the issue became moot.
Great video!
UA-cam automatically resizes most of those square videos for no apparent reason. It's all so tiresome.
my first lcd tv had a screen mode that streched things only as they were farther from the center. as a result, it fit a 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen pretty well, with the only major artifact being that anything you watched in it looked like you were playing a game with the fov slider a bit too high (a bit of fish-eyeing going on). but that was only very noticeable in panning shots. everywhere else it was a pretty damn good compromise. certainly better than just stretching the whole image. i wonder why no tv after did that.
Some 4:3 content is even cropped to fit 16:9 now! Not only are they scaling SD content to fill an HD display vertically, but they're FURTHER scaling it and CROPPING it to fit horizontally. It's pan&scan all over again, for a new generation!
@@GraveUypo Egh, those were possibly even worse! While it would make stuff in the center of the screen look right, things at the edges would appear even *more* stretched! And it would cause straight lines to appear as curved, mess with the speed of movement and wreak all kinds of havoc on the image...
The best thing is that the analog signals can carry a flag for aspect ratio. But they still pillarbox the old 4:3 image into a 16:9 and send that. Watch this on a 4:3 screen and you get additional letterboxing, resulting in a 4:3 video on a 4:3 screen that has massive borders around all sides.
On screen display is fancy, but back in the days I always preferred physical wheels and buttons, because tweaking was sooo much faster with it.
I so hate the touch buttons on my modern screen. Stuff like that can't replace a good physical interface that you can feel.
Agreed! I have one model of Canon camera (and not a DSLR) that places "exposure compensation" -- perhaps the single most-accessed setting in a casual context -- on a dedicated physical dial with no alternative (onscreen menu) access. Part of the appeal of having dedicated physical controls is simply the convenience of immediate access (compared to time spent navigating a menu to find the same control).
Regret getting rid of a perfectly good flat screen SyncMaster when I went to LCD's. No CRT left to retro game on.
Great video! I also prefer 16:10!
Lure of the Temptress from GOG, using ScummVM, does have a graphical interface for you to adjust the options (as should any game using ScummVM from GOG). They just launch directly into the game for a more seamless experience. Press Ctrl-F5 and select "Return to Launcher" to get to the configuration screen. From there you can Edit Game and turn off the aspect ratio correction to correct the aspect ratio on Lure of the Temptress.
Finally, Hocus Pocus gets some credit! I honestly didn't think people remembered it existed. Subscribed!
**high five** I loved that game, too! It was simple, but easy (great for small children) and damn beautiful. And the music was pretty wild, too.
I also put a good amount of time into Hocus Pocus 👍
Your video doesn't go into *why* they used an odd aspect with non-square pixels, and some people may wonder, so I'll comment it for the curious:
First of all, the two aspects mentioned here are 320x200 and (doubled) 640x400. If you add horizontal lines to those to create a 4:3 aspect, you'd get 320x240 and 640x480. (Probably familiar to most people, since we use those now.)
So, what's on the screen is stored in video memory, physical memory chips on the video card. Memory is made up of bytes. 1 byte = 8 bits, and 1024 bytes = 1 kb. Memory chips tend to be packaged in a nice even number of kb that is a power of two: 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. And as to the actual drawing of the screen, the way pixels corresponds to bits and bytes depends upon the color depth: 256 colors is 8 bit (1 byte) per pixel, 16 colors is 4 bit (1/2 byte) per pixel, 4 colors is 2 bit (1/4 byte), etc.
So if you do the math for how many bytes you need for a screenful of pixels: 320x200 @ 256 colors is (320 x 240) / 1 = 64,000 bytes. 640x400 @ 16 colors is (640 x 400) / 2 = 128,000 bytes. Well 64k = 65,536 bytes and 128k = 131,072 bytes, so we can use standard-size memory chips and have sufficient memory without a bunch left unused- there are just enough bytes.
But now, do the same calculations using 4:3 aspect ratios: (320 x 240) / 1 = 76,800 and (640 x 480) / 2 = 153,600. Uh oh- those numbers are slightly *over* the size of standard chips. If we wanted 320x240 @ 256, we'd need 75k- that's a 64k chip plus a 16k chip, with a whopping 5k left unused, or a larger number of smaller chips to save on unused memory (like nineteen 4k chips). So to keep things simple, they picked resolutions that were an even number below what their memory chips demanded, and stretched the pixels to fill a standard screen.
But if you get to video cards with larger amounts of memory, giving multiple pages for lower resolutions, this granularity issue becomes moot. CGA cards could be either 320x200 @ 4 or 640x200 monochrome because they had a measly 16k of memory on them; an SVGA card from the mid-90s may have had a megabyte or more. So... square pixels.
Wrong aspect ratios are driving me crazy!! By the way: in 2019 you still can't correct it in youtube :/ Thank you for this video :)
That's why I only watch porn sites whose players have aspect ratio correction! 🤟😎
Why?
My Dos Lets plays have all the correct Aspect Ratio :-P when you dont look at the first ones :x
If you're on Chrome, there is an addon called "UA-cam Aspect Ratio Control" for exactly that.
You can corret the ratio, but also zoom in and out. So watch widescreen videos that are uploaded letterboxed in 4:3 without letterboxing. (Or pillowboxed 4:3 videos in 4:3)
@@HappyBeezerStudios thank you!
The reason is very simple. 320x200 = 64000. 65536, a 16 bit integer, could store that. Anything larger would require more complicated paging routines to draw the image. 320x256 blows out the size of an unsigned 16 bit integer. I used to do a lot of this in x86 asm, and once paging was introduced, everything slowed down. (640x480x8bit). mov esdi, 0xa000; mov di, 400; lodsb 15; (Been a while) That should set row 2 column 80 to color 15. They did it for speed, and the speed worked. There were lots of great games back then.
I love the 16:10 format.
Great to have tall screen real estate on a PC.
Still use the Samsung 2232BW screen.
PC FPS games is a joy. You can spot players up top or down low much better, without moving the mouse.
Nice DOS video! =)
It's even weirder in 640x350 EGA high-res mode. Non-square pixels were not an artistic choice in games, for many years that was the only kind of pixel available on a PC, and so some artists made their game art look correct in non-square pixels, while others simply let it be whatever it is, even if it looks wrong. So when correcting aspect ratio, not everything really looks best, it's on per-case basis like LGR said.
You can, however, get perfect 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 on a 1600x1200 LCD panel, though those are generally larger than any CRT that was meant to use 320x200 with. Likewise, 1920x1200 LCD panel is suitable for 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 with black bars on the sides.
Or what about consoles that ran only on one field of the interlaced image. Like the SNES high res mode of 512x224
Also worth noting that games from the transition period in history where aspect ratios were changing, or which by chance were intended for something other than 4:3 often had a 'calibration' mode, or at least something in their settings which made it possible to adjust the way the image was drawn to fit different aspect ratios.
Many late era n64 games do this (helped out by the fact that the n64 can do hardware image scaling as a post-processing step)
An extreme example would be Perfect Dark, which gives you manual width and height adjustment, screen positioning, 4:3 and 16:9 video image output options (eg, settings to output the image correctly at those aspect ratios if your display was that ratio), and, independently of this, standard (4:3), widescreen (16:9), and cinematic (2.15:1) image output modes that crop the image using letterboxing, taking into account what your screen aspect ratio settings are. (eg 16:9 if you set your screen mode to 4:3 will have letterboxing, while 4:3 on 16:9 will have pillarboxing. But if you get it wrong and set your TV output to 4:3 when you actually have a 16:9 television, then unless your television is applying pillarboxing, you'll get a stretched image)
Incidentally if you make homebrew for old systems and want to use a non-standard aspect ratio (like say, 16:9 on a PAL snes, which works out to roughly 256x200 due to the pixel aspect ratio) it's a good idea to include something in the main menu that not only makes note of the fact that your game isn't intended for 4:3 aspect as you would expect for that era, but also displays a calibration image that can let people visually identify whether they've got all their equipment set up as intended - typically by using a series of squares and circles to visually show stuff is being drawn as intended.)
Thanks for making this. I have been trying to re-create the look of 320x200 art as it would be seen on early 90's VGA monitors and the brief moments when you showed CRT footage was surprisingly helpful. Perceived gamma and the faint scanlines that are still visible are an important part of how I remember these graphics, but its just so hard to find good examples of how this looked on the internet with period-appropriate hardware. Everyone seems to have a different idea about this stuff in hindsight and perhaps from using meme filters/shaders for decades now also. I love the deep dives into niche topics on this channel so much- keep up the great work!
Thank you so much! I hope to do more videos containing CRT footage in the future...
It is so fun programming in 13h mode. From time to time I still fire up Turbo C++ in DOSBox just to remember the good old times. There's a hidden 320x240 mode called mode X, but I never tried it.
you could also double the vertical resolution in mode x. 320x400. Very hard to create art for it but it did work very well 3d games like quake
@@PiesliceProductions yeah Quake was one game that supported all kind of weird resolutions.
From 320x200, 320x240, 320x256, 320x288....up to 320x480 - and then all the same for 640x200 and up. I think (not 100% sure) that some configuration files could be edited, so you could have more or less the resolution you wanted.
I prefer 320x200 mode Y, which is an unchained mode 13h that has all the video pages and scrolling of mode X but without the 60hz flicker.
God your editing is getting so much better. Timing, scripting, pacing...
You deserve to blow up. Easily one of the highest quality tech channels on the platform. Your hard work does not go unappreciated!!!!
Aspect ratio bothers me. I hated it when I watched my family watch a 480p image stretched on their HD tv. I'll deal with the artifacts
White people problems
@@FeelingShred for sure. But it still bugs me.
@@FeelingShred Are you implying anyone who isn't white can't afford a widescreen TV? 😂
@Dave Jones He's saying that white people are the only ones who will notice or care about it. Nonwhites are just happy to exist.
Even worse, some TV's have a "Panoramic" stretch mode, so the center of the screen is a bit thinner, and the left & right are too wide. My grandma on her TV somehow always has it on, even after me fixing it, and it bugs me a lot. TV motion smoothing is also a feature I hate.
Interestingly a lot of gaming magazines in the nineties published their screenshots without any aspect correction, so I've instantly knew that the game was in 320x200 resolution and I could also deduce if a game had 640x480. Even when the game or demoscene stuff ran in those exotic x-mode resoulutions.
One interesting tidbit: our older monochrome PC monitors all displayed 320x200 as 4:3, but they've displayed 640x400 as a widescreen resolution. When we've upgraded to better, high-refresh rate CRTs, the widescreen effect ceased to be on those modes, too.
And 1280x1024 was also displayed in 4:3, mostly. I remember an icon of a particular Windows 9x application had balls/circles squashed in the opposite direction than with 320x200. That's why I preferred 1280x960 on that new monitor.
Even worse were the screenshots of the 1990s DOS text mode programs that redefined the character set to create a more "GUI-like" appearance. Few magazines at the time ever reproduced this properly -- most selected the option in the program's configuration to revert to standard text mode characters, and some ignored the redefined characters and printed them as standard characters, causing their DOS text mode screenshots to be filled with garbage characters!
@@vwestlife Oh yeah, I remember my first exposure to Linux was a library book (that came with a copy of the Linux distro in question, because why not) that had clearly recreated all of the text mode screens in a nonstandard font because I guess there was no way to produce fully-digital screenshots of actual text mode. I remember being confused and disappointed when those screens just used regular CGA text mode instead of the cool font that was in the book. Ironically, now we're living in the future and Linux _does_ use a custom higher resolution mode for its internal "text mode" for the benefit of UEFI PCs that no longer support classic BIOS graphics modes natively, and while I no longer have access to that book, Iswear the font they use looks almost exactly like my memories.
Thank you for this. I started doing computer art in the 80s when there where the “graphics contests” that required you to submit your [usually BASIC] code that generated the graphics. When I started doing raytracing in the 90s and got my first FTP Warez copy of photoshop, I used to get into arguments with people on IRC about pixels being taller than they are wide but I wasn’t sure of the ratio, and they thought I was crazy. I knew I wasn’t. I had notebooks with the best quarter-circle patterns for every radius that I painstakingly figured out on my own.
I have graphics programming books from the early and mid 90's and they
ALL explicitly mention pixel aspect as an issue when writing any given graphics routine. (plus the performance cost of doing the aspect correction vs ignoring it. - adjustment for correct aspect ratio is far from free. And especially when you don't have hardware multiply/divide, it can be non-trivial.)
Great video. Thanks for taking the time to do lots of comparisons.
"Personally, I'm a 16:10 guy"
the algorithm has blessed us, instant sub. also, as a fellow 16x10 guy "nobody knows, the trouble..." - as monitor tech advances we get less and less love. I feel like my HP Z24i and Z24x G2 might be as good as it can get without breaking the bank. is 120 Hz and native 10 bit output from a VA or IPS panel too much to ask for at 16:10?
Unfortunate. Personally I don't use 16:10 but used to have one such monitor for a while, I can see how the additional screen space would be useful for productivity tasks.
@@Senzorei it's also really great for 4:3 (or even 8:7) stuff because the pillar boxes end up being smaller than they are on 16:9
@@sheik124 Eh, it doesn't bother me at all compared to when I first tried it. It's just essentially trading screen size for correct aspect ratio (or no LCD upscaling blur if you choose to not scale at all)
@Evi1M4chine lol, tryna focus on things I can realistically have on my desk
You're not alone. We pay through the nose for 1200p and yet we still don't get to see a new equivalent for higher res.
This is a great reason to bust out a CRT if you have one. On one of my modern computer setups, I actually still use a Sony Trinitron through an adapter as my daily driver. After putting DOSBox into fullscreen without any scaling, it can be indistinguishable from an actual old PC hooked up to the same monitor.
CRTs still have superior image quality, IMO. I've been waiting for over a decade for technology that takes LCD/OLED and adds in the benefits CRT had... but it hasn't happened yet.
@@jovetj In 2005 I needed a new monitor and I contemplated waiting for SED or just getting an LCD. Glad I didn't wait.
*@TaffingAround*
Yep, it's a shame.
Good video. There are a few instances of games that I've run into that do seem to be designed with square pixels in mind; whether that was accidental or intentional I'm not sure. Some examples would be Dreamweb and Overkill. Both of those are clearly distorted/stretched vertically when viewed in 4:3, but are correct in 16:10 - circles, squares, faces... they're clearly wrong in 4:3. Such cases are definitely few and far between though.
Both were Amiga games originally I believe, a system that had its own aspect ratio issues between regions.
The good thing is, on a CRT we can easily correct that.
I have to admit that this issue never crossed my mind. Makes perfect sense and I'm sure I will notice now if I play a classic game without the proper 4:3 aspect ratio. Great video as always, I have learned a lot about video in your channel, your videos are very well thought and produced, kudos.
Again, thank you for educating a new generation on this. This is one of my pet peeves. DOS gameplay footage being presented as if it was widescreen. URGH.
3:28 - guys, he said it right!
UA-cam sent me down a Rabbit Hole of your vids. Love the content. I can get over all the "diss-plays" lol
LCD ( least common denominator) has left the chat
10:24 Watch as it stretches:
The backdrop becomes a circle, but the O's in the text become improperly stretched. 🤔
That is something I wouldn’t have noticed those Os do look weird
mmm... I don't think they look stretched.
The letter O isn't always a perfect circle anyway.
The text was likely added after scaling.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Quite literally zero DOS programs were designed for widescreen of any kind. Almost all monitors (and video adapters) available were 4:3 or very close to it. Widescreen simply did not exist.
I'm pretty sure 320x200 stems from ye olde CGA monitors, which had 200 vertical lines on screen at any time. CGA had a 320x200 mode as well as a 640x200 hi res mode. EGA also supported this, and was backwards compatible (in low resolution modes) with CGA monitors. VGA almost certainly held this over to help keep backwards compatibility with CGA and EGA, as well as make the memory layout simpler.
Thanks, you helped me understand something I didn't "get" for a long time. I put your tips to use when recording and upscaling Stunt Island films in 320x200 mode.
One might ask (and something you didn't cover) is _why_ they chose that strange 320x200 resolution for mode 13h, which has non-square vertically-elongated pixels, rather than the much nicer 320x240 (which would have square pixels).
The reason is that, at 256 colors per pixel, 320*240 = 76800 takes 75 kilobytes, while 320*200 = 64000 takes 62.5 kilobytes, which fits within a 64-kilobyte segment, and thus can be entirely addressed in 16-bit mode without the need to change segments.
(The maximum 320xN resolution that would fit within 64 kilobytes would be 320x204, which takes 65280 bytes, ie. just a tad bit less than 64 kilobytes, ie. 65536 bytes. I don't know, however, why they decided to go with 200 lines instead of 204. I wonder if it's because 320/200 is such a nice round number, ie. exactly 1.6, while 320/204 has infinite recurring decimals. Maybe they thought that a resolution aspect ratio of 1.6 is better than one of 1.568627450980292...)
They chose 320x200 because it was the standard multicolor resolution compatible with both CGA and EGA, which was already used by the vast majority of all games. If they wanted the maximum number of 8 bit pixels addressable with a 16 bit uint, they would have gone for 256x256, but they didnt. 320x200 made it easier to make games backwards compatible with the older cards, AND the MCGA that came out the same year as VGA.
This is why I installed an extension that let's me change the UA-cam aspect ratio. Someone as big as Chuggaaconroy was using the wrong SNES ratio, and it bugged me.
Oh wow. You definitely took steps to make sure it met your needs. I've also seen some videos that appear to have the wrong AR on UA-cam - not even a let's play or an edited video but straight footage from the opening of an old TV show, for example. The uploader probably had the wrong flat set or it wasn't processed correctly.
Also got one that allows for aspect ratio and zoom. Mostly for videos that got uploaded with bars.
QBASIC (MS-DOS) has a CIRCLE-command, that cares for the 4:3 ratio even in the 320x200 screen mode. (or did I try it on a 640x200 screen?) So I got a perfect circle on this non-squared pixel mode.
I'll never forget the day they made CRT's with an "auto" option which would attempt to perfectly center your image by finding, using and cropping the black edges around the displaying of your signal.
9:40 thanks for the "tip", I finally got DOSBox to show my old DOS games properly. This was driving me nuts!
A huge thanks for this video.
I've seen too many people watch 4:3 Cable TV on their widescreen TV sets without noticing, leading me to believe that most people simply don't notice until it's pointed out to them. Keep up the good work :)
Even more strangely, a lot of people can't seem to notice even *after* it's pointed out.
And this is why I use my Thinkpad T60 for retro gaming. It's the last mainstream laptop with 4:3 display, that also had an IPS panel option. In fact that laptop is my main daily driver too. And that screen is quite frankly spectacular, even in today's standards.
yes, it matters to me, the wrong aspect ratio just looks... wrong!.
it's supposed to be 4:3. I didn't think there could be a debate about this.
I love all these meticulous analysis of pixels, aspect ratios, and other artifacts of our technological past that are not talked about as much nowadays.
This has been quite interesting, I never thought about how pixels must be stretched.
I'm Wolfenstein 3D modder and I was (or still am?) struggling with the ratio. Information you provided is priceless. Thank you.
Got a chuckle when you used the Wing Commander briefing with subtitle narration lol..
idk why this is getting recommended to me out of nowhere but this is the perfect kind of nerd shit to listen to lol. keep it up
Nerds don't shit.
I get the feeling that those that argue for 320x200 being 16:10 never actually used the hardware in its original setting. What about 640x200? 32:10 CGA?? SUPER-WIDESCREEN IN 1981??
The same can be said about DVDs. The standard NTSC DVD resolution is 720x480, but is clearly not a 3:2 aspect ratio, as it was designed to fill a 4:3 display. (or even squeezed to fit 16:9 on anamorphic DVDs. Wait a sec, have any of these people ever watched an anamorphic DVD on their modern display?)
16:9 enhanced/anamorphic DVDs are a GREAT topic. 640x200 CGA is also a great example. The Atari 2600's 160x192 is also rather interesting when viewed using square pixels.
I always try to match the creator's intended aspect ratio. I always cringe when I see someone using 4:3 content stretched over their modern widescreen display. It looks horrible. When I comment it the answer is usually along the line "I paid the whole screen, I use the whole screen". Okay, whatever, ruined image as long as it fills the screen I guess for most people.
this is why we should normalize border art
"Weel, if the picture is too small when it's displayed right; you needed to by a bigger screen."
You guys are too pedantic. Me for example feel annoyed by black bars
4:3 content on a 16:9 screen means either stretching, cutting of the top and bottom, or having black bars.
Stretching is never a good option, and the other two depends on the content. Some are fine being cut off, others have too much information in the top and bottom for that and are better viewed pillowboxed.
Oh and for games it's very easy to setup a custom resolution with the screens native vertical resolution and in 4:3 ratio. Stufff like 960x720 (for 120x720 screens) 1440x1080 (for 1920x1080 screens), 1920x1440 (for 2560x1440 screens), etc
6:45 Super-cool to be able to make reference to actual referents when talking about something that is otherwise completely digital.
Ohhh this is the delightfully nerdy stuff I've been looking for. Came from the 480 vid and now this. Subscribed!
I used to have a 16:10ish CRT
The amount of time I spent in the OSD...
Good old Sony GDM-FW600 for 2304x1440 with 80 Hz and 1920x1200 with 85 Hz?
Ahh! This explains why dos games that look better in 4:3 often have screenshots in their manuals and strategy guides that are 16:10!
Good video.
This was awesome! As a kid in the 90's I had no clue about the aspect ratio in my DOS games. It was fun to see what was going on. Nowadays I just use DOSBox to play them. The one I go back to the most is a weird game called Spacewrecked.
I've been going through all your videos recently; great work man. Also I love the screenshot at 8:33
It was interesting to learn about, as a person who did (almost) not touch CRT monitors!
Thanks for the video!
god that tyrian remix at the end hit me hard. tyrian is one of my favorite dos games.
Something else to point out is the reason so many platforms went with such an odd resolution: While 320×240 _would_ make more sense in a lot of ways-and Sega's consoles managed it somehow-it also goes just over the magic number of 65,536, a power of 2. Which means the pixel count multiplied by the color depth would also be just over a power of 2, as would the number of character tiles, or any other method of dividing the screen up into smaller powers of 2 for performance reasons. So you'd need to bump up to the next highest power of two to store any screen information, and then have to find some use for all the space left over so as not to waste it-and processing it would probably be a pain too. It was easier to find some kind of compromise resolution that stays within the 65,536 limit instead.
Nintendo's solution kept both dimensions under the smaller magic number of 256, which probably improved performance when managing sprite positions (which is kind of a pain on the Commodore 64), as well as filling the entire screen. Actual computers probably went with reducing the line count because it allowed them to keep everything well inside the TV's overscan "safe zone" while also maximizing the number of columns, which is ideal for anything text-based. Hypothetically you could make a system that uses 288×216, giving you an overscan safe zone _and_ square pixels as well as the choice of either one extra offscreen column or row for smooth scrolling. And it divides evenly into thirds both ways, in case anyone needs that.
Weirdly enough, the PS1 Tomb Raider games look more "correct" when stretched to 16:9. Thoughts?
I haven't compared the different versions, but it was developed by Core -- a British developer. European and US TVs of the time would have a different vertical resoution, and European consoles would usually "squish" the image into a letterboxed format to fit this standard. It's possible Core designed it for a European TV and thus the image would appear a bit stretched on a US version.
Though like I said, I haven't compared the different versions (and haven't ever played a US one I don't think), so I have no idea if it actually applies here, but it's a theory at least.
@@todesziege PAL TVs seem to squish the image to an aspect ratio that's still taller than 16:9 or 16:10.
Great video! Really happy to have discovered your channel.
Welcome!
I'll have to check out your video on SNES which you referenced. Another curiosity from the time of CRT displays was Capcom's CPS1, 2 & 3 arcade hardware, they used a 386x240 resolution (an extra 64 pixels horizontally from the more common 320x240 at the time) which gave their arcade games a seldom seen & recognizable *super crisp* look.
Whenever they made console conversions they had to butcher the games to make them fit, with Magic Sword for SNES as a good example.
Hey, Holammer. Thanks for commenting. Did you see the Capcom aspect ratio video?
Shortly after I wrote that comment, it was very good. :D
This makes me realize the first C&C and RA run on 320x200 in DOS and 640x400 in Windows. Usually it would run 640x480 with added bars, ruining the aspect ratio. I just hope the upcoming remakes know the original games uses non-square pixels, but from what I've seen I'm afraid everything will look stretched.
Gotta say, using the physical models built for Doom in your argument was brilliant!
Thanks!
I never realized this! I think my brain compensates for the wrong aspect ratio or else I just never was bothered enough to really notice the strangeness. I love playing around with configs almost as much as playing the game though, so I'll definitely try out these options. Thanks!
This video is outdated. If you want to play properly with the best scaling you need to get dosbox-staging and use its "Pixel-perfect scaling mode".
I have major OCD when it comes to aspect ratios. If each DOS game had a single intended aspect ratio for all of its art (either 4:3 NTSC vs 4:3 PAL, for instance), I'd be content with picking the display mode that results in perfect squares and circles and calling it a day. No, the problem is when games have different aspect ratios for different assets. Doom is a perfect example: Sprites used for projectiles, powerups, and button and door textures look vertically stretched at 4:3 NTSC, as does level geometry. But character sprites and HUD elements look horizontally stretched at 4:3 PAL/16:10. So, I'm left with a Sophie's choice scenario where I have to choose the "most correct' aspect ratio.
This issue extends to consoles as well. SNES is notoriously all over the place, with some developers correctly making art for NTSC standard, others making sprites at 8:7 and not taking into account the horizontal stretch on consumer CRTs, and still others who mix and match aspect ratios within the same game, like Chrono Trigger. Master System games struggles with this mismatching as well (the Sonic 8-bit titles are particularly egregious here). I think the absolute worst I've seen is the classic Tomb Raider games on PS1. On an NTSC set, all the 2D sprites and FMVs appear aspect-correct; however all the 3D geometry, including Lara's model herself, is vertically stretched to a _ridiculous_ degree. If I play the game at 4:3, in-game Lara becomes Jack Skellington. If I play it at 16:10, FMV-Lara becomes Oogie Boogie. I can't win. It's maddening.
My dad had an old Compaq Portable III with an orange CGA 640x400 screen which was in true 16;10 ratio. I'm forever gutted that he sold it when he got a new laptop in 1993. I fkn loved the design of that machine.
My favorite DOS games: King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island. I play these games on my old computer with Windows 98 and DOS) Thank you for the video)
This is something I learned playing Rayman all those years ago. The game runs at 320*200 by default, but there's a graphic option to set the resolution to 320*240. On my 4:3 monitor this just added black bars to the top and bottom and squashed the image.
A few years later, I had some game-making software called The Games Factory that supported two resolutions: whatever your windows resolution was, or 320*200 (which I loved because it made the games look like "console games"). Creating games in the windows interface at 1024*768 then switching to 320*200 to play them made it very apparent that the pixels weren't square in the latter. My lovely square Mario blocks were suddenly rectangular. Even as a young teen I started making my "square" objects squat to compensate for the stretched resolution.
Is that the sound track from one must fall…?
Yes. yes it is.
Good call!
I almost can't believe I recognized that game. Talk about "Blast from de past"....
LOL Yes.OMF is actually the game that taught me I just don't enjoy fighting games!
It's funny that right after "Tyrian" theme begins at 11:47 the clip of "Legend of Kyrlandia" subtitle goes "Please help Brandon..." - Alexander Brandon being the composer of music in "Tyrian" :)
12:30 OMG, the video features Jazz Jackrabbit! Best PC jump'n run ever. Maybe not best looking one or funniest one but I just loved the smooth scrolling and its fast pace; it was like playing Sonic on a PC.
I feel like I gained forbidden technology rn, and am not sure on what to do regarding playing my DOS games now
I should be able to add a second thumbs up if I come back to this video years later and still love it
Answering the real questions. Great video, I'm of the same opinion - it's most likely 4:3! Was happy to find aspect=true i DOSbox.
Nice explanation. I suspect this explains why when emulating vertical arcade games they look skinnier than the expected 3:4 - they are probably incorrectly being shown as 10:16 and need a correction to their aspect ratio.
like all Tyrian fans I always appreciate it getting some screen and speaker time no matter if it's for half an hour or half a minute.
This is a big point in the RetroPie community where we're playing old 4:3 TV consoles on 16:9 widescreen TVs. Some people prefer their 8-bit and 16-bit console games in the correct ratio with black bars, and some crazy heathens prefer to stretch the games over their whole television.
The pronunciation of display sounds like it has 2 S's.
Some people want the screen filled, I just want the game to look correct - with the black borders.
Same. It's not too much work to set stuff up right. You do it once and it's done. Especially when you go into the options anyway to make the game look shiny and adjust stuff like audio levels or mouse speed.
Some games that supported VESA extensions let you choose 320x240, a true 4:3 aspect ratio, among many other non standard resolutions. For exotic resolutions you cant go wrong with 640x240 VGA or 640x200 in EGA mode.
Modern display devices from NVIDIA(Colorfull Geforce GTX 295 PCIe) and ATI/AMD(Sapphire Radeon 7950 PCIe) comes with a VBE 3 Bios and a modetable with some modenumbers for a widescreen resolution wirh 16:10 (up to 1920x1200) and 16:9 (up to full HD 1920x1080) aspect ratio. Starting with my Geforce 4(AGP; VBE 3) i used some of the refrehrate controlled videomodes up to 160 hz refreshrate (for CRT analog monitor with 96khz capacity) in combination with hardware triple buffering for a flicker free movement on the graphic screen.
Most of the older DOS games use modenumbers from an outdated VBE1.x bios for that the VESA consortium will no longer be mandatory to support these old mode numbers. Since VBE 2 we have to use the modetable from the VBE-Bios of the display device.
Usefull public/costfree documents from vesa.org (need register/login):
*vbe3.pfd*
*EEDIDguideV1.pdf*
Thank you so much for making this! It's even worse on Capcom arcade games.
1:36 Hocus! Yey!
I love that game! Its so cool and its music and vibes are amazing!
Me before fully reading the info beneath the video: Holy crap, is that some sort of Lemmings music remix!?
Me after fully reading the info beneath the video: Yes! I am a genius!
I can't find the logic behind the thinking that videogame programmers thought about a video aspect ratio that was not yet considered to be used at the consumer level. Rockstar did it with GTA 3 but it was for the PS2, many years later after Doom's release. This feels like arguing whether a Black and White TV Show was shot considering color TVs... when color TVs were during development and much before even considering its public release.
@Evi1M4chine after re-playing some Snes games through emulation, I was able to corroborate that Alien 3, in fact, looks better without any form of picture stretching. A few other games also deform when stretched to 4:3 aspect ratio.
So, could it be because of lazy programming or because they were looking into the future? Also, Goebbels was, thinking into the future, he is literally the father of modern propaganda by setting the basis for what will be later known as "Marketing". Those color recordings you mentioned were shot with the idea of being projected in cinemas, which they did, so much so, in fact, that using cinemas for propaganda was key for Goebbels' team.
Yes, they were made preferably for the cinemas and used, preferably in cinemas.
lazy programming almost certainly.
Worth remembering a few of the underlying technical aspects of SNES game development (also applies to other consoles and home computers)
On snes
The screen resolution is 256x224, and the pixel aspect ratio is 7:6
The obvious thing then, would be to draw your graphics with a 7:6 ratio taken into account.
That's fine if your graphics are one large image, or can be arbitrary dimensions...
But on a SNES?
Your background is a tilemap - a collection of smaller pieces composing a larger image.
These tiles are 8x8 or 16x16 - it follows that if the pixel aspect isn't square, neither are the tiles.
Since re-using the tiles is a major factor in keeping storage requirements sane, you can't just make arbitrary numbers of tiles either.
Fine and all, but now imagine you want to draw a square pattern in an 8x8 tile.
If you draw some pattern that is say 7x8 pixels, then there will be gaps in your tiles.
If you draw something that would need to be 10x8 pixels to be 'square', now you need multiple tiles to draw that pattern reliably.
Either way you end up needing way more tiles, that all line up in groups rather than individual tiles.
It's wasteful of memory, but you can save tons of memory just by 'giving up' on your patterns being 'perfect'...
So it's no huge surprise given the technical limitations that frequently devs would choose not to compensate for the weird pixel aspect ratio.
As doing so would create tile alignment issues.
Sprites, since they are individually movable objects, can be adjusted more easily, though you'd lose some resolution in doing so I suppose. (but a 14x16 sprite that is a 16x16 sprite to the hardware with extra transparency is not such a big deal as the background alignment problems)
The SNES of course can compensate arbitrarily when mode 7 is in use - simply stretch or squash the image differently in each axis.
But you generally can't use mode 7 for an entire game.
(if you could though, you could even make aspect ratio adjustment an option in the game's menus...)
@@NeonluxDJWorks Most SNES games that look weird in 4:3 do so because they're ports from platforms with other pixel aspect ratios. Alien 3, however, isn't -- it's completely unique from the other Alien 3 versions.
It could however still be that at one point it was meant for another platform, or that the art started being created before it was decided to use it in the SNES version.
16:10 Monitor master-race! Perfect 6x scale
I remember mode-X, the 320x240 VGA mode, even though it was 60Hz instead of 70, and the flicker was more a problem.
I'm also nearly sure it was possible to go 320x240 square pixel aspect, while keeping the linear mode 13h access (making the extra lines unaccessable, or perhaps by interrupt).
As for Doom being designed for widescreen, perhaps it's linked to that pic of Carmack coding on his 16:9 (or 16:10?) CRT, but that was for Quake.
Yeah the pixel scaling trade off is one of many reasons why I use a CRT as my main display now. Using a Gateway VX700 with a Trinitron tube. Well not officially a Trinitron since they didn't license the name, but that's what it basically is and stuff looks great on it. Granted I don't really use my main PC for MS-DOS games though. I have Compaq Presario 4112 with 120Mhz Pentium processor. It's complete with original monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the main PC itself. Had original hard drive (which still works!) in it too and even the warranty sticker hadn't been disturbed on it. Found the thing on a local Facebook sales group for only $25.
Glad I got it because it turned out to be a great machine for old games like this. I do my MS-DOS gaming on that now. DosBox and that other MS-DOS emulator can't compete with the real thing. :D
I use my main PC's CRT as the monitor for my Nintendo Switch too. Have a HDMI adapter and a 2 port VGA switch I use in tandom with. Stuff looks great on it. Only OLED stuff can compete with the kind of contrast I can get on it. But gaming on OLED still sounds dangerous to do since they still can have burn in problems. :P
I suppose CRTs have burn in issues too and that's why screensavers were a thing. But you'd have to put an image on the screen for hundreds or more hours before it becomes a problem. :P
I've heard it only takes less then an hour on a OLED for a static image or element on a TV to have burn in.
I wonder, why even bother dealing with all these scaling issues, when there still exist a lot of nice CRTs idle. It might be a challenge to grab some 24" Trinitron, but for retro gaming 17" is more than enough.
Yeah any CRT PC monitor in the 20+ inch range will be hard to find. It's generally 15 to 17 inchers that you'll still find out in the wild now a days. The Trinitron type PC monitors are also a bit rare now too. It's mostly shadow mask tubes you'll find. Not to say the shadowmask ones aren't good. I have a 16 inch Dell e771p that is a shadowmask and things look great on it too.
In fact the shadow mask ones seem to age a bit better. Don't have as much convergence issues on that one as my Gateway VX700 does. I had to make a lot of adjustments to my VX700 when I got it. The Dell e711p, is nearly perfect with just a tad convergence fringing on the very edges near the corners which aren't even bad enough to warrant messing with. :P
Although I can't say the same for "flat" tube style shadowmask CRTs that were made post 2000s. My Dell e771p still has some curve to it despite being made early 2000s. Probably one of the last "curved" tubes they made before they joined the flat tube fad of the 2000s....I don't really like the flat screen type tubes. They were trying to be too much like flat panels during this time and the flat tube design came at the cost of having geometry/convergance issues. Especially the Trinitrons. The flat tube era Trinitron TVs tended to have some geometry issues that were noticeable with playing side scrolling 2D games.
I suppose it wasn't bad enough to hinder standard TV content. Never owned a PC monitor Trinitron that was flat. I don't know if that carried over to monitors too. But for TVs it was bad on some models so I've decided to avoid them. My 13 inch Sony Trinitron TV (a KV1393R made in 1980) still looks great and have no serous geometry problems on it. :D
What about
www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00004YNSR/ref=dp_olp_refurbished_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished
?)
I started to play emulated DOS on retroarch. The sharp bilinear filtering is really good and fits well for most games, even if it means not getting the razor sharp image most people prefer
7:26. As a short person, I completely understand the feeling.
So, as it turns out I'm not short... it's just that people need to interact with me in 4:3. :)
Although we seem to like to use 16:10 for that aspect ratio name, mostly due to 16:9 being a modern common ratio, Both the 16 and 10 can divide by 2, so the actual aspect ratio should be named 8:5.
16:10 was used to easily compare to 16:9. Same goes to phones, where 18:9 is just 2:1.
@@vadnegru I do get that, but it doesn't make it correct.
also my phone is apparently 18.5:9, even though it's a 2:1 resolution, because the damn screen it curved and looks slightly narrower....
I really enjoy this technical knowledge. Wonderful content!
Thank you. All comments like these make it worth it!
interesting topic. when I hooked up my Atari ST to a widescreen CRT TV, the TV rescaled the typical Atari ST image (with a border) to fill the whole screen and it looked very fine (although a bit blurred). I thought that it was the proper way to display 320x200 image on a screen anyway...
Jazz Jackrabbit
It's my favorite DOS game
fantastic and interesting video! :) I am using 4:3 17" LCD monitor and noticed that in the photoshop when I make a square the high and with are not equal in real life, when I take a ruler and measured them :D
SNES's Doom uses 512x224 still images. That's already a super vertical stretching that the CRT does.
One interesting problem is that 240p on a CRT TV for consoles with 240/224 scanlines doesn't match PC/DOS's 200 active scanlines, so the vertical is too small. So when you shrink the horizontal so you get 4:3, but all four sizes have black areas. Old CRT computer monitors were always adjusted so that 320x200 resolution was full screen at 4:3, the physical AR of the monitor. So old CRT computer monitors worked/displayed slightly differently than old CRT TVs, which didn't have decent adjustment mechanisms.
Good arguments for both sides, but I'm pretty much indifferent to aspect ratio differences in these old games. But now I'm bothered about the pronunciation of "display". XD