To me, it looks like your CRT photo is somewhere in between Dolphin and the PC port in terms of how things wide are, so I don't think that simply stretching to 4:3 is correct. Maybe it's the case that if you were to flatten out the curvature of the CRT, it would look rather similar to Dolphin?
(09-20-2021, 07:00 PM)Shady Guy Jose Wrote: [ -> ]I believe I can explain why this is the case. In the age of CRTs, as you probably know, signals had no declared/discrete horizontal resolution, so each line would always be stretched to the full width of a 4:3 panel.
It's not quite that simple. The GameCube outputs some black pixels at the beginning and end of each line (inside the active area) which Dolphin skips outputting, and those have to be taken into account when you determine how wide the TV makes each line.
(09-21-2021, 12:16 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]To me, it looks like your CRT photo is somewhere in between Dolphin and the PC port in terms of how things wide are, so I don't think that simply stretching to 4:3 is correct. Maybe it's the case that if you were to flatten out the curvature of the CRT, it would look rather similar to Dolphin?
It's not quite that simple. The GameCube outputs some black pixels at the beginning and end of each line (inside the active area) which Dolphin skips outputting, and those have to be taken into account when you determine how wide the TV makes each line.
While I do understand what you mean, and it does look like the CRT photo is not as wide as the PC port, flattening it out would make the edges wider, not narrower. What happens with continents close to the poles in a Mercator projection of the Earth is a good example. Greenland looks almost as large as Africa in a Mercator projection, but it's much smaller when viewed in a globe. It's a much more extreme example, of course, but the principle is the same and further proves my point.
Look at the text on the lower left edge of the CRT pic. Aside from the copyright symbol being a circle, the text is already much wider than the Dolphin screenshot, and that's not even taking into account what would happen if we flattened it out. And the circles in the mode selection menu are also closer to perfect circles than to the ovals in Dolphin, I can snap some shots of those, too, if you need them.
As for the black pixels: sure, the correct stretch might not be exactly 40:33 to 4:3, but somewhere in between. However, I honestly believe (and the photos back it up) that 4:3 would be closer than leaving it as is, and we should test it out (giving users the choice in the end if neither option proves to be perfect would be ideal).
(09-21-2021, 01:31 AM)Shady Guy Jose Wrote: [ -> ]While I do understand what you mean, and it does look like the CRT photo is not as wide as the PC port, flattening it out would make the edges wider, not narrower. What happens with continents close to the poles in a Mercator projection of the Earth is a good example. Greenland looks almost as large as Africa in a Mercator projection, but it's much smaller when viewed in a globe. It's a much more extreme example, of course, but the principle is the same and further proves my point.
Yep, you're entirely correct. I'm not sure why I thought it was the other way around
(09-21-2021, 02:07 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]Yep, you're entirely correct. I'm not sure why I thought it was the other way around
I took a ruler to the pictures and did some math. I measured the game logos in all of them, and came up with the following measurements:
CRT: 12×6.3 cm (~1.905:1 aspect ratio)
Dolphin: 10.7×6 cm (~1.783:1 aspect ratio)
PC: 12×6 cm (2:1 aspect ratio)
The absolute size obviously applies to my screen only, and the CRT picture is slightly larger because of overscan, but the ratios should hold. This means Dolphin's output needs to be stretched by approximately 6.8% to match the console's output. Matching the PC output would require a 12.15% stretch, but this is irrelevant, of course, since the point should always be matching the actual console.
Measuring the lower left corner text alone, though, I get an 11.11% stretch to match the CRT picture with Dolphin. This would obviously require additional testing, but I believe it's been established that the picture needs to be stretched, even if not by how much exactly, and that 4:3 would be closer to the real thing.
Can you give us this comparison in-game? UI squish is annoying but doesn't matter much, but if the whole game is messed up? Yea I want to see it.
(09-21-2021, 11:35 AM)MayImilae Wrote: [ -> ]Can you give us this comparison in-game? UI squish is annoying but doesn't matter much, but if the whole game is messed up? Yea I want to see it.
Here. Same amount of squish, as expected.
[
attachment=19831]
Link
I'd like to remind you that this is only one such game, as I've found that this happens with several games that render at anything other than 640×480 internally. I've noticed it with Medabots Infinity and Pokémon Colosseum as well (to a lesser, almost unnoticeable degree with the latter). And it's probably a complex issue, I assume some games will actually look wrong (overstretched) in a CRT, making Dolphin's current behavior desirable for those. That's why I'm advocating for keeping both options (1:1 pixel aspect ratio and 4:3 stretch).
Hmm. it's difficult for me to work with this, having a camera involved makes everything harder on top of the tube warping, but I could gleam some interesting results from this. Comparing Dolphin to PC, the PC version is definitely wider. GameCube to Dolphin though... So I used photoshop to account for that and make the content the same size vertically along the center of the screen (scaling uniformly so as not to affect aspect ratio, of course).
So it gets weird along the horizontal edges due to the tube projection, the tops and bottoms are different due to overscan, and they are not centered in the same way due to the camera introducing perspective. And I also brightened up the Dolphin image to make it easier to see. Yea there is a lot of compensating here. But you look at the tails walker thing, the bar along the bottom, and the buildings vertical orientation along the center.
(flip between these two images quickly between tabs or something)
Dolphin -
https://i.imgur.com/nuX8y37.jpg
GameCube -
https://i.imgur.com/jkWZS71.jpg
The walker is basically the same. From this you could say that Dolphin and console are identical. I'm not going to say that since this is kind of "twice removed" analysis and there are WAY too many opportunities for error in this, but, yea. Looks the same. Well, this is as far as we can go without game capture. I don't have this game, so I'll ask JMC if he can try this on console and do this comparison. He's a bit busy these days but it's not a hard test so we'll see.
(09-21-2021, 09:10 PM)MayImilae Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm. it's difficult for me to work with this, having a camera involved makes everything harder on top of the tube warping, but I could gleam some interesting results from this. Comparing Dolphin to PC, the PC version is definitely wider. GameCube to Dolphin though... So I used photoshop to account for that and make the content the same size vertically along the center of the screen (scaling uniformly so as not to affect aspect ratio, of course). So it gets weird along the horizontal edges due to the tube projection, the tops and bottoms are different due to overscan, and they are not centered in the same way due to the camera introducing perspective. And I also brightened up the Dolphin image to make it easier to see. Yea there is a lot of compensating here. But you look at the tails walker thing, the bar along the bottom, and the buildings vertical orientation along the center. (flip between these two images quickly between tabs or something) Dolphin - https://i.imgur.com/nuX8y37.jpg GameCube - https://i.imgur.com/jkWZS71.jpg The walker is basically the same. From this you could say that Dolphin and console are identical. I'm not going to say that since this is kind of "twice removed" analysis and there are WAY too many opportunities for error in this, but, yea. Looks the same. Well, this is as far as we can go without game capture. I don't have this game, so I'll ask JMC if he can try this on console and do this comparison. He's a bit busy these days but it's not a hard test so we'll see.
I get what you mean, and I'm sorry that I don't have anything better to capture the image with. However, the fact remains that circular objects become ovals in Dolphin and are clearly circles on the TV (copyright symbol in the title screen, menu options in the screenshots I initially sent months ago,
ring icon in the latest gameplay image...). Even with overscan and tube distortion, these are easily comparable elements where we can see marked differences. Here are some pictures where this is painfully obvious to the naked eye:
Full screen and head-on zoom (CRT):
[
attachment=19832]
[
attachment=19833]
Dolphin:
[
attachment=19834]
And Dolphin's output looks right when stretched to 4:3:
[
attachment=19835]
I'll even say that it's very possible that the actual signal follows the internal aspect ratio, but the end result on a CRT — and, as such, the intended result in 2001/2002 — is stretched to 4:3. That's why I'm asking for an additional option to stretch the image to 4:3 (you could even call it CRT mode or something, especially if there's an option for a scanline filter or similar).
UI elements in the final composition are not what we should be focusing on, as the textures can be scaled separately. What matters is the 3D assets, that's where we can definitely spot.
If you want to use the UI elements for this analysis, you'll need to dump those textures and compare them to Dolphin's output. If the textures are a different shape in Dolphin than the texture files, you'll have something.
(09-21-2021, 10:15 PM)MayImilae Wrote: [ -> ]UI elements in the final composition are not what we should be focusing on, as the textures can be scaled separately. What matters is the 3D assets, that's where we can definitely spot.
If you want to use the UI elements for this analysis, you'll need to dump those textures and compare them to Dolphin's output. If the textures are a different shape in Dolphin than the texture files, you'll have something.
I'm using UI elements because they're obvious round shapes, but sure, I'll look for a ball in actual gameplay. I'll also try and dump the textures.