roondar |
05 October 2020 10:49 |
The main problem with Amiga & fullscreen games (apart from coders electing to make the screen smaller for performance reasons or PAL developers simply sticking to what fits for NTSC screens) has more to do with the size of the actual pixels and not so much the resolution of the screen.
Unlike many other systems on the market at the time, the Amiga uses pixels that are the "correct" size for PAL/NTSC (meaning the aspect ratio of it's pixels as shown on the screen is actually 4:3 for lowres non-interlaced/hires interlaced). Further, the HRM specifies a standard screen size that is on the low end of what is commonly recommended for analogue TV signals. This later step was probably done because quite a few older TV's (and even some monitors) on the market cut of fairly large chunks of what we know as overscan*.
The consequence is that the standard resolutions (320x200 for NTSC/320x256 for PAL) don't fill the screen on most monitors and certainly not when used on modern screens where things such as overscan have long since forgotten. Arcade & console games often don't really have higher resolutions per se**, they just have slightly stretched pixel sizes that aren't quite the size that is "correct" for PAL/NTSC (meaning their pixels as shown on screen are not quite 4:3).
As others have pointed out, you can actually achieve the same on the Amiga by manually stretching the display - but doing so needs to be done on a game by game basis and will cause issues with the aspect ratio being distorted.
*) as strange as it might seem to us now, the common thought back then apparently was that it was better to have a border and see all the text/graphics than to have the possibility of missing pixels. I think this is why most 8-bit systems, the PC and most computer oriented 16-bit systems tended to not quite fill the entire screen by default.
**) many arcade games run at 256x224 - the Mega Drive's 320 pixel wide display covers nearly 720 pixels if you convert it to DVD, the SNES uses 256x224 for many games and is widely known for it's "fat pixels", etc.
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