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Post by roushimsx on Jun 14, 2013 19:20:41 GMT -5
Could the strange widescreen-ness be because of the way that the Saturn rendered polygons? Instead of dividing into triangles, it was done with quadrilaterals. The two are unrelated.
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Post by Super Orbus on Jun 14, 2013 22:26:01 GMT -5
I think it had more to do with the hardware of the time being designed with 4:3 displays in mind. Likely only 4:3 display modes were supported, so this was a way to cheat and let the tv do some of the work. One other possibility is performance reasons. A widescreen resolution with the same number of vertical lines as the equivalent 4:3 resolution requires pushing substantially more pixels. Since most customers at the time would be using 4:3 displays, you'd want to optimize the game for that aspect ratio. But then switching to widescreen would impact performance adversely.
Dragon Quest VIII does the same thing to achieve widescreen.
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Post by bakudon on Jun 15, 2013 2:53:36 GMT -5
A few more, now that I'm at it, from the second page: - Paragraph 15: "...the storytelling was the original" -> "in the original"
- Paragraph 18: "...instead the multiple arrangements of level themes used in the different sections." -> missing "are"?
- Paragraph 19: "...there are lot of problems" -> "lots"
- Paragraph 19: "...resulting in game..." -> "in a game"
- Paragraph 19: "There's at least 75% of a pretty decent game ... it just involves suffering through the other 25%..." -> Seems to be missing something connecting the two parts, maybe a "but"?
- Paragraph 19: "...resulting in game..." -> "in a game"
- "...stages are three-dimensional, despite relying totally on 3D graphics." -> Probably meant to say "2D graphics"?
- Paragraph 1: "...shortest amount of times." -> "time", I think?
- Paragraph 1: "both Nights and Reala makes a brief appearance in the Dreamcast board game Sonic Shuffle, who replace the guide character Lumina Flowlight." -> "Both"; "make"; "replacing" would be better, I think.
- Paragraph 3: "...this is perhaps necessarily..." -> "necessary"
- The title is "Tsubasa ga Nakute mo Sora wa Toberu. Because "toberu" is the potential form, a more accurate translation would be "one can fly in the sky even without wings", or something like that.
Your local proofreader, signing off.
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Post by benoitren on Jun 15, 2013 17:28:34 GMT -5
One thing you didn't touch upon is Air NiGHTS. It was a Dreamcast sequel that got scrapped when Yuji Naka and his team realised that they didn't want to make a sequel because the original was dear to them (or so he said in an interview). The game would have been the same, except you'd use some kind of motion control where your motions would translate into NiGHTS's movements. Also worth mentioning is that the A-Life system lived on in the Sonic Adventure games in the form of the Chao Garden. I think it's better if the cameos are listed in chronological order. By the way, using tags in the article's HTML title won't work. Wizeman doesn't rule Nightopia. He rules the world of Nightmare. He does want to take over Nightopia, though, and if he achieves this he could gain access to the real world. NiGHTS is actually a Nightmaren who gained sentience and started rebelling against Wizeman. This even becomes a plot point in the Wii sequel/remake. Where did you get that the Saturn version runs in 240p? It doesn't. All systems at the time outputted an interlaced video signal. As a Sonic fan, I dispute this. Sure, we didn't like fishing as Big the Cat, but every other character was fun to play in their own way. By your logic, Shadow's stages were lousy, too.
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Post by blackdrazon on Jun 19, 2013 14:12:51 GMT -5
This article's got me curious: what's going to happen to the Wii game's weather system once the Forecast Channel goes down next week? I assume the feature's just going to go dead, sunny days all around. Too bad.
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Post by Discoalucard on Jun 19, 2013 15:03:10 GMT -5
Where did you get that the Saturn version runs in 240p? It doesn't. All systems at the time outputted an interlaced video signal. I was under the impression that all older video game systems (32-bit and prior) output a progressive signal at "low" resolutions (240 on NTSC) and interlaced at "high"(480). Following up to your reply, I checked it out here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-definition_televisionWhich in turn references this article: scanlines.hazard-city.de/So it's the sort of case where it outputs an interlaced image but layers both sets of lines on top of each other, so it's basically a progressive image. Hence why there's nothing known as 240i, only 240p.
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Post by benoitren on Jun 19, 2013 17:59:43 GMT -5
Oh, just like the NES does? That's not really progressive, but it's a good trick to fake it.
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Post by Dracula on a bike on Jun 19, 2013 22:25:23 GMT -5
A widescreen resolution with the same number of vertical lines as the equivalent 4:3 resolution requires pushing substantially more pixels. That's true when the pixels are square (1:1 pixel aspect ratio), but in the CRT era it was fairly common to have non-square pixels. For example, the maximum (and most common) video resolution for DVD-Video discs is 720x480 (in regions using 480i60 analog television) or 720x576 (in regions using 576i50 analog television), which if rendered with square pixels would give a frame aspect ratio of 3:2 or 5:4 (respectively). However, the actual screens they were intended to be played on have an aspect ratio of either 4:3 or 16:9, thus the pixel aspect ratio ends up being 8:9 (when screen is 4:3 and vertical resolution is 480), 32:27 (when screen is 16:9 and vertical resolution is 480), 16:15 (when screen is 4:3 and vertical resolution is 576), or 64:45 (when screen is 16:9 and vertical resolution is 576), but never 1:1. For another example, the Capcom CPS and CPS2 arcade boards had a framebuffer resolution of 384x224, which when rendered with square pixels would result in an aspect ratio of 12:7. It seems fairly common to see emulator screenshots of CPS games rendered at the native 384x224 resolution with no scaling, thus making everything onscreen look obviously wider than it should be; for example, this one: Where did you get that the Saturn version runs in 240p? It doesn't. All systems at the time outputted an interlaced video signal. The "logical" vertical resolution of older game consoles was often less than the amount of analog TV scan lines. As for the Saturn, what I've read about it indicates it had a huge amount of different video modes / resolutions, but the resolution of the emulator screenshots from the article is 351x224, for example: though some things I've read say instead that one of the supported native resolutions was actually 352x224.
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Post by Discoalucard on Jun 20, 2013 10:00:58 GMT -5
NiGHTS probably runs at 352x224, the emulator probably just cut off a pixel due to either a bug or that particular line being blank.
Annoyingly the Saturn doesn't support 256x224, which is the reason why that version of Symphony of the Night looks so awful. They had to rescale all of the graphics and made everything look all jagged. I'll have to check how the system rendered CPS2 games, because none of the consoles ever QUITE supported the same resolution, and usually end up looking at least a little wrong.
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Post by Dee Liteyears on Jun 20, 2013 10:44:06 GMT -5
I'll have a look at Night Warriors in SSF later. Though I have the PAL version if this matters for you
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Post by starscream on Jun 20, 2013 10:49:44 GMT -5
Cyberbots runs in 352x224, so I would assume that most if not all ports use that. The Playstation seems to be a good deal more flexible with regards to width, if emulator output is not misleading. One of the Street Fighter Alphas uses 366 horizontal res, and that Konami Salamander pack 288 pixels (like the arcade?) from what I've seen.
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Post by Dee Liteyears on Jun 20, 2013 11:29:15 GMT -5
This is what I get with SSF. Scaling is set to 1x, so I have no clue why it seems doubled Resized it gives me a res of 352 x 224 too
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Post by Discoalucard on Jun 21, 2013 8:28:04 GMT -5
That's pretty close to CPS2, so I guess in the porting process. maybe they cut off like 16 pixels on each side, and then everything else is the correct proportion. I'd need to look at a side-by-side to compare.
I guess this is why they never QUITE look right on other platforms - they seem to squish them slightly, to fit into 640x480 (or higher in HD resolutions).
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Post by Dracula on a bike on Jun 22, 2013 0:11:01 GMT -5
That's pretty close to CPS2, so I guess in the porting process. maybe they cut off like 16 pixels on each side, and then everything else is the correct proportion. Assuming that the sprites/backgrounds/etc. were not rescaled at all in the porting process (which does appear to be the case here) and the CPS2 boards are/were in cabinets with 4:3 monitors, then the Saturn version's sprites (and all other graphics) would appear stretched in the vertical direction by an extra one-eleventh (about 9%) of their originally-intended width when running on a Saturn connnected to a 4:3 TV set. I'm guessing that the porters considered this to be such a small amount of strectching that it didn't matter. By comparison, unscaled CPS2 emulator screenshots (like the ones currently in the Darkstalkers article) will appear to be vertically stretched by an extra two-sevenths (about 29%) of their originally-intended width, when displayed on a modern computer monitor (or any display with square pixels).
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Dec 3, 2014 4:58:28 GMT -5
Since last week and for one more, the PC version can be bought in the current "main" Humble Bundle. For a single dollar you can get it, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, and Dreamcast Collection (Sonic Adventure, Space Channel 5 Part 2, Crazy Taxi, SEGA Bass Fishing).
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