byuu's message board

You are, I hope, aware that if you give up on convincing a bigot that he's wrong, he'll claim victory?

Trust me; I read Pharyngula.

Here's something I just thought of: what if you were to render the screen of, say, a GBA at 256×256 instead of the intended 240×160? And I don't mean scaling the final output to that size, but actually... let's just get some visual aids in here.


This is what Pokémon Fire Red is supposed to look like. Pay no attention to the quick randomly-picked name.

If we were to render the screen at the dimensions of an entire tilemap, we'd get something like this:

The help bar is no longer aligned to the bottom of the screen and is not wide enough to cover the full distance. The menu too is out of alignment. But wait, there's more!


Everyone knows there's supposed to be a fat guy further down! He's just in range, but wouldn't actually be present in OAM at our current location. He's culled, cos he's out of the game's (rightly presumed) viewing frustrum. That means, if we were to play on a 256×256 screen, the fat guy would suddenly pop into view and then scroll along, like a piece of scenery in an old 3D racing game or whatever.

There's a good chance you'd see scrolling glitches too, depending on how the game updates the tilemap.

Sure, you could make anything possible if you include enough game specific hacks. You could have a hack that replaces the entire game with a port that natively targets the resolution. But I don't think it'd be fair to consider it a bug just because this doesn't go to the most heroic attempts possible to cover up all issues it introduces.

And DeSmuME X432R already invokes heuristics and at least one game specific hack to make the graphics work better. While we don't know for sure it couldn't have perfect results with a combination of heuristics and hacks, in practice this will almost certainly never happen. And right now there are plenty of problems - for instance, look at the player select screen in Mario Kart. But conveniently for you, any time there's a problem with the graphics you'll just say it's a bug that could be fixed, without knowing anything about what's causing it. If I were you I'd just defer to the people who have a better understanding of the inner working of emulators.

BTW, I also intend to explore higher resolution hacks in my DS emulator. I'm just under no illusions that it'll always look right, and there's no way I'd try to present it like that.

As I understand it (third-hand), that's basically Zeromus' take, as well. He's not against the concept, just this particular implementation. This doesn't sit well with end-users, who view it as him rejecting something that already "works" out of NIHism.

Of course, this problem can have a number of causes. Attempting to apply filtering in realtime is one of them, but using the game's 1.0 exe on virtually any graphics card newer than 1997 will do it too, as will having FSAA enabled.

The correct way to filter the backgrounds, of course, is to rip them all from flevel.lgp, piece them together (newer ff7 extraction tools can do this step automatically), filter the extracted image, and then re-insert them into the game. Filtering the individual tiles, even if you can prevent these errors, leads to some nasty looking seams like in the Zelda screenshot.
Then you're not looking close enough. I zoomed in the first screenshot and drew an arrow pointing to the problem area:


As you can (or at least should be able to) see, the logo has sort of a "tiled" look to it. The pieces don't fit together quite correctly.

Here's the same shot, but rendered at the machine's native resolution:


The problem disappears. The logo snaps together as it should.

This is a visual artifact that is explicitly caused by rendering at a resolution other than 320x240. As wareya pointed out, to fix these bugs would be a hack in itself. You'd pretty much have to resort to dishonest math, or hardcoding values for specific cases, neither of which is really a good practice.

Yeah I really sympathize with zeromus on this. The code is pretty esoteric and the very few comments are in Japanese. He is totally right to not just blindly accept big patches, especially if the developer is going to just keep making more patches for future versions. It really requires working with the maintainers directly if you want to get something like this in mainline, something this developer is probably unable or unwilling to do.

Instead of complaining and insulting zeromus over this it'd be much more productive if someone would act as a bridge in figuring out how the code works and then working with the DeSmuME team to integrate it under acceptable terms. But complaining and insulting is a lot less work.

That's actually more extreme than what I remember. I'll fire up the PS1 version when I get home.

Might be related to the fact this is the PC version. This was a common problem back in the day.

> There's a good chance you'd see scrolling glitches too, depending on how the game updates the tilemap.

Even just rendering the actually visible scanline 224 (zero indexed, so the 225th, although we skip scanline #0, so the 224th displayed) on the SNES, we see lots of games that have garbage on the last line. I even have overscan controls so you can lop that line off if you want.

Displaying more of the tilemap, you would see an unbelievable amount of garbage. And on the SNES, it'd be even more fun since tile map size is selectable ... on a per BG basis. I don't even want to imagine what that would look like in practice.

When it comes to not giving a crap about overscan garbage, TMNT for the NES is king. The garbage on the pause screen was plainly visible even on my old, terrible rounded-corner 1980s CRT.

The sad part is that Konami could have easily fixed this by shifting the screen upwards a few lines; the game does clear 240 lines like it's supposed to, but the developers apparently just didn't care.

FF7 on ePSXe 1.9.0 with Pete's OpenGL2 driver 2.9 with almost all the settings maxed out. This is what texture filtering does.

Extended w/o Sprites - unfiltered 2D


Extended + smoothed Sprites


Some screens later on are worse. IIRC the color leaking through is sometimes also pink or black.

If you can't tell what's wrong with the second shot, please report to your nearest optician.

I remember in ppsspp if you took the IR past 2x the entire game hud would disappear in outrun 2006. In the persona 3 port I recall there being black outlines around HUD icons with increased IR. Really if you're not running any game in the original IR you're pretty much asking for trouble. I'm sure there's a lot of even worse stuff if I played through a bunch of games.