Why do so many 8 bit and 16 bit console games have better proportions and perfectly round circles at 1:1 pixel aspect ratio, and appear stretched and distorted in 4:3?You would think most devs would design their sprites around 4:3 given that was what all displays were at the time, but it seems a good 75% of games look more "proper" when not displayed at 4:3 at all. For example, the screenshot is taken at 1:1 pixel aspect ratio (16:15 including overscan or 8:7 excluding overscan), nearly a square, but the enemy projectiles are perfectly circular, and the ship appears appropriately sized. Stretching this out to 4:3 looks similar to stretching out a game built around 4:3 to fit 16:9 modern displays
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHfPA4n0TRoThe "correct" aspect width for 256-wide sources is something like 1.12*256 = 287 which looks a bit less offensive
fuck I'm retarded I forgot to uncheck 'maintain aspect ratio' in the previous resize
>>10882370Because the resolution is low enough that rotational asymmetry is more distracting than distortion. A real circle is always distorted depending on where it is in your field of vision, but it never has different aliasing artifacts in the X and Y axis. Only if the circle is really big, e.g. the moon scene in Chrono Trigger, is it worth correcting the aspect ratio.
Some devs/artists may simply have not cared, or perceived the way a TV displays it as abstract rather than absolute.When I made my own games on my family's Atari 800, I didn't give thought to the difference between my graph paper drawings and how the actual pixels on-screen were shaped, sometimes even changing plans from graphics mode 1 to 2 (or vice-versa) mid-way through making a game, which completely changed the height of the tiles/characters.Of course I wasn't a professional game artist, just a kid making games for fun, but I can imagine other people having the same mindset of abstract rather than exact representation.
In japan they all have 1:1 televisions.
Because exact PAR on consumer TVs is largely hypothetical anyways and it will probably shift between different oval shapes depending where on the screen it appears no matter what you do.
>>10882421apparently what happened was:> capcom staff requested certain features for graphics system during design phase> engineers went to work> capcom staff begin testing new hardware> circles are now ovals> squares are looking like rectangles> software developers and staff start to panic. tens of millions of dollars spent so far> they contact the engineers of the chipsets and board> they claim it's what was specified> didn't believe the staff that the aspect ratios were wrong> they had to show these engineering faggots that the screen was the wrong aspect ratio> someone had made a big mistake. couldn't fix it. chips were in production.> capcom staff are forced to draw things in a fucked up way on computers just so they would look normal on cps hardware the end.
>>10882370For background elements using a tile-based system, it's literally impossible to take CRT pixel stretching into account. You want a circle in your tile? You have to abide by the tile's size, you can't make the circle smaller within the tile because that would leave empty space you don't want, you can't use several tiles either.It's different for things like titlescreens/cutscenes (or huds) in which case it's more like directly transposing a drawing onto the screen, you're not constrained to the tile based format like for gameplay elements. This is why people always use the Chrono Trigger moon as an example, it's a cutscene. But that doesn't mean background gameplay elements use the same logic. There are also ports of computer games to console which adapt title screens/loading screens/huds/etc but not gameplay elements.Sprites are different too. Anyway the whole thing is a rabbit hole. Just stick to your preference, and remember that anyone claiming "this is the only correct way and how the devs intended it" is mostly likely a tech illiterate idiot who doesn't know enough on the subject and makes a lot of assumption. Some will even tell you that square pixels didn't exist until the 00s.
>>10882370>>10882421>>10882423I can't make heads or tales of this...which is supposed to be better?
