/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4992605
>Both the left and right bar would have been covered by overscan on old TVs, so why would they bother creating the black bar with sprites?

That wasn't always the case with NTSC CRT's (not sure about PAL) as in many cases with NES games, you would see garbage appear where the Vblanks and Hblanks are on the screen.So developers would try to mask it up with sprites.

here's a capture of SMB3 running on real hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO72jyNB6MI

You can see the mess on the right that the v-blank causes.