Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

are the shadows just a blob on a real GC when you go in mission or did Sega got lazy with the shadows while porting?

That screenshot was probably just taken with the low-end graphics enabled. The normal graphics setting preserves the GC shadows, but since Sega ported the game to the Xbox and then to the PC, all of the distortion effects are either removed or gimped on both the Xbox and PC versions. That screenshot also has a skin applied to Forest 1, but the point was to compare the proportions of the HUD, which wasn't changed.

Gamecube games played on the Wii display exactly the same as they would on a gamecube. Any difference between captured screenshots has to do with how they were captured. I would guess that the most likely explanation is explanation 1, that the GC ~1.2:1 AR is correct, and the Wii (or at least the capture card) is wrong, and Sega didn't bother to correct the AR when porting the game to the PC (although you'd have to ask sega to be absolutely sure).

(08-07-2015, 11:51 AM)mirrorbender Wrote: [ -> ]Gamecube games played on the Wii display exactly the same as they would on a gamecube.  Any difference between captured screenshots has to do with how they were captured.

To prove your point, I actually posted the wrong screenshot by mistake.



The capture card got 720x480, as one would expect. I accidentally posted an uncorrected framebuffer capture from Devolution, instead.

IMO neither is correct. You probably should be watching this (need more images to guarantee):

(08-07-2015, 01:41 PM)Aleron Ives Wrote: [ -> ]The capture card got 720x480, as one would expect.

720x480 captures (and 720x576 PAL captures too) don't use square pixels. You'll need to scale the image if you want to see it with the correct aspect ratio.

(08-07-2015, 11:55 PM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]720x480 captures (and 720x576 PAL captures too) don't use square pixels. You'll need to scale the image if you want to see it with the correct aspect ratio.

That was my point: the fact that the capture card logged a 720x480 image means that the Wii was outputting a standard NTSC anamorphic AR, so the pixels aren't square. I had incorrectly thought that the 640x480 framebuffer dump was taken with a capture card, which confused me, as if the Wii had been outputting a standard VGA resolution with a 4:3 AR, then it might have been using square pixels, which would have made no sense (as a Wii would have no reason to display a GC game differently than a GC would). It was too late to update my post with the correct information by then, though, as people had already replied.

There's no way to know what the correct DAR is by only looking at the capture, though, as even though there are only two standard ways for scaling video content (4:3 or 16:9), a GC doesn't have to obey those rules and scan scale the image any way it wants. As mirrorbender said, the only way to know whether the 1.2:1 AR was intentional would be to consult one of Sega's employees who worked on the game.

(08-07-2015, 07:44 PM)eckso Wrote: [ -> ]IMO neither is correct. You probably should be watching this (need more images to guarantee):

How did you arrive at 1224x960 (1.275:1) as the correct AR? That doesn't follow any of the established possibilities so far (unless Dolphin is incorrectly detecting how the game is supposed to be scaled and using 1.2:1 in error). I have no idea how mirrorbender's code determines what the correct AR is supposed to be for each game, so I'm not the person to say whether it is detecting PSO's AR correctly. The AR you used does look better to me than the one that Dolphin wants to use, though.

(08-08-2015, 09:01 AM)Aleron Ives Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-07-2015, 07:44 PM)eckso Wrote: [ -> ]IMO neither is correct. You probably should be watching this (need more images to guarantee):

How did you arrive at 1224x960 (1.275:1) as the correct AR?

Grab your last image and apply a PAR of 10/11, you can also use 4320/4739, no idea why Dolphin does it wrong ask mirrorbender.

You're right! I processed the Wii capture in the normal way, and I confirmed your result. It would seem that Dolphin has some kind of bug, unless GC games get processed in a non-standard way. Here's what I did:

1. Starting with the 720x480 original image captured from the Wii, I cropped 8 pixels off the left and 8 pixels off the right of the image to isolate the (mod16) active image area.
   
2. I resized the horizontal resolution from 704 -> 640 using the NTSC SAR of 10:11 (704 * 10 / 11 = 640) to convert to square pixels.
   
3. The image still has black bars on the left and right, so I cropped them (14 black pixels off the left, and 14 off the right).
   
4. The active image area is 612x480 pixels, which has an AR of 1.275:1.
   

Perhaps mirrorbender can confirm what he's doing differently. I read the discussion on the PR, and I got the impression that his magic numbers were very close to 10:11 (for NTSC). M-a-r-k suggested that he should have used 10:11, but the difference is < 1% between those "nice" numbers and the more exact ones mirrorbender used in the PR. The PR is assuming all 486 lines are active, rather than only 480, and it's also only cropping to 711 pixels, rather than 704, but I don't think that can explain it, because if I process the Wii capture the same way, I get the active image area being ~606x480 pixels, which is still only 1.263:1, and not 1.21:1. I'm not sure why we're getting different results from Dolphin. Hopefully mirrorbender can explain how the math of his PR differs from our approach (and why our approach is wrong for GC games, if so). As long as the GC/Wii output standard NTSC video, this should be the correct approach for scaling the output of all games to their original ARs, at least when working "backwards" from a final image.

I use 710.85x486 as the active frame, which gives a PAR of 4320/4739. This is the most precise ITU specification for NTSC. The 10/11 PAR is the nicest number within the margin of error allowed by the specification. The difference is <1%. I prioritized precise adherence to the specification over nice numbers. The actual image area for the GC/Wii is irrelevant, as the 710.85x486 active frame is always what is displayed (or should be displayed), regardless of how much of that actually contains image data (which varies from game to game because of variation in framebuffer size, vertical and horizontal scaling).