Question about black bars, again. . . .

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Nikku4211
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by Nikku4211 »

TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 12:22 pm I believe this is due to it being a port from Capcom's CPS1 hardware. CPS1 runs in the odd resolution of 384x224. So to preserve the aspect ratio and show as much on screen as possible on SNES's 256 wide resolution, Capcom typically letterboxed their ports on SNES.
CPS1 video is generally in 4:3 (on properly calibrated hardware) using thin rectangular pixels, so I doubt the letterboxing on Capcom's ports had anything to do with preserving a ratio that wasn't really widescreen back in the day.

They probably needed the extra time for uploading more graphics or something like that.
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Gilbert
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by Gilbert »

It may also be because the characters are a bit smaller in a console port than the original arcade game (for many reasons, such as cart space, VRAM space and/or the console is not capable of displaying lots of large sprites without hitting the limit), so the developers cropped the screen to make this not as apparent (if the bgs are shrunken to match the characters you may even need to incorporate extra stuff (such as a ceiling) to them which do not exist in the arcade version if you insist to display the frame in full height).
MSonage
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by MSonage »

Capcom did this as a way to avoid graphic loading overflow, and this can happen when 2 characters switch frames at the same time or fire off big special powers.
Even if this happens rarely, Capcom would still use the black bar to prevent this from happening at all. That's the case with Magical Quest 2/3 and some other games.
They could optimize the animation time to avoid this. Killer Instinct and Battletoads in Battlemaniacs are full screen and fast, no need for black bars.
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tokumaru
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by tokumaru »

I think that if you have an advanced animation system with an equally capable graphics patterns manager, you can generally make the most out of the normal VRAM bandwidth without the need for any forced blanking. This means you have to use techniques such as double buffering, predictive pattern loading and animation delaying, which are significantly more complex to implement than simply extending the blanking time by a constant amount that can accommodate the worst possible case.
turboxray
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by turboxray »

dougeff wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 12:16 pm Some of the things you notice in an emulator, and say "this looks bad" probably looked fine on a 1990s CRT that cut off several pixels on each side. The kids playing the games didn't care, and the developers didn't care.
^This. Since none of these game systems are even using the full 240 lines of the frame, let alone all the horizontal area too.

Clipping the window/frame to change the "frame aspect ratio" is something 4th gen system could more easily do than 3rd gen. It could be deliberate for artistic reasons, or it could be that there is one or two edge cases that need it (but overall 98% doesn't need it) - or maybe needs it most of the time. Since these systems don't even use the full frame anyway, I never got why clipping is seen as such a negative thing in retro gaming. I mean it's not anything like the huge fixed-boarder-art in Speccy/ST/PC88/98 and other games for PCs that didn't have video hardware acceleration.



Side note: I don't outright trust rom hackers in general to test thoroughly their stuff directly on hardware (they have a long track recorded of not doing this... "most people are going to play on emulation anyway"), so a hack claiming to remove borders doesn't mean it doesn't have occasional issues on the real hardware (or some variants of the hardware), etc.
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by creaothceann »

For SNES you have the bsnes core which should be virtually the same as a real SNES.
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jeffythedragonslayer
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by jeffythedragonslayer »

I just debugged an issue with black vertical lines appearing that turned out to be psuedo hires mode being on accidentally. Bsnes, Mesen-S, snes9x, and zsnes do not reproduce this problem, and if it weren't for this post explaining it I might have had to probe the hardware itself:

viewtopic.php?p=258389&sid=ffbbd9a73c55 ... 53#p258389

I don't trust emulators. Bsnes just isn't accurate enough for the development I do.
TrekkiesUnite118
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by TrekkiesUnite118 »

Nikku4211 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 7:46 pm
TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 12:22 pm I believe this is due to it being a port from Capcom's CPS1 hardware. CPS1 runs in the odd resolution of 384x224. So to preserve the aspect ratio and show as much on screen as possible on SNES's 256 wide resolution, Capcom typically letterboxed their ports on SNES.
CPS1 video is generally in 4:3 (on properly calibrated hardware) using thin rectangular pixels, so I doubt the letterboxing on Capcom's ports had anything to do with preserving a ratio that wasn't really widescreen back in the day.

They probably needed the extra time for uploading more graphics or something like that.
Yes, they were displayed on a 4:3 monitor, but the overall horizontal resolution is about 1.5x that of the the SNES. If they didn't vertically scale things down, the screen would be severely cramped and cut off. We actually see this to a lesser degree on Saturn where the closest resolution it can get is 352x224, and about 16 pixels end up being chopped off on the sides of the screen in all of Capcom's CPS2 ports.

This might illustrate it better. This is the raw CPS1 output of Street Fighter 2 at 384x224:
Image

Now if we try to just put this as is at 256x224, we end up chopping way too much off the sides making a very claustrophobic game:
Image

You are correct that this was actually displayed on a 4:3 monitor, so the aspect ratio should be corrected, so the CPS1 at 4:3 should look something like this at 298x224:
Image

Now if we try to take this straight to 256x224, we still end up chopping quite a bit off the sides, making it still feel too narrow:
Image

So what's left to do? We lower the vertical resolution, thus letter boxing the game so we can get the full horizontal length of the screen and preserve the feel of the arcade game:
Image

You see this in just about every single one of Capcom's CPS1 ports that they handled themselves during this era. All of them on SNES are like this, the ones on the Genesis and PC-Engine that are ported from the SNES versions are like this as well. The only time you don't see this are on ports that Capcom themselves didn't handle like the Genesis ports of Strider, Ghoul's and Ghosts, Final Fight CD, etc.

So it's not necessarily some technical issue of needing more time to update graphics, but just a way to deal with going from 384x224, down to 256x224.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

If it was about matching the arcade while working with the SNES lower horizontal resolution, and there wasn't any need for the black bars [forced blank] in order to run the game without any display and/or slowdown issues and the like, wouldn't they have been better doing something like this on SNES then:
Squished.png
Squished.png (62.27 KiB) Viewed 802 times
(evenly pre-squish the visuals to SNES 256 horizontal resolution, losing a little bit of the pixel detail horizontally and touching up any pixels where necessary to make everything still look as nice as possible)

And then letting the 4:3 stretch make it look like this:
Stretched.png
Stretched.png (67.09 KiB) Viewed 802 times
(the 4:3 stretches them out to the correct proportions again, with that little bit of loss in horizontal pixel detail but generally everything still looking lovely, and the same FOV is maintained as well)

At least I think that could have worked, where it would have looked about as good in terms of the slightly reduced pixel detail that they would have inevitably ended up with via either solution on SNES (don't they already pre-squish the visuals horizontally on the SNES versions of Street Fighter II anyway), and also not had any black bars.

Or, when making the art for the SNES version, just [re]draw everything with the 256 8:7 PAR already stretched to the 256 4:3 PAR, assuming some graphics software or display at the time allowed such a thing, and it would look as close to the arcade as possible but just with slightly less pixel detail on the horizontal axis.

If that were possible, and maintaining the arcade graphic's proportions as closely as possible was a priority, I think that's the solution I would have went for here personally.

Edit: I removed a paragraph about not pre-squishing the backgrounds along with the sprites, which I'd added later as an edit, as that wouldn't actually look correct and was just undermining my original point above.
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:26 am, edited 10 times in total.
TrekkiesUnite118
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by TrekkiesUnite118 »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 12:27 pm If it was about matching the arcade while working with the SNES lower horizontal resolution, and there wasn't any need for the black bars [forced blank] in order to run the game without any display and/or slowdown issues and the like, wouldn't they have been better doing something like this on SNES then:

Squished.png (pre-squish the visuals to SNES 256 horizontal resolution, losing a little bit of the pixel detail horizontally)

And then letting the 4:3 stretch make it look like this:

Stretched.png (let the 4:3 stretch them out to the correct proportions again, with that little bit of loss in horizontal pixel detail)

At least I think that could have worked, where it would have looked about as good in terms of the slightly reduced pixel detail that they would have inevitably ended up with via either solution on SNES (don't they already pre-squish the visuals horizontally on the SNES versions of Street Fighter II anyway), and also not had any black bars.

If that were possible, I think that's the solution I would have went for here personally.
Sure that's an option, but eventually there's a point where things get too distorted and it starts to look off. It could be that Capcom felt things looked too horizontally stretched at that point and went with a more uniform scaling by also lowering the vertical resolution. It also has the benefit of allowing the graphics to take up less space thus allowing for a smaller ROM.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Yeah, true.

Edit: I did add a little extra bit above about not actually having to squish/stretch the backgrounds, but that was incorrect, so I removed that.

Although, like I said, I actually think they already pre-squish the fighters horizontally anyway, so it wouldn't have made any difference there from what they have right now doing it the way I suggested above in terms of pre-squishing everything, if I'm right about them already pre-squishing the fighters as is.

I guess there's a few different things to consider and a few different possible solutions ultimately.
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun Aug 14, 2022 3:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.
TrekkiesUnite118
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by TrekkiesUnite118 »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 12:58 pm Yeah, true.

I did add a little extra bit above about not actually having to squish/stretch the backgrounds, due to the fact they scroll left and right anyway, and the HUD could also remain basically perfect to the original but just with the energy bars shortened and some of the text moved in a little so they don't go too close to the edge of the screen, but it might have been something to consider with the fighters a bit more so.

Although, like I said, I actually think they already pre-squish the fighters horizontally anyway, so it wouldn't have made any difference there from what they have right now doing it the way I suggested above, if I'm right about them already pre-squishing the fighters as is.

I guess there's a few difference things to consider and a few different possible solutions ultimately.
The problem with not adjusting the backgrounds is that it breaks the sense of scale. The characters would look like they were shrunk down in a world for giants or something. And yes, they did pre-squish the graphics in the 16-bit ports. But again what I'm saying is there is a limit to how far you can do that before things look really distorted. Going 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.

It's pretty obvious at least for these Capcom games it's dealing with the resolution change. You can see other Capcom games that are not coming from CPS1/CPS2 hardware and are not based on a previous port from that hardware typically don't have these black bars.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Edit: Yeah, ignore the bit below. It would just be pre-squishing everything equally to get the correct result I was originally talking about.

You might be misunderstanding what I'm saying, but the characters and backgrounds would remain exactly 1:1 scale with the arcade in my suggested way of doing it (assuming the arcade is 4:3 display aspect ratio and the vertical resolution is 224, with only the horizontal resolution being higher on the arcade). The only difference would be the characters being drawn with a little less pixels horizontally in my solution (stretched to the correct proportions once shown at the 4:3 display aspect ratio) and the HUD being adjusted slightly so it isn't drawn too close to the left and right edges of the screen (so, shortening the energy bars slightly and moving the text in a little). Of course, if the backgrounds weren't pre-squished too, the game would have to scroll more to show all the backgrounds on the horizontal axis during a fight, but that wouldn't be an issue; it would just mean letting the fighters move a little more in either direction before stopping the scrolling to compensate for a little less of the background being shown onscreen at any given time.
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun Aug 14, 2022 2:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.
TrekkiesUnite118
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by TrekkiesUnite118 »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:21 pm You might be misunderstanding what I'm saying, but the characters and backgrounds would remain exactly 1:1 scale with the arcade in my suggested way of doing it (assuming the arcade is 4:3 display aspect ratio and the vertical resolution is 224, with only the horizontal resolution being higher on the arcade). The only difference would be the characters being drawn with a little less pixels horizontally in my solution (stretched to the correct proportions once shown at the 4:3 display aspect ratio) and the HUD being adjusted slightly so it isn't drawn too close to the left and right edges of the screen (so, shortening the energy bars slightly and moving the text in a little). Of course, the game would have to scroll more to show all the backgrounds on the horizontal axis during a fight, but that wouldn't be an issue; it would just mean letting the fighters move a little more in either direction before stopping the scrolling to compensate for a little less of the background being shown onscreen at any given time.
I get what you're saying. But that still will cause a disconnect because the sense of scale between the characters and backgrounds would be noticeably off. Redrawing the HUD is fine, but not scaling the backgrounds and sprites the same way would cause a disconnect. And there's still the issue that scaling down in just one dimension to that extent would cause noticeable distortions and stretching. Which is probably why Capcom also decided to scale down vertically so things wouldn't look as distorted.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

TrekkiesUnite118 wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:30 pm
iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:21 pm You might be misunderstanding what I'm saying, but the characters and backgrounds would remain exactly 1:1 scale with the arcade in my suggested way of doing it (assuming the arcade is 4:3 display aspect ratio and the vertical resolution is 224, with only the horizontal resolution being higher on the arcade). The only difference would be the characters being drawn with a little less pixels horizontally in my solution (stretched to the correct proportions once shown at the 4:3 display aspect ratio) and the HUD being adjusted slightly so it isn't drawn too close to the left and right edges of the screen (so, shortening the energy bars slightly and moving the text in a little). Of course, the game would have to scroll more to show all the backgrounds on the horizontal axis during a fight, but that wouldn't be an issue; it would just mean letting the fighters move a little more in either direction before stopping the scrolling to compensate for a little less of the background being shown onscreen at any given time.
I get what you're saying. But that still will cause a disconnect because the sense of scale between the characters and backgrounds would be noticeably off. Redrawing the HUD is fine, but not scaling the backgrounds and sprites the same way would cause a disconnect. And there's still the issue that scaling down in just one dimension to that extent would cause noticeable distortions and stretching. Which is probably why Capcom also decided to scale down vertically so things wouldn't look as distorted.
Edit: Yeah, I think you're right. I think you'd have to pre-squish both the characters and backgrounds in the same way as I originally said, rather than just the sprites while leaving the backgrounds un-squished as I suggested later, in order to do it the way I was originally saying and for both to look correct. If you pre-squish both though, then nothing will be off in terms of proportion or scale; they'd both just have a little less detail on the horizontal axis. So, yeah, just pre-squish both horizontally (losing a little detail on the horizontal axis, with some touch up to make sure the art still looks good), let them stretch back to normal proportions when output to 4:3, and don't have any black bars. Job done.

I'll go remove the bit about the backgrounds from my previous posts to avoid the confusion I added to things after the fact, which just served to undermine my original proposed solution.
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun Aug 14, 2022 3:06 pm, edited 21 times in total.
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