Original Resolution / Aspect for each game
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Hi Guys
I have been searching for this answer for quite some time and I can’t get a definitive answer.
I want games to open in their original aspect ratio / resolution on my retro pie pi3.
Can anyone tell me if this is possible.?In RetroArch settings / video. I have the following;
Aspect Ratio: Core Provided
All the rest is default.
I used to have it set to custom resolution and it x2 on screen 640x480
But when play a game such as outrun, it looks off as its resolution is 320x224.Any info would be appreciated.
Chris
Ps.. I’m new when it comes to editing config files etc
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@retrocraze In RetroArch menu go to video settings. Leave aspect ratio as
core providedand turn oninteger scalethis will scale the native resolution by whole numbers only.
Set custom aspect ratio width and height to(4x). this will set it to 1280x896 which is 4 times 320x224.
Short answer: integer scale> ON -
@retrocraze While @jonnykesh gives you some suggestions to explore, your question is actually a little more complicated than it might seem. This is why you have had a hard time getting a definitive answer. First of all, the title of your post "Original Resolution / Aspect for each game" contains a common contradiction, and would only work consistently if you were going to display each game on a CRT and you were willing to tune the horizontal and vertical adjustment knobs to fill that screen.
Assuming we are talking arcade games here, almost all of them were built to be displayed on a 4:3 aspect ratio CRT, regardless of resolution. Game programmers built their games using a variety of standard resolutions, but they all knew that in the final cabinet, the video would be stretched to fill the 4:3 arcade monitor (with probably a handful of exceptions).
Now, take your example, Outrun, which you say is running at 320x224. If you do the math, that divides out to an AR of about 1.43, not the 1.33 of a 4:3 monitor, and even if you scaled it to 640 horizontally, it is still only 448 vertically (not 480). If you do perfect integer scaling on a modern display, even if that display is a 4:3 LCD, this game will not fill the screen area. That is NOT how it looked in the arcade. They would have tuned the display to stretch the image to fill the monitor.
There are many more severe examples of this. Street Fighter II for instance almost looks like a widescreen TV if rendered in its native or integer scaled resolution. But in this view, the characters look stretched wide. That is because the game was built and the graphics designed to fill the monitor, stretching them back into shape.
There was probably a good reason why programmers built games at the resolution that they did, whether memory constrained, or for performance or hardware reasons. But in the end, the final AR was almost always 4:3 by way of CRT adjustments.
What this means is that pixels in these games were not always square. On a CRT this was not much of an issue since the RGB triads were never lining up with game pixels anyway. You just needed enough of them to make the dot on the screen glow the right color, stretched or not. This idea does not translate perfectly to rigid modern LCD displays.
What I would suggest is that you take this info and consider that there is a big difference between the calculated AR from the game's actual resolution and the intended AR used in original arcade cabinets. If you focus on the fact that 4:3 (or 3:4 for vertical) was almost always the intended display AR, you will understand why games at "perfect" resolution don't look right--because they're not!
On modern displays, we need to accommodate some stretch in one dimension in order to get a game to display at the intended AR, but everyone has their own opinions for how to accomplish this, and it often depends on your own display hardware.
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@caver01 sure, I could have said that... Great explanation and answer though.
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@caver01 so basically what your saying is that for pretty much everything the best way to play it and it look the way it did on tvs back in the day, is to set everything to 4:3 for horizontal games. And adjust for vertical games? I have all my consoles set to 4:3 and they honestly look great to me. I’ve been wondering what I would do for arcade because I would rather set all games to 4:3 and use a universal overlay if they will look right that way.
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@cjax08 that is basically it. There are probably some exceptions, but 4:3 is a good rule of thumb for horizontal, and of course, 3:4 for vertical. However, as you might find in some other active threads, some folks are willing to live with a little distortion in one dimension in order to enforce a strict, integer scaling in the other for the sake of improving the look of certain shaders. Namely, the CRT-PI shader which looks fantastic in my opinion, can be made to look even better by eliminating rainbow artifacts that come as a result of fractional scaling not lining up perfectly with the scanline shadow mask. It’s a complicated issue, and one that I personally don’t bother with, but a lot has been written on it.
In the end, it boils down to personal preference. Some people want to see games fill their screens even on HDTV. But if you are trying to be historically accurate, 4:3 or 3:4 is a good starting point, or do some research per game to confirm.
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@caver01 so basically what your saying is that for pretty much everything the best way to play it and it look the way it did on tvs back in the day, is to set everything to 4:3 for horizontal games. And adjust for vertical games? I have all my consoles set to 4:3 and they honestly look great to me. I’ve been wondering what I would do for arcade because I would rather set all games to 4:3 and use a universal overlay if they will look right that way.
not at all. all emulators run the correct aspect ratios by default. there are a handful of emulators that do not because of bugs, but they generally don't need to be used.
i'm not sure why there's so much talk of changing configs in this thread. aspect ratios are correct by default. if you want to start messing with custom scaling, then you're giving yourself a problem to solve, because not all games had 'square' pixels.
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Yes, in principle "core provided" should work and give 4:3/3:4 for almost all games. And it should give the correct non-4:3 aspect ratios for games such as Ninja Warriors arcade.
But quite often it just doesn't work. I think these are just longstanding bugs.
For example, in Sonic the Hedgehog, using the default Retro Pie settings, the screen is stretched to some kind of non-4:3 ratio. To fix this, I had to change the setting in the "emulator config" menu to force 4:3 for the Genesis emulator. How can such a popular game already cause this to fail?
The "core provided" setting also fails with many vertically oriented games and many multi-screen games. It also gives the wrong aspect ratio when using the advanced "screen rotation" option, e.g. it does not switch from 4:3 to 3:4 when rotating a 4:3 game by 90 degrees.
Once those remaining bugs are all fixed, nobody should have to manually change aspect ratios anymore. But in the meantime, a little fiddling with the "emulator config" menu is required, on a per-emulator basis. Alternatively, the correct settings could be made default to spare users from having to mess with this stuff.
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@rsn8887 said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
Yes, in principle "core provided" should work and give 4:3/3:4 for almost all games. And it should give the correct non-4:3 aspect ratios for games such as Ninja Warriors arcade.
But quite often it just doesn't work. I think these are just longstanding bugs.
For example, in Sonic the Hedgehog, using the default Retro Pie settings, the screen is stretched to some kind of non-4:3 ratio. To fix this, I had to change the setting in the "emulator config" menu to force 4:3 for the Genesis emulator. How can such a popular game already cause this to fail?
what emulator? "core provided" leaves the aspect ratio calculation up to the emulator, which is almost always what you want to do. i suspect something else is going on here with your config. can you show an example?
The "core provided" setting also fails with many vertically oriented games and many multi-screen games. It also gives the wrong aspect ratio when using the advanced "screen rotation" option, e.g. it does not switch from 4:3 to 3:4 when rotating a 4:3 game by 90 degrees.
only if the emulator hasn't been fully coded to account for this. lr-mame2003 and lr-fbalpha for example have no problems here, and are generally the ones that you should be using.
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Some good info here guys.
So do you think I should set it to core provided to get the correct Aspect ratio for arcade games?
Also, is there a way to shrink the image to smaller version in centre of my HD TV? -
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
So do you think I should set it to core provided to get the correct Aspect ratio for arcade games?
like i said, it depends what emulator you're using. lr-mame2003 and lr-fbalpha will use the correct aspect ratio when set to 'core provided'. lr-mame2010 has problems i believe.
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@dankcushions said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
So do you think I should set it to core provided to get the correct Aspect ratio for arcade games?
like i said, it depends what emulator you're using. lr-mame2003 and lr-fbalpha will use the correct aspect ratio when set to 'core provided'. lr-mame2010 has problems i believe.
Im not even sure what emulator its using. I think its lr-mame2003.
I will try these settings later tonight:
Aspect Ratio: Core Provided
Integer Scale: OnCustom Aspect Ratio 4x
If I set these do I have to make sure that any settings in retroarch.cfg are defaulted as well?
ie... I have aspect ratio set to unset i think.
I tried tinkering a little with the configuration editor but not sure what difference it made.
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@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@dankcushions said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
So do you think I should set it to core provided to get the correct Aspect ratio for arcade games?
like i said, it depends what emulator you're using. lr-mame2003 and lr-fbalpha will use the correct aspect ratio when set to 'core provided'. lr-mame2010 has problems i believe.
Im not even sure what emulator its using. I think its lr-mame2003.
I will try these settings later tonight:
Aspect Ratio: Core Provided
yes
Integer Scale: On
this will scale via integer values - this will not neccesarily give the correct aspect ratio. this is not the default
Custom Aspect Ratio 4x
same as above. this is not the default.
If I set these do I have to make sure that any settings in retroarch.cfg are defaulted as well?
ie... I have aspect ratio set to unset i think.
I tried tinkering a little with the configuration editor but not sure what difference it made.
like i said, the defaults are correct. if you've changed a bunch of stuff then it's difficult to say what you need to do to get back to 'normal'.
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@dankcushions said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@dankcushions said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
So do you think I should set it to core provided to get the correct Aspect ratio for arcade games?
like i said, it depends what emulator you're using. lr-mame2003 and lr-fbalpha will use the correct aspect ratio when set to 'core provided'. lr-mame2010 has problems i believe.
Im not even sure what emulator its using. I think its lr-mame2003.
I will try these settings later tonight:
Aspect Ratio: Core Provided
yes
Integer Scale: On
this will scale via integer values - this will not neccesarily give the correct aspect ratio. this is not the default
Custom Aspect Ratio 4x
same as above. this is not the default.
If I set these do I have to make sure that any settings in retroarch.cfg are defaulted as well?
ie... I have aspect ratio set to unset i think.
I tried tinkering a little with the configuration editor but not sure what difference it made.
like i said, the defaults are correct. if you've changed a bunch of stuff then it's difficult to say what you need to do to get back to 'normal'.
Your confusing me lol
If i go to all libretro configs, then into mame and arcade conconfig files. everything is more or less set to unset.
If someone can paste here what their settings are for retroarch / video settings. we can go from there.
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@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
Your confusing me lol
What he is saying is that if you leave well enough alone and don't add any extra configurations, lr-mame2003 will scale the game to fill your display using whatever aspect ratio is correct for the given ROM. Crucially, this might NOT be proportional scaling because the game image was often stretched to fill original arcade cabinet CRT displays (4:3). AND it is rarely integer scaling because using integer magnification would prevent the stretching needed in one direction or the other to reproduce the original aspect ratio. Besides, integers rarely multiply out to exactly fit your display's resolution. BUT it will look correct, or at least it should match the way it looked in the arcade.
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@caver01 said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
Your confusing me lol
What he is saying is that if you leave well enough alone and don't add any extra configurations, lr-mame2003 will scale the game to fill your display using whatever aspect ratio is correct for the given ROM. Crucially, this might NOT be proportional scaling because the game image was often stretched to fill original arcade cabinet CRT displays (4:3). AND it is rarely integer scaling because using integer magnification would prevent the stretching needed in one direction or the other to reproduce the original aspect ratio. Besides, integers rarely multiply out to exactly fit your display's resolution. BUT it will look correct, or at least it should match the way it looked in the arcade.
Thanks for the info.
I don’t want the image to fit my display, I just want it to be the games corrext ratio and potentially smaller on my screen with more black borders. -
So, it’s a strange thing. When I set a resolution of 320x224 the game fits the screen and plays smooth but looks terrible.. When I set 640x448 the game slows down sometimes like my graphics card is keek.
Wtf
It’s as if RetroPie can’t handle Outrun! -
@retrocraze nothing is worse than a keek graphics card. I hate when that happens.
What emulator are you using? What ROM? What computer? There are so many variables.
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@caver01 said in Original Resolution / Aspect for each game:
@retrocraze nothing is worse than a keek graphics card. I hate when that happens.
What emulator are you using? What ROM? What computer? There are so many variables.
Lol!
I’m using a Raspberry Pi3 with RetroPie.
The rom I am trying to get playing smoothly is Sega Outrun on Mame.
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@retrocraze you still gotta be more specific. There are nine versions of MAME you could be using.
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