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    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by Nicholas Steel

    It's really bizarre going from the NES games which did take advantage of the increased vertical resolution, to the SNES games which squished everything.
    Well, in the Nintendo's case, there was no option to NOT output all 240 lines(there was just an assumption that they were outside the screen on NTSC development). On a PAL system, all of those lines would be visible under all but the worst conditions.
    There wasn't actually an increase in resolution(much less support for PAL50's higher vertical resolution). Just increased pressure on developers to not ship stupid shit.

    In the Super Nintendo's case, there WAS a flag to suppress 16 scanlines and only output 224 lines. Which, since 16 of them "would" fall outside the screen seemed a really good idea. Again, to my understanding there's no actual support for PAL50's higher vertical resolution, so you're still getting letterboxed. There's just no longer that pressure on developers to make sure the first and last eight lines are clean, because they can actually be suppressed entirely.

    In both cases, everything was squished. It was still 240 lines in a 280-line frame, and pixels were less tall because of it. It is just the Super Nintendo offered the option to output 224 lines in a 240 or 280-line frame, and absolutely everyone used it.



    Unrelated: The Wikipedia article for PAL contains sections entitled "PAL vs NTSC" and "PAL vs SECAM". Neither the NTSC nor SECAM articles have similar subsections. This made me laugh.
    I think someone has an inferiority complex about their flickery TVs with their limited color space.
    Nicholas Steel
    Posted by jjndig
    SMW was one of the only games that optimised the resolution to 240 lines on the PAL version right? Even DKC didn’t do that surprisingly :p


    It's weird that they didn't do the same kinda optimizations for the other games in the Super Mario All-Stars collection, Super Mario All-Stars + World collection and the uh, collection that included all of them and Super Mario World 2 (was that a thing?)

    It's really bizarre going from the NES games which did take advantage of the increased vertical resolution, to the SNES games which squished everything.
    jjndig SMW was one of the only games that optimised the resolution to 240 lines on the PAL version right? Even DKC didn’t do that surprisingly :p
    Kakashi In PAL land, we got all the pixels, but technically squashed. With a PAL60 mod, I got all the pixels, but I think my CRT TV at the time was too new to have much overscan.
    creaothceann Of course the overscan varied from TV to TV, depending on how it's calibrated.

    The SNES does only 224 visible lines at most in NTSC mode.
    KingMike Did that thread just say NTSC gives us 256 pixels and some of the 288 pixels are lost from overscan.
    Because I sure remember on the SNES not getting even the 256 pixels visible on my CRTs as a kid. Sometimes losing as much as 8-16 pixels from each edge. Probably at least 8 of the visible scanlines from the top and bottom as well.
    (I recall Sega's docs told devs to consider at least 16 pixels from each edge of the "visible" screen to be potentially lost to overscan when designing games.)

    I know NES did 240 lines, but I believe as RHDN has noted for its reason for accepting 224-line screenshots is that it was common for devs to not even bother managing the farthest scanline data and leave garbage there, like "nobody will ever see it anyways".
    creaothceann Relevant:
    http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19599
    http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15855
    CaptainJistuce If I'm not mistaken, the Master System VDP, like other TMS9918 derivatives, outputs a 256*192 image inside a 320-ish*240 frame.
    hunterk Wikipedia says 256x192:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_System#Technical_specifications
    CaptainJistuce I'm not a Master System expert, but 240 lines does sound wrong.
    KingMike At least, going by the list in byuu's Twitter.

    "SMS 256x240"
    I thought the standard resolution was 256x192.
    What I had thought was that 224 lines was only supported by a VDP revision commonly known as the "SMS2" VDP since it was more commonly found in model 2 consoles. And possibly only PAL at that. At the least, the only games reported to have used it were Codemasters games, which I believe were made only for the PAL market. (and speculation on SMS Power has been made that maybe Codemasters developed their games on a later console without being aware of the difference).
    Not sure if 240 lines was even used. (was that also only PAL, or am I confusing it with the Mega Drive? I suppose it doesn't matter too much unless games used it.)
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