Stretching 16:9

[Anuskuss]

I just read the new (well June/July) progress report and Fix Cropping Aspect Ratios... Again caught my attention. Inside Graphics -> Advanced you have the option to switch between cropping and showing the whole output. Would it make sense to transform that into a toggle that lets you switch between:

• Show everything
• Crop
• Stretch
  

I know that it is technically possible to do that Graphics -> General by forcing 16:9, but that also stretches 4:3 games. Basically what I want is to restore the output before Crop was introduced/fixed. What an option like this make sense?

Best regards

[JMC47]

Hey, sorry I missed your message on IRC.

I do think all of these options could be simplified a bit at this point. Finding an easy way to do that would be a bit of a problem though, considering the behavior of the broken crop was actually a bug. I think something in general... such as adding another dropdown for it.

Maybe it could have "Show All Pixels", "Crop to Aspect Ratio", and "Stretch to Aspect Ratio" or something like that. Maybe a proper bug/feature report would be nice once we hammer out something that makes everyone happy.

[Anuskuss]

(08-16-2019, 05:05 PM)JMC47 Wrote: Maybe it could have "Show All Pixels", "Crop to Aspect Ratio", and "Stretch to Aspect Ratio" or something like that.

I like it.
To add to this, some 4:3 GameCube games (probably many GCN/Wii games in general) have black bars at the top and bottom. Is that something created by the game or by Dolphin? If they are in fact created by the game/hardware, I think those would not show up on CRTs due to overscan. Could we implement something that removes those, preferably autonomously?

[MayImilae]

@anu... ok I won't type that. As mentioned in the progress report, the small black bars are normal because the game doesn't output exactly 4:3 or 16:9. Games always render a little off, since they are expecting the television to overscan anyway. On console games do not distort, they crop. So yes the "black bars" are console accurate, they were just cropped out due to overscan. To recreate that behavior, turn on the Crop setting. But if you want to see absolutely everything the game renders, leave Crop off. Under no circumstances is distortion accurate emulation. As a default, we prefer to show everything the game renders, so by default crop is off.

And of course if you don't care about stretching the image and just want a game to be absolutely a specific aspect ratio, distortion and all, use Stretch to Window under Aspect Ratio.

@JMC Hella no thank you to a "Stretch to aspect ratio" setting bundled with crop. We SO do not need subtle distortion behaviors buried in the Advanced tab. If we're going to change anything, it would be to have 4:3, 16:9, and Force 4:3, and Force 16:9 aspect ratio settings. The 4:3 and 16:9 would be distortion free (for those that feel like they need to set the aspect ratio for whatever reason), while the force ones would absolutely force the display to that aspect ratio, distortion and all. It's where aspect ratio settings should be and it is nice and clear.

[Anuskuss]

(08-16-2019, 06:49 PM)MayImilae Wrote: @anu... ok I won't type that. As mentioned in the progress report, the small black bars are normal because the game doesn't output exactly 4:3 or 16:9. Games always render a little off, since they are expecting the television to overscan anyway. On console games do not distort, they crop. So yes the "black bars" are console accurate, they were just cropped out due to overscan. To recreate that behavior, turn on the Crop setting. But if you want to see absolutely everything the game renders, leave Crop off. Under no circumstances is distortion accurate emulation. As a default, we prefer to show everything the game renders, so by default crop is off.

Yeah, I've read the progress report but I have questioned myself as Crop is not working as intended in Mario Party 7. Aren't the black bars at the top/bottom supposed to be cropped away then?

To add to this, and explain why this catched my attention in the first place: I recently saw a video which talks about aspect ratios. So basically the crux of the video is that the SNES renderes (which square pixels that is) at 8:7 ratio, while most, if not all TVs at that time displayed at 4:3 and how there is no "correct" aspect ratio. Some games accommodate for the stretched image (proven by circular objects not appearing circular in the opposing format), while others don't; so determining what's right or wrong or accurate isn't always that easy. Snes9x, the fast SNES emulator, defaults to 8:7, while bsnes, the accuracy-focused true-to-the-hardware emulator picks 4:3.

(08-16-2019, 06:49 PM)MayImilae Wrote: And of course if you don't care about stretching the image and just want a game to be absolutely a specific aspect ratio, distortion and all, use Stretch to Window under Aspect Ratio.

Since I'm only ever playing in fullscreen that means Force 16:9 for me. I think it's a shame that some people like to play their retro games stretches to 16:9 (or even 21:9 ) but the important thing is to have a choice.

(08-16-2019, 06:49 PM)MayImilae Wrote: @JMC Hella no thank you to a "Stretch to aspect ratio" setting bundled with crop. We SO do not need subtle distortion behaviors buried in the Advanced tab. If we're going to change anything, it would be to have 4:3, 16:9, and Force 4:3, and Force 16:9 aspect ratio settings. The 4:3 and 16:9 would be distortion free (for those that feel like they need to set the aspect ratio for whatever reason), while the force ones would absolutely force the display to that aspect ratio, distortion and all. It's where aspect ratio settings should be and it is nice and clear.

I agree that if something like this was to be integrated, it should definitely happen in Graphics -> Aspect ratio. Here are my suggestions:

• Full - show everything without distortion (current Auto)
• Auto - detect black borders and crop them away
• Crop - same as Auto but crop even more to get true 16:9 (and 4:3; current Crop)
• Stretch - crop 4:3 like Auto, stretch ~16:9 to true 16:9
• Fill - Take whole window
• Force to 4:3/16:9 (I think those are not very useful but someone may use them idk)
  

Best regards

P.S. How does SMG (or any other non perfectly rendering widescreen game) look like on a real Wii with an ordinary 16:9 TV - black bars left/right or stretched/cropped? I think I've never seen black bars playing on my Wii but don't quote me on that.

[JosJuice]

(08-17-2019, 12:16 AM)Anuskuss Wrote: P.S. How does SMG (or any other non perfectly rendering widescreen game) look like on a real Wii with an ordinary 16:9 TV - black bars left/right or stretched/cropped? I think I've never seen black bars playing on my Wii but don't quote me on that.

If you're playing on an HDTV that doesn't crop out anything at the sides, every Wii game will have black borders on all four sides. (At least that's my experience when using the Wii U's HDMI output.) But TVs generally do crop unless you manually turn it off in the settings, and CRTs always crop.

[Anuskuss]

(08-17-2019, 12:25 AM)JosJuice Wrote: If you're playing on an HDTV that doesn't crop out anything at the sides, every Wii game will have black borders on all four sides. (At least that's my experience when using the Wii U's HDMI output.) But TVs generally do crop unless you manually turn it off in the settings, and CRTs always crop.

Now that you mentioned it... I do remember my Kodi being cut-off on all sides when I hooked up my Raspberry Pi to my TV. I tried to fiddle around for days with overscan in RPis firmware and Kodis advanced settings until I finally figured out that my TV was cropping the image. That's maybe the reason why I didn't see any black bars, although it sounds pretty ugly to have a black border all around your image - my PS4 handles it just fine.

[JosJuice]

Yes, modern video game consoles can output an image with no black borders just fine. The Wii was the last Nintendo console that couldn't. I guess it's tied to the shift from analog signals to digital signals.

[Anuskuss]

I still don't know why anybody would want to force 4:3 but instead of just enforcing the aspect ratio, it should also change the display setting in the internal Wii settings.

Example: Mario Party 8