@lettuce;
Sorry lettuce but I've always been uncomfortable knowing most people don't understand the benefits of integer scaling, I'm going to add some more - slightly angry - rant but please don't take it personally, as I'll only be expressing a general sentiment I've had for long, on that topic.
Since it's off-topic in this thread I'll put it under
spoiler tags.
EDIT: uh no spoiler tags make it scary.
[rant]Integer scaling is for people who think it needs to scale right before everything, and that when it does it opens the doors to clarity and efficiency considering the state of modern displays. It's for those who don't use heavy, completely exaggerated forms of smeary bleedy ghosty über-smooth atrocities to hide the tons of ugly wrongly-scaled, artifacts-filled output picture, always resource and resolution-hungry solutions that most of the time end-up being simulations of anything but normal well-working RGB low-res CRTs.
And even so, most of those CRT shaders benefit immensely from integer scaling, in many situations unless you have at minimum a WQHD real estate for more effective dissimulation of the scaling errors and inconsistencies, occurences when the scanlines distribution end up wrong, which is affecting the art/colors and motion clarity immensely and therefore realism, are many, many, and much too many. And I know most people don't even
see it, still, that doesn't make them
right.
The race for ever-extended fractional scaling is wrong in a sense that it's not a viable universal and efficient solution IMHO, it's putting the cart before the horse as it doesn't work well for the type of contents it's intended to work on, where any error is easily noticeable for the trained eye and demanding retrogamers, in particular those who've practiced the real deal their whole life.
Now unless one is a sucker for absolute border-to-border display of the games area on their flat panel (which only rarely happened on crt's in real life anyway) and can't deal with a few lines left out like in overscan, or on the opposite can't stand some black borders at times (which did happen a lot) then it's okay, anyone can leave integer scaling off, it's the default anyway.
So
please people don't start ridiculing integer-scaling and by extension unvoluntarily campaigning against it now it's finally back in MAME, we may be a minority, you may not understand our reasons, but some of us have been waiting for it probably about a decade.
Few people will understand yes, and sorry for the upcoming redundance, because the common thinking is to always go supposedly 'forward' in the direction that always requires more of
everything (cpu/gpu/resolution), like it's the only way that works. But doing things right from the start, even if that won't be the final solution, is the choice of accuracy and efficiency at a low cost and universally accessible.
This is also preservation. Why ? because of the circumstances of displays technology reality:
For most people having switched to LCD in this early 21th Century,
---smurfy--- LCD to be exact for 99% of us even today, it would have been actual progress if they'd have realized before thinking of the - still - rendering, that we have to mind what the display is capable of, and maybe make up for its weaknesses, the smart thing is to adapt to the circumstances.
Poor pixel lighting power, poor response and ghosting/smearing, weaker color reproduction, delay, limited signal compatibility, etc, all things that limit, almost
cancel the expected results of really refined/advanced simulation efforts.
It's nice to have super fancy advanced shaders, it's desirable, but until things like super bright UHD OLED displays (or equivalent) have become as common as Full-HD LCDs ended-up becoming in this beginning of the century, then something like integer scaling is more than useful, more than welcome, and should have been a thing already a decade ago.
Yesterday I gave a try to various things using either PNG overlays (always falling right and even more so than before w/ H&V sliders) or hardware smoothing solutions (from my TV or an external scaler) and the results
utterly destroyed anything I've seen in terms of picture quality and clarity, being much more optimal for LCDs particularily in motion, than most if not every filter or shader solution I've experienced so far.
It's a matter of making smart and right choices minding reality, GM allows to choose what games will scroll smooth a the cost of speed accuracy, or to preserve the latter even if it means choppiness.
Unless you're using a display that can do it all without this, it's the only reasonable thing to do.
Well it's the same reasoning with scaling: unless you have a display and PC that can bring out the benefits of higher fractional scaling and advanced shaders, using integer and simpler, lighter ways to make the picture enjoyable, is the reasonable thing to do.
[/rant]
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Topic: GroovyMAME 0.171 - SwitchRes v0.015m (Read 277158 times)
