the Low Down on Low Resolution

The place for all discussion on gaming hardware
Post Reply
thaIllsburyFlowboy
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat May 07, 2022 11:54 pm

the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by thaIllsburyFlowboy »

Hello all,

So I've heard, and my eyeball-collected evidence would seem to back this up, that some games will actually look better on the original Playstation and/or Saturn versus Dreamcast and/or PS2 because the sprites are stretched on the more "advanced" hardware (think of how your 8/16 bit consoles look on an emulator versus a CRT TV). Naturally this leads to a few questions.

1.) Why? Is the trade-off that you get to market the game as "high resolution?"
2.) Does this make any difference in terms of high score runs? I asked a similar question in the main forum where it might not make that much difference, but I am curious.
3.) If the answer to 2 is yes, is there any way to get my laptop and/or modern TV to display 320x240 like it was a CRT?

Thanks in advance and sorry for being an obvious newbie!
ZellSF
Posts: 2642
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 11:12 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by ZellSF »

Resolution is just the amount of detail game developers can work with, nothing else. You should probably read the Wikipedia articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution

That games look better on PSX/Saturn is your opinion. Why do games look different on PS2/Dreamcast? Most people don't agree with you. There aren't any hardware reasons for this, beyond the hardware of the PS2/Dreamcast being more powerful and allowing developers to create the graphics they, and most of the players, want.

Since resolution is all about detail in the image, it has zero effect on high score runs except if you take a high resolution image and downscale it enough so that critical details are left out.
thaIllsburyFlowboy
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat May 07, 2022 11:54 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by thaIllsburyFlowboy »

ZellSF wrote:Resolution is just the amount of detail game developers can work with, nothing else. You should probably read the Wikipedia articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution

That games look better on PSX/Saturn is your opinion. Why do games look different on PS2/Dreamcast? Most people don't agree with you. There aren't any hardware reasons for this, beyond the hardware of the PS2/Dreamcast being more powerful and allowing developers to create the graphics they, and most of the players, want.

Since resolution is all about detail in the image, it has zero effect on high score runs except if you take a high resolution image and downscale it enough so that critical details are left out.
Eh, I'm maybe not being clear enough. I found this thread which touches on the issue somewhat:

viewtopic.php?t=3020

That is, Mars Matrix on Dreamcast versus CPS2 arcade hardware. On the Dreamcast the resolution is changed such that it's not 384x224, but higher. Yet, this just makes it look "stretched out." An example of the same game on all of these platforms might be Street Fighter Alpha 3.

I run into the same issue with the "postage stamp" size using original resolutions with emulators. Of course, the graphics on all of these games are outdated, I'm just thinking about it from the perspective of scoring.
User avatar
bobrocks95
Posts: 3462
Joined: Mon Apr 30, 2012 2:27 am
Location: Kentucky

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by bobrocks95 »

Look at the infamous Symphony of the Night Saturn port. The Saturn didn't support the lower resolution that SotN used on PSX, so they just stretched the graphics horizontally to fit the lowest horizontal res the Saturn allowed for. Most games are going to either letterbox/pillarbox, or stretch assets. Another example is Square RPG ports to PSP, instead of being reworked for widescreen they just chop off a bit at the top and bottom (vert- widescreen). Some games give a larger field of view with more tiles on screen, but if you're talking like 8 or 16-bit era machines differed so much that different ports were often quite different anyway.
PS1 Disc-Based Game ID BIOS patch for MemCard Pro and SD2PSX automatic VMC switching.
ZellSF
Posts: 2642
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 11:12 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by ZellSF »

thaIllsburyFlowboy wrote:
ZellSF wrote:Resolution is just the amount of detail game developers can work with, nothing else. You should probably read the Wikipedia articles on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution

That games look better on PSX/Saturn is your opinion. Why do games look different on PS2/Dreamcast? Most people don't agree with you. There aren't any hardware reasons for this, beyond the hardware of the PS2/Dreamcast being more powerful and allowing developers to create the graphics they, and most of the players, want.

Since resolution is all about detail in the image, it has zero effect on high score runs except if you take a high resolution image and downscale it enough so that critical details are left out.
Eh, I'm maybe not being clear enough. I found this thread which touches on the issue somewhat:

viewtopic.php?t=3020

That is, Mars Matrix on Dreamcast versus CPS2 arcade hardware. On the Dreamcast the resolution is changed such that it's not 384x224, but higher. Yet, this just makes it look "stretched out." An example of the same game on all of these platforms might be Street Fighter Alpha 3.
Most likely that's as I said, what the developers and players want. You and I might think it looks worse, but likely it's a very intentional choice.

It could be for technical reasons too. For example if the Dreamcast doesn't support 384x224 (but I think it does) or they wanted to stick with 480i/p to not give people with VGA adapters problems. I don't think using VGA adapters with Dreamcasts was that common either though. So I'm going with intentional choice.
User avatar
Kez
Posts: 818
Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2017 7:09 am

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by Kez »

This is a tough one to answer, I think your question covers a huge range of different scenarios and resolution is only one factor.

So, resolution is really a digital property of the game, but CRTs are a bit different in the way they handle resolution. They tend to have a fixed vertical resolution (240/480/etc.), but horizontal resolution is handled differently. It's difficult to explain without going deep on how a CRT works, but.. an analogue signal does not have a horizontal resolution in a traditional sense, and CRTs don't really recognize horizontal resolution. The tube of the CRT has a phosphors which are lit up by the electron gun, and the density of those phosphors determines the maximum horizontal resolution of the display, it is known as TV Lines. When a CRT receives a video signal, it doesn't really know or care what the horizontal resolution is and handles it the same regardless.

What this means is that digital hardware can render games at whatever horizontal resolution they feel like, and the CRT will just squeeze it into the same aspect ratio. When you transition to digital displays, this becomes an issue because the horizontal resolution is inherently linked to the aspect ratio, and so when you try to render those games on a digital display, they will appear stretched, or squeezed, or otherwise distorted, and if you try to correct the aspect ratio, you may need to lose some information or create scaling artefacts. CPS2 is an obvious example and one you have referenced. 384 x 224 is not a 4:3 pixel aspect ratio, but the games were displayed in 4:3 on a CRT. On a CRT, the "pixels" from the signal were not displayed square, they were tall and skinny. The sprites had higher horizontal detail than vertical. But if you try to display those sprites, pixel for pixel, on any modern digital display it will appear stretched and fat.

Most old consoles would have resolutions that they are natively comfortable dealing with, and developers would have to choose one of those resolutions for their games. When you're talking arcade -> console (or console->console as with SOTN above) conversions, sacrifices would often need to be made in order to make the arcade sprite work fit in the new resolution.

The solution is ultimately scaling to higher resolutions. The higher you can scale it, the easier it is to compensate for. The less likely you are to have to have uneven sized pixels to reach the desired aspect ratio, creating shimmering artefacts. Also you can hide the shimmering with interpolation, which will also look sharper at higher resolution. So, if you want to reproduce games on a modern display - you need a high quality modern scaler for original hardware (RT5x, etc.). If you're using an emulator, a lot of them will have robust scaling and interpolation options which should address the issue.

In terms of whether it will affect scoring.. no, not really? If you are playing a port of the game that is lower resolution, you might have less information and so it may be more difficult to notice details and react. But a true port like that would likely have so many changes under the hood as to not truly be comparable anyway. When you're playing on an emulator, latency is likely to be a greater concern than resolution (or whether the emulator is accurately replicating the behaviour of real hardware).

If you're just trying to play the games and score high for your own enjoyment, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you're actually submitting scores to leaderboards or contests, see what their rules are, see what version of the game the community recommends, etc.
User avatar
Ed Oscuro
Posts: 18654
Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2005 4:13 pm
Location: uoıʇɐɹnƃıɟuoɔ ɯǝʇsʎs

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by Ed Oscuro »

"Why do old games look like they do?" is an old Shmups Forum genre. =)

Mars Matrix does NOT seem to be a 240p native Dreamcast title. SFA3 is, though.

I will try to go into the unnecessary layers of detail as briefly and accurately as possible. TL:DR - it's layers, and layers, and layers of technical or bureaucratic rules combining in odd ways with various creative intentions. So I think the answer is less "we wanted this" and more "this is the best we could do."

The very first consideration of old game design was the technical specification. In NTSC broadcast standard television the video signal buzzes along happily with a pixel clock of 13.5MHz (6 * 2.25MHz). That's pretty fast, and a lot of pixels for the day. Using this rate you can squeeze upwards of 700 pixels on a single line of video (see (ITU-R BT.601); some sources suggest 702, others 711 for NTSC). There were some technical compromises in the design of television itself behind the specific numbers, including the slightly-off 59.94 and 29.97 rates we all hear about.

Next, old systems: 240p is a hack to get progressive resolutions with 60fps. Beyond immediately losing half the vertical resolution and doubling the frame rate, there is an awful lot of leeway to do anything up to at least 700x240p resolution that you should expect a standard CRT TV to handle well enough. But old hardware is highly bottlenecked by component performance. In many cases these old systems were designed so that they could get as high a horizontal resolution as possible while also balancing a number of other factors including sprite count, color count, and component cost. Therefore all the systems tend to have their own resolutions - the Neo Geo's is less than the CPS-2, for instance, while Irem's M-72 is higher resolution than the Neo Geo but also runs at the odd 55MHz frame rate (and the CPS-2 also runs at an odd rate). The pixel clock rates are also lower than TV - closer to 8MHz for the Capcom and Irem systems, which perhaps not coincidentally also both feature 8MHz CPUs in their designs.

On to game design - there's a lot of variation here too. There's evidence all along the spectrum from games designers carefully tweaking all their art to preserve aspect ratios (circle in art = circle on screen) to developers who barely cared at all, sometimes even in the same project. Sometimes graphical workstations or even graph paper used for art design were the cause of differences from the slightly different target platform. On top of all that, when porting an arcade game to a home system one potentially has to deal with standards imposed by the game publishers and console licensor (Sega, Sony, etc.).

That last bit may explain why the Dreamcast port of Mars Matrix has different resolution options than the arcade. One of the major marketing points for the Dreamcast is that it had something better than HDTV for the time - support for VESA standard PC CRT monitors. It turns out there's some complicated stuff going on here, too, which you can read about in detail here. On a further note, Mars Matrix defaults to outputting a 608x416 resolution image, quite different from 640x480 (the active area part of the of 720x480 output). And if you play with those settings, you'll realize that the video output is actually 640x480 - Mars Matrix uses the rest as a black border. In essence, Mars Matrix's options let you digitally tweak the image instead of using h/v controls on a monitor.
User avatar
Ed Oscuro
Posts: 18654
Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2005 4:13 pm
Location: uoıʇɐɹnƃıɟuoɔ ɯǝʇsʎs

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Post break to introduce some other observations:

Things are a lot different now in the emulation scene than they were when ShmupMAME 4.2 hit in 2015, which was also a lot different from the era when MAME introduced pixel aspect ratio switches (yikes!), which was also different than the era of Genecyst and Nesticle. Today's emulators aren't all perfect when it comes to aspect ratio, but most of them are pretty good at respecting the concept of a 4:3 active area as default, which is the safe bet in most cases. So to finally answer one of your questions - modern high resolution monitors will scale low resolution games better than lower-resolution screens, and to make it more faithful to real life, search out and disable screen filtering (usually bilinear filtering). Scanline options are a good compromise between emulator speed and a nostalgic look. For a really "accurate" nostalgic picture you can look up "CRT shaders." Personally, square pixels without even a scanline filter is good enough almost all the time.

I've read many people loved to tweak their monitors when playing the X68000 ports of games - to my way of thinking Chelnov: Atomic Runner's original arcade release looks good with more square pixels - perhaps not better, but some tiles will be more clearly square at a narrower aspect ratio than the 4:3 default. Robocop and the Genesis Atomic Runner remake both look more unambiguously correct as they are, however. Digitized images from film or video are a usual pain point for inaccuracy in games - sprites may be designed to fit the aspect ratio but a digitized image may be squashed or smashed. Good example of this in the world's best Shmup, Major Stryker, which seems to use part of an anime framegrab as an anime girl talking head.

Another fun example of this kind of thing in three dimensions is pretty straightforward - 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue is on both the PlayStation and Dreamcast. The original PS version looks like a fairly good effort for the hardware with sharp graphics. On the Dreamcast, it's easier to see detail but there's also some bilinear filtering - meanwhile, some of the odd polygons of the PS seem to have been ported over with some warped texturing. It's definitely not a game running at the extreme limits of what the DC can do. Depending on how you feel about these things, the fact that the Dreamcast version looks cleaner may make it better, or perhaps the fact that it's below what you'd expect from a DC game will make you dislike it in a way you'd forgive the PS version.
thaIllsburyFlowboy
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat May 07, 2022 11:54 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by thaIllsburyFlowboy »

Interesting stuff, thanks guys.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8869&start=30

So as far as the Cave PS2 ports, you have Dodonpachi 3 and ESPrade in low resolution, and then Mushihimesama and Ibara in "high" (scaled/filtered) resolution. Presumably this occurred due to consumers switching from CRT to flatscreen TVs?

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17808

Something here about interlacing/deinterlacing also.

The effects on gameplay seem to be debated. I guess the tl;dr is just to play all of this in MAME :lol:
ZellSF
Posts: 2642
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 11:12 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by ZellSF »

thaIllsburyFlowboy wrote:Interesting stuff, thanks guys.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8869&start=30

So as far as the Cave PS2 ports, you have Dodonpachi 3 and ESPrade in low resolution, and then Mushihimesama and Ibara in "high" (scaled/filtered) resolution. Presumably this occurred due to consumers switching from CRT to flatscreen TVs?
CRTs were still common at the end of the PS2's life.

Also the higher scaled/filtered resolution is interlaced and looks better on a CRT than a LCD.

So... probably not.
gray117
Posts: 1233
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 10:19 pm
Location: Leeds

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by gray117 »

ZellSF wrote:
thaIllsburyFlowboy wrote:Interesting stuff, thanks guys.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8869&start=30

So as far as the Cave PS2 ports, you have Dodonpachi 3 and ESPrade in low resolution, and then Mushihimesama and Ibara in "high" (scaled/filtered) resolution. Presumably this occurred due to consumers switching from CRT to flatscreen TVs?
CRTs were still common at the end of the PS2's life.

Also the higher scaled/filtered resolution is interlaced and looks better on a CRT than a LCD.

So... probably not.
Yes/no

Mostly developers just being lazy, developers working with lcds, and any producers not noticing/not giving a shit if they did/not knowing enough to care either way. And pershaps even more importantly than anything; some company guidlines/format that both just have to follow when making ps2 games.

There were many things that were just coped with on the fly... whether or not resolutions or pixel aspect ratios were ever properly compensated for was often a bit of crap shoot... capcom's own cps2 developers being the (necessary) exception to the rule --- but even then they couldn't do some thing perfectly - ratios just don't always work out.Near enough is usually good enough.
ZellSF
Posts: 2642
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 11:12 pm

Re: the Low Down on Low Resolution

Post by ZellSF »

Not sure why you quoted me there; I replied to a post about low resolution vs high resolution, which I took to mean 240pVs480i, not the difference between 240p resolutions with different PAR.

That said I really doubt the "developers working with LCD" part in any scenario. Before developers were working with LCDs, they were working with CRTs with 1:1 PAR. They were most likely testing with the displays consumers would be using, which in this time period was CRTs.
Post Reply