But I did a couple of weeks ago:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,159472.msg1677155.html#msg1677155
You don't mind the slightly off aspect ratio though?
Ok, so the little hamster in my head was huffing and puffing on his wheel trying to make sense of this all. I read that thread that you posted Recapnation, and it was thought provoking. I realize in looking back at my post how I communicated it implied I was in the camp of the OP of that thread. To be clear, I don’t
believe that the pictures for games were intended to have black bars. I would fall in your camp of the argument that the intention of the developers was to have the picture fill the screen. The “designing for RGB” vs poorer signal standards seems like a silly argument to me as SCART in Europe provided for a RGB connection, so how could developers design console games for the inferior North American composite/RF and ignore the European RGB? In addition as you pointed out they developed the games undoubtedly on RGB monitors, so there’s that.
But Neil’s question was very thought provoking to me. Given that it appears we accept that the resolution ratios of the games themselves are not perfect 4:3, and given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to fill a 4:3 screen it does imply that some (and I hate to use this word, can’t think of another) stretching is mandated to fill the picture, either vertically or horizontally. How MUCH stretching seems to be the question. So what is the intended look of a game?
Neil’s question about the MK2 aspect ratio got my searching deep last night, and I did come across this video (took a still image) that got me worried that he might be right about the mk2 aspect ratio being off:
This threw me off big time, because even with leaving the original untouched GroovyMame settings the image was “squished” horizontally compared to the image above. The only way to correct for it was to go into the TV’s service menu and dramatically increase the horizontal size, but of course this severally distorted other games. Then after doing more searching of actual mk2 cabinets running on CRT’s I came across this image:
I also checked an LCD with no stretching applied to get this image(has border bezels):
So based on those 2 images it would seem the original mk2 image I posted does not look distorted from an aspect ratio standpoint (I’m judging based off of the square box outlines of the character selection).
But obviously this requires subjection on how much to increase or decrease the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display to make.
Clearly you can change the aspect ratio to the amount you like as evidenced by Calamity’s link to the video:
and indeed to reinforce your point Recapnation, I believe the intention was to do exactly that, have the image be filled on the 4:3 by adjusting the vertical and horizontal size on the hardware of the display so that it fit perfectly on all sides.
Assuming that’s true it makes Neil’s pursuit of making 224p, 240p, and 256p content fit the display vertically seem pretty logical as technically that’s what was done in Arcades. The difficulty as far as I can see it is that it can’t be done in the vertical direction via software because of the inherit limited number of lines. Horizontally it’s not a problem because you can draw a lot of lines (15khz vs. 60hz). So it seems the only real solution is to either put pots on your display (like in the above referenced video), or accept that the aspect ratio isn’t
exactly what was intended. I had never thought of the aspect ratio as being off though until Neil mentioned it.