TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 7:38 pmYes we are all aware that both systems display in a 4:3 aspect ratio and use non-square pixels.
Okay.
The 298x224 was an approximation of how the arcade would look at 4:3, nothing more, nothing less. It was not trying to say this is what you need to scale to first or that it was the correct resolution or some kind of standard.
Okay.
It was just a visual aid to show that even when we have both displayed at 4:3, we have more horizontal resolution in the arcade
You just torpedoed the point you were making. The word "even" makes no sense in this context. The 4:3 frame on the arcade monitor is 384 pixels wide. The ~4:3 frame on a TV connected to a SNES is 256 pixels wide. Obviously there's more horizontal resolution on the arcade machine. The wording you've used here strongly suggests that you
do think your 298-wide image means something. It doesn't.
and we need to do further reductions to get to 256.
This is the conflation I was talking about. Further reductions from what? The only possible answer is your 298x224 scaled shot, which is, as you have agreed, totally irrelevant to the question of how to convert the graphics.
We can crop, we can reduce down more horizontally, we can reduce down both horizontally and vertically. Capcom chose to do the latter, that's all that post was trying to show.
Of course it's possible somebody at Capcom thought it would be a good idea to shoot for 256x192 as a 4:3 frame, and that this boneheaded decision propagated all the way through from Final Fight to SFA2. I've suggested as much twice now. But I don't think it's the most likely possibility.
And it is true that the stage backdrops do seem to be sized to fit
roughly the same amount of the scene into the letterboxed frame both horizontally and vertically as the arcade version shows. That doesn't mean it was an attempt at aspect ratio correction; I think it's more likely that the letterboxing came first, and the BG was converted to fit the available area afterwards. Particularly since the character graphics don't share this approach, instead having the correct aspect ratio as I showed above.
That's the point I was trying to get at, the black bars in these CPS1/CPS2 ports may not be some technical issue, but just Capcom being stupid and thinking they needed to do that to get the right look for those ports.
I'm sorry, but you've been doing an exceptionally bad job of making that point. What was all that about "distortion"? Why did you use a cropped version of the 298x224 image to try to show how rescaling horizontally wasn't enough? You claimed, without qualification, that
TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 11:03 amIf they didn't vertically scale things down, the screen would be severely cramped and cut off
which is not true, and you've since agreed it's not true. You then showed your 298x224 image, pointed out that simply cropping it reduced the horizontal scene coverage, and remarked
So what's left to do? We lower the vertical resolution
which pretty strongly suggests that you actually thought this was the only option, rather than that you were trying to follow an errant thought process in a hypothetical Capcom employee (something that is implied nowhere in your post). Furthermore, the process you illustrated produced an image that has the correct aspect ratio, but only because it's being displayed with square pixels on a computer screen. On a SNES it would look wrong.
Then iNCEPTIONAL showed the obvious correct way to do it, and you responded in a later post:
TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:11 pmGoing from 384 to 256 is definitely in that realm of going too far. So to make things not look too distorted it makes more sense to squish down a bit for the 4:3 aspect ratio, then scale uniformly down to 256 wide to prevent any further distortion.
This seems to contradict your most recent statements on the topic of the 4:3 298x224 rescaled image and what you meant by it. It also strongly implies that the "distortion" you were talking about was aspect ratio distortion, not rescale aliasing as you later seemed to claim.
If it were the latter, "scaling uniformly down to 256 wide" would not "prevent any further distortion". It would produce exactly the same amount of rescale aliasing in the horizontal axis as if you'd gone straight from 384 to 256 (or possibly more, if you did it in multiple steps), while also adding aliasing in the vertical axis. But the point makes no sense because the graphics weren't rescaled naively; they were redrawn, and they look fine.
If you meant aspect ratio distortion, isotropic scaling does indeed prevent it, but the point still makes no sense because scaling horizontally from 384 to 256 does actually produce the correct aspect ratio onscreen, while your method doesn't.
...
None of this makes sense. It sounds an awful lot like you did get confused and are trying to avoid admitting it.