My understanding is that the native resolution of CPS2 games is supposed to be 384 x 224 pixels. Well, neither MAME nor FB Alpha put them out in that resolution. I prefer to play at 1x original size, and here is what I get:
MAME puts out a 384 x 288 picture:
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/9579/mame.jpg
and FB Alpha is 310 x 224
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/9269/fba.jpg
What’s going on here?
you’re playing with aspect ratio correction on wide screen 16:10 monitor or full stretch enabled a on standard 4:3 monitor.
Actually, if you play CPS2 games without aspect correction it will look wrong since almost all arcade cabs came with 4:3 aspect ratio monitors.
Here’s your first image resized to 384x224. It looks more correct than either of those to me:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/5113/alphass.jpg
And here’s a related thread on the the Shmup forum.
That Final Burn screen shot looks awful like it’s a GBC port or something where the sprites were mangled.
Neither. I’m playing in windowed mode at 1x zoom.
You don’t think everything looks fat in your pic?? That’s messed up.
I guess this has to do with square vs. non-square pixels and both emulators are correcting that, one by streching vertically and the other by shrinking horizontally. There probably is no other way around this on an LCD monitor.
It is correct in the sense that is the original CPS2 native resolution, however most arcade cabs came with standard 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, and the sprites were meant to be played at that aspect ratio, that’s why the sprites look all wrong and stretched.
I’m guessing he didn’t take the screenshot using the built-in screenshot feature or something like that. All my final burn screenshots are always direct feed (no filters, no stretching regardless of my video/blitter configuration) I’m using fba 29677
384x224 is supposed to look stretched. CPS-1 and CPS-2 games produce a stretched output natively, which is horizontally squished by the monitor in the arcade.
I don’t know the precise reasoning for the numbers, but if they would’ve rendered at 384x288 (4:3), this would’ve bumped them into Extended Resolution territory, which would require a more expensive monitor. Standard Resolution arcade monitors max out at 262 lines (38 blanking, 224 active). They probably wanted better horizontal resolution without the added cost of a high-res monitor.
I didn’t take an internal screenshot on purpose to show you the actual output.
According to the shmups thread linked above, CPS2 games are stretched to fill the monitor, not squished. Which is important for understanding which 4:3 correction is more proper, MAME or FBA’s.
You can think of it however you want, but the point is that the actual CPS output resolution is wider than it is supposed to be presented on-screen. You can think of it as vertically stretching, or horizontally squishing. Using the analog monitor controls you might be vertically stretching it or horizontally squishing it, but in terms of the actual data, it is being squished horizontally to fit the larger-than-usual amount of horizontal resolution onto the screen.
The 224 line output is a proper number of lines for standard res arcade monitors. The ‘extra’ output is all horizontal resolution. This is why they look fat and not tall when you look at the actual unadjusted output at a 1:1 ratio.
You can’t think of it however you want. It’s either always stretching or always squishing. If 224 is indeed the proper number of vertical lines in arcade CRTs, then FBA is doing it right. I was just quoting the other thread since another poster had linked to it earlier.
Apparently you can think of it however you want; s’how we ended up with some people squishing it and some people stretching it.
There isn’t really right or wrong about it if you’re talking digital resizing the way these emulators are doing it. On an analog monitor you’re just resizing the presented image, but the resolution stays the same. In digital you get to either add bogus vertical resolution to stretch the image height, or drop horizontal resolution to reduce it to 4:3. One has reduced horizontal resolution but the right number of lines, while the other has incorrect vertical resolution (some lines doubled, some lines not); both are technically inaccurate images.
So as long as you’re playing on an LCD, it’ll look like poo?