Recap escribió:640 x 480 is a pretty bad size for low-res screenshot purposes.
Maybe it's a stupid question, but how come? I don't understand the theory behind this. Is it because image editing method's distortion is too obvious with such small resolutions?
The theory behind it is just that the bigger the size, the bigger the ability to mimic true scanlines' behaviour in a digital environment is. Keep in mind that true scanlines aren't perfectly regular black lines; they vary according to the colors they separate, being even virtually invisible with some colors like red if the screen is not too big:
http://i47.tinypic.com/acto21.jpg
In order to simulate the lines' 'melting', or getting closer to it--since that's still to properly simulate--we need a bigger resolution. Just compare Ronan's samples with any of Postback's screens. Of course, going further, if the size is big enough we could even work in a per-pixel basis for even more accuracy.
Shit this is confusing. One thing I don't understand is why emulators aren't set to emulating the 4:3 aspect ratio by default? I mean the difference is huge!
You'll soon get used to it. It's easy to understand why the emus' settings aren't 4 : 3 by default -- they're emulators, not simulators. Ideally, we all should be using video hardware capable of the original systems' video modes, so no artifacts of any kind would be needed.
Recap escribió:See, that's what I meant. All the CRT games have a 4 : 3 aspect ratio. It just happens that many of them have also black borders, but those are also part of the screenshot itself. You'll find all the interweb emulator screens from PC88 and PC98 games at 640 x 400, but the actual systems' frame buffer left two black borders for a 640 x 480 full-screen resolution. So when you find this, for instance (PC98 Digan no Maseki):
Ah, that's why I got weird results with that intro sequence in that SFC System Sacom car game? The emulator removes the borders for us?
Which "weird results"? "The emulator" removes the borders only if you tell it to do so. With a standard SFC game, you have natively 256 x 224. That's usually doubled for default non-windowed display with SFC emus. Given that 512 x 448 is less than VGA mode res (640 x 480), you get borders. If you want to get true full-screen, you need the emu or the video card to scale it to that res. It's an anisotropic, non integer scaling, so any pre-scaling effect will be affected and indeed the pixels are distorted.
Recap escribió:Forget this size and try ~ 1280 x 960 screens for everything. You can see Ronan's uploads are the way to go. Hi-res screens would get scanlines too at that size, but half their usual size (we still need to test that out). If you're using 640 x 480 screenshots despite my advice, be extremely careful with PC88 / PC98 games. They usually have default fake scanlines or other artifacts which don't allow for slight scaling / curvature or even blur without ruining the screen (that Wer Dragon screen, for example).
The emulators have default scanlines you mean, there must be some way to disable them though? I haven't the deciphered the options menu in M88 yet.
Nope, I meant the game's default fake scanlines. This is material for the second part of my scanlines essay, so without elaborating it too much, many games for the old Japanese computers were designed with fake scanlines in order to prevent the always ugly line-double effect, given that they used graphics designed in low res for RAM and budget limitations.
So when you have something like this:
PC98 TRITORN II
...it's normally because the game was indeed designed so and not an emulation artifact, unlike, say, MAME's.
(And there you have who's the actual inventor of that thing so popular these days as is the fake scanlines. Not many people know that!)
One more thing: when resizing these images to fit my website's design, is there something to keep in mind? All images will ofcourse link to the full-size version, but I'm sure there's a golden rule to make them look acceptable when scaled down?
I'd need to know the thumbnails' size in order to answer this, but unfortunately I don't think there'll be a very good way for non-photographs. Best way I can think of is taking the original, non-scaled screen (or just scaled to 4 : 3), adding curvature, blurring it a bit and touching up the colors if needed with IR Fan View.
