Pixel Perfect

[Anonymous No.7883843]

with how CRTs work do we know if pixel perfect is actually what the developers had in mind for their visuals back then? Surely they would optimize their visuals for commercial televisions at the time.

[Anonymous No.7883858]

Yeah, they did. You see this in Super Mario World, for exemple. That's why the sprite of Mario running sideways is wider. then the one of him runnning normally.

[Anonymous No.7883902]

Guess which one is pixel perfect.

[Anonymous No.7883927]

>with how CRTs work do we know if pixel perfect is actually what the developers had in mind for their visuals back then?

It's not that simple no, especially with sprite/tile based 8-16 bit graphics. While it is simple to take the TV stretching into account when you work on things like cutscenes or title screens, it's not simple to do the same thing during gameplay. A good example people always bring up is the moon in Chrono Trigger, people use that as a "proof that they took TV stretching into account for this game" but that's a cutscene, while on the other hand all background graphics aren't designed that way at all.
When you're forced to work with 16x16 tiles you really don't have a choice, it's not like you can leave empty space in the background tile and you can't really use "1,2 tile" either.

[Anonymous No.7883947]

The motherfuckers who designed this shit are still alive! Someone go bother them on Twitter or something

[Anonymous No.7883953]

[Anonymous No.7883959]

>>7883927
Hm, yes, clearly the developer intention to playing Chrono Trigger is to switch TVs during cutscenes.

[Anonymous No.7884001]

Developers made the games "pixel perfect" but narrow, expecting consumer TVs to make the display wider and thus look the way they wanted their games to look.
You were meant to see the games look the way the TV displays them.

[Anonymous No.7884007]

>>7884001
the example here though >>7883902
you can see that pixel perfect is actually wider than 4:3

[Anonymous No.7884013]

>>7884007
so what
posting screenshots of emulator overscan padding
that doesnt prove anything

[Anonymous No.7884026]

>>7884013
>posting screenshots of emulator overscan padding
no cropping on overscan area in either screenshot. What do you think would be the "correct" option for MGS then?

[Anonymous No.7884028]

>>7884026
only overscan area + 4:3
youre including padding by having no cropping, is what im saying

[Anonymous No.7884036]

>>7883843
"""we""" know nothing. Because """we""" includes (You)

[Anonymous No.7884050]

>>7884028
>youre including padding by having no cropping
Guess I'm slightly confused as to what this means. Nothing gets subtracted from the image when you go only overscan + 4:3, it just squishes it. But I do think you're correct, I found this old promotional shot from MGS1 that I managed to pretty much make an exact match with using only overscan and 4:3

game native is narrower
par 1:1 is wider

This still kind begs the question why par 1:1 (perfect pixel) is so much wider and whether or not that is what they wanted it to look like.

[Anonymous No.7884069]

Seems like in lots of cases they didn't really give it much thought.

Any example I realized recently playing Super Metroid on 3ds. In pixel perfect mode, the morph ball is circular, as it is in the GBA games, but planet Zebes in the opening cutscene is an oval.

I'm opting to play the game in 8:7 because you see the morph ball a lot more than you see planet Zebes from space and pixel perfect looks a lot better on a handheld screen.

[Anonymous No.7884090]

>>7884028
what is the difference between only overscan and all borders? From what I can tell there's a 4 pixel wide black border with just the overscan cropped, "all borders" corrects this and gives an extra 4 pixels of width. From what I can tell, this setting does not in any way impact the actual image at higher resolutions, it just seems to add in 4 pixels where there would be a 4 pixel black border.

[Anonymous No.7884335]

>>7884050
>>7884090
Only overscan area crops the areas the devs set the original console to cut before displaying the game. Some games will have leftover letterboxing because the letterboxing is part of their display, as a means of diminishing the stretching effect of 4:3 displays. If you set it to crop all borders, it'll cut off those as well.
For all intents and purposes, only overscan area + 4:3 is the image you're supposed to be seeing for most, if not all games. It's the setting TVs expected to receive.

[Anonymous No.7884681]

>>7884335
Thanks for the explanation, anon.

[Anonymous No.7885154]

>>7883843
>do we know if pixel perfect is actually what the developers had in mind for their visuals back then?

This is just my opinion, but sometimes yes and other times no. Some devs did care, but others didn't. Examples would be the arcade Mortal Kombats and Street Fighers (not counting 1). Mortal Kombat displayed in 400x256 or something like that, but when scrunching the image into 4x3 the image ends up looking thinner than how it was probably meant to with the pixel aspect looking more like how it should. Games like Street Fighter 2, on the other had, likely had a 4x3 image in mind despite displaying at a similarly wide 384x224. I even heard the devs used special graph paper for drawing out the characters animation before beginning the spriting process.

[Anonymous No.7886413]

>>7883843
Some games had objects designed with both 4:3 and 8:7 in mind. It's a clusterfuck and you shouldn't really overthink it too much, just use whatever you feel like. I switch between them pretty often. Hell, some CRT TVs weren't even 4:3