Well, I dunno about anyone else, but I'm mainly talking about drawing art in a program with square pixels, as almost all art is now (as far as I'm aware), and, I will assert, how almost all SNES art was drawn back in the day too (hence why I keep banging on about the vast majority of SNES games looking proportionally correct when viewed at an 8:7 display aspect ratio/1:1 PAR, because you just could not even fluke it looking proportionally perfect when viewed with square pixels if you weren't actually drawing and viewing the art with square pixels when creating it in the first place*), and then stretching everything to a 4:3 display aspect ratio, where the pixels would no longer be squares. And my thought [in the original post] was you'd simply take the original art created for a 320 horizontal resolution, remove the additional 64 pixels evenly across the image, so it's now a 256 image instead (which would visually look squished when viewed with the gaps removed, but everything would still be square pixels), and then let the inevitable stretch happen when output to a 4:3 display aspect ratio, where the end result would keep exactly the same amount of horizontal view as the original 320 game, but just now using 256 slightly stretched pixels instead (although, we've established this approach will only make sense for certain types of games).rainwarrior wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 1:56 pm We're mixing PAR and DAR again 8:7 is being used for both PAR and DAR, but 4:3 is only DAR.
If 256 x 224 resolution is stretched to a 4:3 display (DAR), its PAR is 4x224:3x256 = ~1.17 : 1 = ~8:7
Of course, the 256x224 image isn't really stretched to 4:3, there is overscan and other issues. 8:7 is the ideal PAR for most NTSC systems with 256px width, and "4:3" is the shape of a display on which we might see that 8:7 PAR displayed.
It's approximately the same, but is referring to the dimensions of a different thing.
...and also 256 x 224 resolution displayed with 1:1 PAR scaled pixels... is unfortunately 8:7 DAR.
I think we've been over this a few times already, though. Apologies for the repetition, but it keeps throwing things off track. I'd suggest throwing PAR or DAR next to ratios to clarify.
So, me, I'm basically always talking about and referring to display aspect ratio (8:7 and 4:3), and almost never talking about pixel aspect ratio specifically (1:1 and 8:7), even though that is, of course, inevitably affected by what I'm describing. This is why I try to always remember to specifically say "display aspect ratio", and I sometimes say "pixel aspect ratio or PAR" when I meant that.
Hope that makes sense, at least in terms of what I'm talking about.
*Note: And this is irrespective of the actual display aspect ratio of the screen the game art was created on, as I'm not saying the art was viewed stretched to full screen while it was being created (be it a 4:3 DAR monitor, 8:7 DAR monitor, 16:9 DAR monitor, or whatever), just that when drawing their SNES art back in the day, artists were seeing the pixels on [part of] said screen as squares [in the vast majority of cases], exactly as they do today when using Photoshop and the like, rather than as rectangles (which, it seems to me, most people must think was the case).