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This is an insanely long post, but hear me out.
Despatche wrote:You know you're actually agreeing with me, right?
Despatche wrote:We are literally at the point where people are saying it's a personal preference if the fucking moon is supposed to be round.
...ok... so.... I was about to just call you a troll and point out that you're contradicting your previous posts, but I make it a point to at least try and see things through the other side's eyes before I write someone off, so I went back and re-read this whole argument a few times and looked at the earlier posts while considering what was written in the later ones. I
think I figured out what's going on here, maybe.
There appears to be a major communication gap happening between you and the rest of this forum. Your phrasing and word choice means something very different to us than what you think it does, and likewise when we try to refute what we think your points are, what you think we're arguing is not what we actually mean, and neither side is realizing this. I honestly don't mean this as an insult but is your native language not English? Because I've seen this sort of thing happen before with non-native speakers; if you use broken english everyone knows to second guess your words, but if you're so fluent you sound like a native speaker then no one thinks about that and they just chalk up communication conflicts to you being an idiot. Either way, I want to try and point out a few things. Although we should both be aware that there may very well be a whole bunch of communication gaps in
this post too so what I'm trying to do here may not work.
Your use of the phrases "intended screen", "internal resolution", and "designed against" are totally misleading everyone in a huge major way, and when
we use these phrases you're getting equally misled. I want to try to explain some points about our position, as clearly worded as I can, so we're on the same page. These are points that I'm given to understand 'everyone' agrees with, and by 'everyone' I mean everyone participating in this thread on this forum as well as other people you've argued with about this topic elsewhere on the internet. I heavily suspect that you also agree with these points, or at least most of them.
- The vast, vast majority of CRT screens available in the 90s, both arcade screens and home TVs, were 4:3 aspect ratio. It was understood by both developers and gamers that games would be presented to the public on a 4:3 screen (except in rare cases of 16:9).
- Nearly all home consoles and the vast majority of arcade games constructed video frames into a grid of pixels. (I am acknowledging vector games existed but I'm excluding them from this conversation).
- In nearly all cases for nearly all games, if you were to take this pixel grid
and assume the pixels are square, the resulting aspect ratio of the video frame would NOT be 4:3 or 16:9. It would frequently be some other random ratio like 8:7 or something.
- For a significant majority of games,
if you display their video frames using square pixels, the objects displayed would appear to be proportionally correct: objects you would assume to be circles would be presented as circles, and objects you would assume to be square would be presented as square, etc.
- For these same video frames, if you were to stretch them so that they fit a 4:3 screen,
such that the pixels were no longer square, the objects would NOT appear proportionally correct.
- People who are not blind or clinically retarded are well aware that stretching these video frames to a 4:3 screen looks weird in many cases.
- The developers who made these games were well aware of all the above points.
- For one reason or another, developers commonly released games that appeared stretched when presented on a 4:3 screen. (Some appeared to go through the effort to make things look correct, most did not).
- Given that the developers were aware of the stretching problem, and still chose to release these games anyway even though they appeared stretched on a 4:3 screen, we MUST assume that these games appearing stretched was either what the developers explicitly wanted or at least what they were willing to accept.
- The end result of all this is that nearly all gamers experienced playing these games on a 4:3 screen, commonly with stretched video. This experience is what purists try to replicate and what they argue is "correct". They are NOT claiming that stretched video is necessarily correct in its own right, but rather that stretching the video to 4:3 is the correct way to replicate the experience of playing on these systems, since that's the behavior these systems exhibited.
All of the above are points that I personally agree with. They are also points that I believe everyone arguing with you agrees with. One of the main conflicts I think I've identified here is a fundamental miscommunication about that last point.
When you say "these games were not intended for 4:3!" the statement you appear to be making is that
"these games frequently do not look correct when played at an aspect ratio of 4:3", but what everyone hears is
"Despatche is an idiot who thinks devs made custom CRTs for each game".
When everyone responds "yes these games WERE meant for 4:3!" the statement we're making is
"these games were played on systems that stretched the video to fit a 4:3 screen, and although that often looks wrong, it must have been what the developers wanted (or at least accepted) and you need to replicate that if you want a faithful experience", but what you appear to hear is
"we think these games look perfectly fine and not distorted at all when played at 4:3, the concept of distortion is arbitrary, the issue of a circular moon vs an oval one is merely personal preference".
When you use the term "internal resolution", what you appear to actually mean is "the
aspect ratio of the rendered video frame,
assuming the pixels are square". When everyone else uses the term "internal resolution" we're only referring to the literal rows and columns of the pixel grid, because the terms "aspect ratio" and "resolution" mean very different things. "Aspect ratio" is the relationship between the overall width and height of a thing with no regard to how many sub-things comprise it (a 4:3 image could equally be 320x240, 100x100, or 1x1), whereas "resolution" only refers to the raw number of pixel rows and columns with no regard to their shape or what the resulting dimensions of the overall grid would be (you can display an image with a resolution of 100x100 at literally any aspect ratio including 4:3, 16:9, 8:7, or anything else).
Anyway, I hope my analysis is correct here because it would go a long way to explaining why we're still arguing about this. If I'm not correct then try to point out parts you can and maybe phrase it two or three different ways and maybe we'll figure something out.
Despatche wrote:There's a really fantastic article, probably multiple at this point, about how people like to talk around each other rather than talk to each other.
I believe this is what's happening, but that it's not on purpose.
Despatche wrote:I'm tired of this shit happening. I'm tired of being blamed for it, even when I witness people literally claim I said things I never even implied at any point. I'm tired of being challenged over stupid shit that isn't really controversial.
If this is something that happens to you a lot (and it seems like it does), I think you should seriously investigate taking some communications classes or seeing a language therapist. If it was just me vs you then it could easily be argued that I was the one with the problem, but if everyone teams up against you in every thread then there's something different about the way you communicate that doesn't jive with the rest of the world and you really need to look into that or you're going to give yourself a heart attack.