[HN Gopher] Widescreen Gaming in the 90s
___________________________________________________________________
Widescreen Gaming in the 90s
Author : luu
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-06-18 07:54 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mistys-internet.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mistys-internet.website)
| golergka wrote:
| > This shows you a lot more of the game world than you'd get in
| the standard 4:3 mode, but you can see that all of the 2D
| elements in the scene are displayed with the wrong aspect ratio.
| This lack of aspect ratio correction for 2D elements is common to
| most widescreen games of that era.
|
| In my experience, building game UX for non-fixed aspect ratio
| requires a different and much more complicated architecture from
| the very beginning, so I would be quite surprised if any game
| developers of console titles in the 90s managed to do it. Even
| with modern game engines and layout tools proper support is still
| a headache.
|
| And BTW, game UX is pretty different from the usual business app
| UX: you have a LOT of images that take up tons of texture budget
| (which you can save by slicing it up in creative ways) and you
| can't just stretch them: you have to anchor things up in pretty
| complicated ways. And once you add localisation, support for far-
| eastern languages and cultures (which have a different design
| language) and RTL, things get really interesting.
| lbebber wrote:
| Related--with great timing, as it was just released--, Super
| Mario World Widescreen
| https://twitter.com/HackerVilela/status/1405972177225191427
| crazygringo wrote:
| Seriously talk about timing, from an hour ago!
|
| EDIT: Moving rest of my comment to the new dedicated thread for
| Super Mario World Widescreen:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27554765
| brundolf wrote:
| > Most people got their first taste of widescreen gaming with the
| Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3
|
| To put on my pedantic hat for a minute: the Wii was only ever
| 480p and never truly output in widescreen
|
| _However_ , there was one exception: Super Smash Bros Brawl had
| a "widescreen" mode where it could widen the virtual camera such
| that if you stretched the 640x480 picture across a wide-screen
| TV, it would look correct
|
| Edit: I should have read the article! Brawl did exactly what's
| described here as happening on older consoles
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Huh? Tons of Wii games supported 16x9. That was one of the big
| differences between Twilight Princess on Wii vs. GCN. 16x9
| support.
|
| Loads of original Xbox games supported 16x9 too. Stuff like HL2
| and Doom 3.
| brundolf wrote:
| My main point was that the Wii, unlike the 360 and PS3,
| didn't actually output a 16:9 resolution, it was only able to
| use the trick described in the article, so I wouldn't include
| it under "most people's first taste"
|
| Didn't realize more games used the same trick, though
| anw wrote:
| John Carmack coding Quake on a 100 pound 1080p CRT in 1995[0] is
| a great image that this article reminded me of.
|
| I seem to remember monitors being 800x600 around that time, and a
| few years later did we even see 1024x768 become the norm.
|
| It's mind blowing to imagine what 1080 would be like back in the
| day.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...
| duxup wrote:
| When I built my first computer I remember a guy helping me along
| told me "Your monitor IS your computer. Don't skimp on that."
|
| After that I always had a nice monitor and it really was true. No
| matter how slow my computer was / is ... having a big screen to
| use it on makes it a lot easier to tolerate.
|
| I always found it funny how some games were able to handle wide
| screen with no issues, others much more difficult.
| anw wrote:
| This is an important point, and an oft-quoted mantra I've seen
| from older devs.
|
| Your computer will change, and has little to know difference on
| your health.
|
| Your monitor, keyboard, mouse (and chair/desk can also be
| included) are your long term tools that you use to interact
| with your computer. They can be a benefit or detriment to your
| health (eye strain, RSI, back pain). If you have to work with
| your computer for your job, and do so for many years, it's
| worth it to purchase tools that have long term benefits.
| hyakosm wrote:
| > Since there isn't a widescreen resolution in the SDTV standards
|
| En Europe we had WSS (Widescreen signaling), a digital signal
| embedded in line 23 describing the aspect ratio: full 16/9, full
| 4/3, letterbox 16/9, etc. It was very useful in late 2000s for
| owners of 16/9 CRT TVs.
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen_signaling)
| spullara wrote:
| A friend of mine had one of these in the late 90s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW
| trzy wrote:
| The Sega Model 3 (ca. 1996-1998) arcade emulator I co-wrote
| supports arbitrarily wide resolutions and expands the field of
| view of the 3D content to fit the screen width. It works
| beautifully despite the games performing culling at the original
| aspect ratio. If you choose a really extreme aspect you might
| catch objects being culled or ceasing to animate.
|
| Model 3 also had a couple of 2D tile map layers which are more
| difficult to handle consistently.
|
| You can see an example here (a few seconds in, there is a scene
| with a foreground layer that isn't stretched, revealing the
| expanded viewport behind it): https://youtu.be/fGQodD4I600
|
| In the intro sequence, a driver hops out of a burning car and
| then freezes at the edge of the screen. This normally would have
| been outside of the visible viewport. Otherwise, everything looks
| as expected.
| bityard wrote:
| In the linked forum thread, someone asked whether there were even
| widescreen standard-def CRTs around at the time.
|
| The answer is yes, but they were fairly uncommon. Most of these
| games were produced around the same time that DVDs were new to
| the scene. One of the "killer features" of DVDs was widescreen
| content and much-better-than-VHS picture quality, finally
| allowing the average person to get something very close to the
| movie theater experience in their own home. If they had a large
| high-end widescreen TV, that is...
|
| The "widescreen" TVs at the time were mostly projection TVs
| (which did use a CRT tube, but were not usually referred to as
| CRT TVs) and plasma TVs. Plasma displays were somewhat popular
| for a fairly short period between the dominance of CRT and LCD
| TVs. But they were fairly expensive, so the vast majority of
| households simply went directly from 4:3 CRTs to widescreen LCDs
| once the prices on the latter dropped dramatically.
|
| The companies releasing DVD movies typically either sold a
| particular movie in separate "standard" or "widescreen" editions,
| or bundled them both into the same box/disc because it was clear
| to _them_ that widescreen in the home was the future. And it was
| easy: pretty much every film was widescreen already. However,
| video game makers were targeting the existing market which was
| mainly 4:3 CRT TVs and designing a game for both aspect ratios
| was usually not trivial. Hence why there were not many games that
| supported it. It was just a nice bonus for trade show booths and
| rich kids.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I don't think many game devs thought that their creations would
| live on. Most probably figured their games would be off store
| shelves in a year or two and completely irrelevant in three to
| four. So it makes sense they would not have planned for the
| future.
|
| I'm sure no one, but a few prescient individuals, ever
| considered retro gaming/emulation would be a huge thing in 30
| years. Even I can't believe it when I see seven year olds
| wanting to play SNES games.
|
| The film industry had been around long enough by the 90s to
| have realized that there will be a market for classic movies
| and that it behooved the industry to future-proof when
| possible, especially for blockbuster films.
| kstrauser wrote:
| We had a Sony Wega TV CRT that had a special "16:9 Enhanced"
| anamorphic mode that basically narrowed the vertical scan area
| of the electron gun while keeping the same number of lines. For
| a while you could find specially mastered DVDs that digitized
| the source material at a higher than normal vertical
| resolution. If you played them on a normal TV, everything would
| appear vertically stretched. If you played them on the Wega (or
| other similar TVs? _Were_ there others?), then the picture
| would be scaled down correctly and would appear super sharp and
| bright.
|
| [0] https://www.manualslib.com/manual/321453/Sony-Wega-
| Klv-15sr1...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-18 23:01 UTC)