Full screen PAL Amiga games 320x256

[dreadnought]

The problem is not with the small area size. I also grew up with ZX Spectrum and C64 and I can live with it, borders and all.

It's when you start getting ovals instead of circles and chubby characters instead of normally proportioned ones that things get ugly. I don't want to sound too judgemental on ports because I can imagine there were/are various realities of running a software company. But I'm sure laziness and greed played some part too. Kyrandia for example was developed by Westwood, an AAA dev at the time, who surely had enough talent and $$$ to make a decent port. And in general, it's a huge blow to Amiga IQ when comparing things from today's perspective.

PC games were also 320x200, yet they were stretched to fill the screen. Why couldn't Amiga's? Is it about hardware resources?

[britelite]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

PC games were also 320x200, yet they were stretched to fill the screen. Why couldn't Amiga's? Is it about hardware resources?

It's all about screen mode timings, not about hardware resources.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Spectrum had an effective display size of 352x296, and yes you could use it, albeit at a low resolution.

I don't doubt it for a second. But in fairness, almost nothing actually used screen modes like that though. Pretty much all games for the system (like 95%+) run in the standard modes.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Spectrum had an effective display size of 352x296, and yes you could use it, albeit at a low resolution.

By that definition it has the exact same "effective display size" as every single other PAL machine. Being able to change border color doesn't a new screen mode make.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by britelite

It's all about screen mode timings, not about hardware resources.

I guess I should've said "was/is it possible?".

[britelite]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I guess I should've said "was/is it possible?".

Yes, by using NTSC-timings. In PAL-modes you're simply out of luck, as it has a certain amount of visible lines, and nothing will change that.

[dodke]

Most monitors had some vertical size adjustment dial in the back though. So you could make 320x200 games fill a bit more of the screen.

For a lot of games you can kind of guess what the reasons might have been for the used screen size. Either other versions / original / ports used a smaller screen. Or possibly the game used blitter a lot and performance was the issue. With an optimal tile engine that runs smoothly on the Amiga hardware the memory requirements are also quite a bit higher so lack of memory might have been an issue in those cases.

[dodke]

That being said, in a perfect world a lot of Amiga games with issues with viewport size could have still been done a lot better with more effort.

Personally I think the lack of both some background music / sounds and some sound effects in many games is quite unfortunate and an even bigger issue than the viewport size.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by britelite

By that definition it has the exact same "effective display size" as every single other PAL machine. Being able to change border color doesn't a new screen mode make.

You don't just change the border colour. You can draw in the border. It's CPU intensive and practically useless (not to mention having a very low horizontal resolution), but many demoscene productions used it.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by Dunny

You don't just change the border colour. You can draw in the border. It's CPU intensive and practically useless (not to mention having a very low horizontal resolution), but many demoscene productions used it.

You "draw" to it by changing the border colour...

And it still doesn't give you a horizontal resolution of 352 pixels

[roondar]

Originally Posted by britelite

Yes, by using NTSC-timings. In PAL-modes you're simply out of luck, as it has a certain amount of visible lines, and nothing will change that.

You can do the Dynablaster trick to get it to work I suppose, but that kind of is making the PAL system do NTSC timings. And there is something else I kind of forgot: on ECS/AGA systems you can actually run a fair bunch of these 200 line games "full screen" by simply changing over to NTSC mode. Most screens ought to support that. I think I did that at one point for some of the Westwood stuff at any rate.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by britelite

Yes, by using NTSC-timings. In PAL-modes you're simply out of luck, as it has a certain amount of visible lines, and nothing will change that.

Admittedly, I'm quite dumb when it comes to this subject (despite reading about it for years). I just have some mental block...

Just can't solve the puzzle why, when PAL is supposed to have more lines vs NTSC, we can't squeeze more into PAL? Why isn't it possible to fill the screen - or at least fill enough to mantain proportions - in the ports? After all, some games (which the OP is about) did just that, they are full screen.

I don't watch utube normally but have just stumbled upon this vid: [ Show youtube player ]

He really has a field day with PAL Amiga there, I'd say going into the extreme gloat zone quite often, but the fact is the differences really are huge

[dodke]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Just can't solve the puzzle why, when PAL is supposed to have more lines vs NTSC, we can't squeeze more into PAL? Why isn't it possible to fill the screen - or at least fill enough to mantain proportions - in the ports? After all, some games (which the OP is about) did just that, they are full screen.

The same graphic will simply be smaller when viewed at higher resolution. The PAL has more lines so some of them will end up being black. The video signal transmits line by line, left to right, so the vertical frequency of these lines can't be changed without completely changing the signal.
The other problem is you can't easily scale pixel graphics to a different size. A lot of the graphics is drawn pixel by pixel so basically most things would have needed to be redrawn to fit the PAL aspect ratio.
Also a lot of people would not be hugely bothered by the slightly stretched graphics especially if they weren't told about it so it probably wasn't seen as a big deal.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by dodke

Also a lot of people would not be hugely bothered by the slightly stretched graphics especially if they weren't told about it so it probably wasn't seen as a big deal.

Problem is they are not "slightly" stretched. The difference is massive, and I view it side by side on original hardware outputting to CRTs. I really have a big flaw tolerance when it comes to old hardware, especially displays, but this is really, really striking.

I don't actually have any original consoles but might try to put my Pi or Wii in PAL mode and see how much difference is in the case of emulated SNES or MD vs Amiga. From what I recall it's not as striking as vs PC, but maybe it's because their black bars are even on top and bottom, so they don't seem as huge as Amiga's double one on the bottom

Back in the day, of course, it was different for many reasons but mainly two: we (well, I at least) were kids blown away by all this new stuff and without much perspective, and two, there was no internet so we couldn't compare these things and see countless examples of the differences and listen to some geeks ranting on about it

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Admittedly, I'm quite dumb when it comes to this subject (despite reading about it for years). I just have some mental block...

Just can't solve the puzzle why, when PAL is supposed to have more lines vs NTSC, we can't squeeze more into PAL? Why isn't it possible to fill the screen - or at least fill enough to mantain proportions - in the ports? After all, some games (which the OP is about) did just that, they are full screen.

I don't watch utube normally but have just stumbled upon this vid: [ Show youtube player ]

He really has a field day with PAL Amiga there, I'd say going into the extreme gloat zone quite often, but the fact is the differences really are huge

That chap has had a bee in his bonnet for years about that!

Truth is, PAL was designed for a better TV experience than NTSC, when it was made i don’t suppose they expected such things many decades later, more lines obviously means a slower refresh rate (17.5% slower) but for TV it gave 100 extra lines of definition, it really was a much better improvement, anyone who used to watch import American TV series in the 80s/90s could see by the blurryness of the picture that had been blown up to fill the PAL picture.

The downside of having more lines and slower refreshrate only came to light when consoles came to town esp 16-bits around 91/92, and foreign imports started to flood the market, mags were the only source of news and they were soon to tell us these machines ran games faster.

Something kids today won’t have a clue about as the world finally got a universal standards in various HD modes and HDMI.

[dodke]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

but maybe it's because their black bars are even on top and bottom, so they don't seem as huge as Amiga's double one on the bottom

I agree. Having a massive black bar at the bottom is quite annoying and simply having matching letterboxing isn't as bad. There is a technical reason for this too for games that use complicated copperlists. On a PAL display the scanline counter wraps around in the visible area unless you keep a 320x200 screen near the top of the display. It's not a massive problem but can require quite a bit of engineering to overcome. Especially if the code was originally written for NTSC and didn't take this into account. Even simply changing the position could be very problematic if the code for generating the copperlists wasn't designed to allow for it. I'd imagine this might have been one cause in games like Lotus 3. Also basically in any games with large hardware scrolling tile maps, copper gradient backgrounds etc.

Basically the Amiga hardware is a bit TOO flexible for its own good.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Problem is they are not "slightly" stretched. The difference is massive, and I view it side by side on original hardware outputting to CRTs. I really have a big flaw tolerance when it comes to old hardware, especially displays, but this is really, really striking.

There is about a 20% difference in vertical size, so I get what you mean. It never really bothered me to be honest. But then again, I came from a PAL C64, which has pretty huge borders as well.

For me it was actually the other way around, the first time I saw a "full screen" game with overscan was on the Amiga. In fact, I personally didn't see consoles/PC's equal that until years later.

So to me it was always the Amiga that broke the "borders around screens" limitation, not the other systems - even the 16 bit consoles had borders. Nowadays I know that the Amiga could've had better conversions for all those 320x200 NTSC/Atari/PC games, but I also understand it would've been a big ask for the artists involved to redraw all graphics for just the Amiga and it's comparatively small market.

It's kind of like how the consoles also could display a full screen for PAL games and almost never did. It's annoying, but I do understand the reasons.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

The downside of having more lines and slower refreshrate only came to light when consoles came to town esp 16-bits around 91/92, and foreign imports started to flood the market, mags were the only source of news and they were soon to tell us these machines ran games faster.

Yeah, the speed factor was another punch in the gut, though it did not bother me as much because I was mostly into slow games, like RPGS, adventure, strategy. Truth to be told it didn't even bother me as much later on when I got the PSX, because of the early 3D wow factor (and the fact there weren't countless utubers around to rub it in

As for Euro vs USA TV malarkey, I guess both had their ups and downs, one big point for Euro was the widespread SCART/RGB adapatation while they had to put up with composite or the much rarer component. Still, the NTSC/PAL BS is a true bane of retrogaming for sure.

Originally Posted by roondar

There is about a 20% difference in vertical size, so I get what you mean. It never really bothered me to be honest. But then again, I came from a PAL C64, which has pretty huge borders as well.

Yeah, but like I said above, I'm similar - the small size does not bother me, the aspect ratio shizzmajagig does. As in, if there was a game coded with that screen size in mind, with correct proportions and all then its' fine. I had a look at Beneath The Steel Sky yesterday and the fans in the first scene seem perfectly circular. Maybe it's one of them.

Originally Posted by roondar

It's kind of like how the consoles also could display a full screen for PAL games and almost never did. It's annoying, but I do understand the reasons.

Well, I can understand some of the reasons but it's quite likely other reasons, in some other cases, are not so forgivable.

It's all water under the bridge now, done and dusted and I guess I should move from the grief to acceptance stage or better yet to a figure-out-what-now one.

The reason why it hit me so hard is beccause for years I did preach Amiga as the best platform for the 1986-1991 era, at least when it comes to my favourite aforementioned genres. And assembling my retro battlestation now I fully expected her to take central stage...seems this plan took quite a knock. For all my hardware sentiments (ZX, Amiga <3), I follow the best version of a game and all of a sudden a DOS PC seems to be a place to be. And I don't really dig the VGA pixel blockiness.

Are there any modern hardware solutions which could alleviate this problem? (I'm a CRT user so it's an extra hassle) What is a scan doubler? Can it double my scanlines and fill the screen or something?

Otherwise Amiberry on RPi, or PC with crtemudriver could be a solution of sorts (you can scale the display to CRT quite nicely) but it's not the original hardware :/

[Daedalus]

Ultimately, it comes down to what the artist intended. If the artist intended it to be full screen 4:3 with 200 lines, then that's what should be used to see the graphics in their originally intended form. If the artist used a PAL setup with 200 lines, then that's what should be used. If the artist used a PAL setup with 256 lines, then that's what should be used. Unfortunately, not every game gives an indication of the artists' intent, so I generally aim for a full 4:3 screen in every case.

That's a different story to the widescreen (16:9) versus 4:3 issue of course... Interestingly, even the 4:3 grab of Defender of the Crown given on the AmigaLove page there as the correct aspect, is slightly wrong as the pixel scaling isn't 100%, resulting in some lines only being half the height of the rest.

Ultimately, 320x200 will fill a screen if that's how it was adjusted, just like 320x240 will fill a screen, and 320x256 will fill a screen. There were no absolute digital displays back then, either in PC or Amiga realms, and it was the norm to adjust your display to maximise the screen area regardless of resolution or platform.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Interestingly, even the 4:3 grab of Defender of the Crown given on the AmigaLove page there as the correct aspect, is slightly wrong as the pixel scaling isn't 100%, resulting in some lines only being half the height of the rest.

I know, always wanted to point it out to him..kinda funny given how in-depth they went and yet made such a simple mistake

Originally Posted by Daedalus

There were no absolute digital displays back then, either in PC or Amiga realms, and it was the norm to adjust your display to maximise the screen area regardless of resolution or platform.

I wouldn't say it was the norm, at least when it comes to the Amiga, because TVs have accounted for the overwhelming majority of displays, at least in my area.

I agree with the artist's intention angle but that's the whole problem: seems most of them drew stuff with NTSC measurements in mind.