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Genesis & SNES Resolution


Special T

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I was looking online at the tec specs for the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo and I noticed that they have multiple resolutions

- Genesis: 256x224, 320x224, 320x448 
- SNES: From 256x224 to 512x448

Does anyone have a list of what games utilize which resolutions?

 

 

Edited by Special T
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There's not a whole lot of info on this that I could find with a quick Google search but I did find this discussion about it:

http://hg101.proboards.com/thread/12143/genesis-games-lower-resolution?page=1

From what I gathered out of it the vast majority of Genesis games use 320x240 while a smaller percentage used 256x224 and the 320x448 was used in split screen games.

The SNES stuff used 256x224 for the game and some games used the higher 512x448 for menus.

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Thank you both for the quick reply. I tested some of the games in the link you posted but they look normal to me if I display them at 320 x 240. Have you noticed any games that need specific resolutions to look normal or do you just play all your genesis games at 320 x 240 and all your SNES games at 256 x 224?

Wouldn't the games all get stretched to a 4:3 resolution on real televisions anyway? I don't recall playing any games on real hardware in letterbox mode although it's been a long time since I played any retro games on real hardware.

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I just use Retroarch and let the core set the aspect ratio and use integer scaling and this looks good and "right" to me.

4:3 is the aspect ratio that TVs would "fit" the output image of the console to. So in the case of the Genesis the actual output resolution would be 4:3 like an average CRT TV of the time. In the case of the SNES the output resolution of the console wouldn't be 4:3 but the TV would adjust and "stretch" the image but artists knew that this would happen so they designed it knowing this and allowed for it.

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19 hours ago, Special T said:

Thank you both for the quick reply. I tested some of the games in the link you posted but they look normal to me if I display them at 320 x 240. Have you noticed any games that need specific resolutions to look normal or do you just play all your genesis games at 320 x 240 and all your SNES games at 256 x 224?

Wouldn't the games all get stretched to a 4:3 resolution on real televisions anyway? I don't recall playing any games on real hardware in letterbox mode although it's been a long time since I played any retro games on real hardware.

Its a bit complicated. 

CRT tvs don't have pixels, they have scan lines. A typical NTSC television can display as many as 480 scan lines interlaced. 240p game used half the scan lines drawn, with half the scan lines left blank (that is the pixel gap everybody loves so much). 

The resolution on the console is merely the size of the framebuffer. Everything on a TV is overscanned to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio, or in the case with many NTSC to PAL conversions (PAL TVs have 576 scan lines), letterboxed on the top and bottom to pad the output to 288p or 576i. 

A lot of older consoles didn't necessarily used a fixed resolution even for the same game, although AFAIK all MD games were displayed in progressive mode. 

If you are using retroarch you can set the aspect ratio to 4:3 and use an integer scale to fix the screen as best it can without artifacts. If you are using something like composite out of a RPi3, then you set the height to a fixed 240p, and then you can set the width to a much higher values, like 1800 pixels, which I guess helps get more detail out of the frame buffer. 

If you are using CRT_Emu driver or similar, then there are other options. MESS has MD support, which you can integrate with groovy MAME and then you should be able to get a native Gens, 15khz variable resolution output. I haven't tried it. I am not really sure how MESS compares with Gens GX Plus or other popular emulators in terms of compatibility, accuracy, and performance. 

Edited by mothergoose729
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