Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Sorry, the problem I was seeing appears to be on my end.
Apparently FireFox's rendering algos aren't so great.
Looks fine for me elsewhere.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I can't see well without FF being zoomed in everywhere, ctrl-0 means I can't browse at all.
Chrome nor Opera in my tests have this distortion despite zooming.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Bisqwit wrote:
Nach, when have you ever used that avatar that is shown in your screenshot?
Twice every hour or so.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
I've largely stayed out of the ensuing discussion to this point partly out of curiosity as to the direction it would take.
I now see that there's been very little discussion of the topic at hand other than by those who originally prompted this thread to be created again stating their arguments. This leads me to believe that either the average site viewer doesn't care one way or another or that this thread hasn't received sufficient attention for the average viewer to know about or comment upon it.
Thus, I'm going to inject a few arguments of my own in an attempt to spark further discussion on the matter at hand.
---
To begin with, one of the founding principles of the site was that the site's movies should look as though they could have been played with authentic hardware. This is reflected as far back as the very first draft of the movie rules:
The aforementioned draft wrote:
The movie should look like it could have been played with an authentic hardware. This makes it more familiar to the audience.
This is also given a nod in the [wiki WelcomeToTASVideos]site's Welcome page[/wiki]; prior to the introduction of [wiki ConsoleVerifiedMovies]console verification[/wiki] the relevant text stated "could theoretically be performed on the actual hardware".
This, in my view, has motivated past decisions such as not allowing settings such as FCEU/FCEUX's "allow more than 8 sprites per scanline" (noticeable in games such as [movie 1825]Pinball Quest[/movie]) or Gens' "PSG High Quality" (for most Sonic games) to be used for encodes in that they cause video/audio output to be distinctly different from actual hardware.
This is also, in my view, the reason that the aspect ratio flag came into use in the first place - most viewers familiar with the games in question are going to expect content that they would normally see on a TV screen to be displayed at the same ratio as they would on a TV screen - thus, it's more familiar to viewers.
Now, let me pose the question:
Is it possible for a game running on the actual SGB hardware to be displayed without borders, or with borders but at a 7:6 AR (i.e. no AR correction)?
It's possible to change the border on the fly of an SGB game, and it is possible to set it to one which is completely black, but that doesn't actually remove the border altogether - the video output of the console is still going to be the same size.
It may just be me, but I've never heard of a 7:6 TV (besides which most viewers are going to be familiar with TV-displayed content on a 4:3 display, as omnipresent as they are).
I submit that the answer to (both parts of) the above question is no.
Does the developer intent when writing the game have an impact on what viewers would expect to see when running the game with this hardware configuration? No, it does not.
From this perspective, does it make sense not to include the border and/or not to use AR correction for SGB runs? No, it does not.
The bottom line here is that I fail to see a meaningful difference between this case and the case of other platforms that the average viewer would, in the case of the platform / hardware conditions being portrayed by the run, expect to see displayed on a 4:3 CRT.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
sgrunt wrote:
To begin with, one of the founding principles of the site was that the site's movies should look as though they could have been played with authentic hardware. This is reflected as far back as the very first draft of the movie rules:
The aforementioned draft wrote:
The movie should look like it could have been played with an authentic hardware. This makes it more familiar to the audience.
While I agree with all this, I don't really think televisions are part of the console.
I could easily plug my NES into my video input card in my computer, and get a nice picture without scanlines (and my software for controlling it allows one of several different predefined aspect ratios). Same goes for the variety of LCD television screens we have today.
Therefore, I don't think 4:3, 8:7, and other display parameters are actually part of authentic hardware, since it's perfectly legal to plug an NES into a device with different video output parameters.
sgrunt wrote:
This, in my view, has motivated past decisions such as not allowing settings such as FCEU/FCEUX's "allow more than 8 sprites per scanline" (noticeable in games such as [movie 1825]Pinball Quest[/movie]) or Gens' "PSG High Quality" (for most Sonic games) to be used for encodes in that they cause video/audio output to be distinctly different from actual hardware.
Now these settings by contrast modify how the console itself is supposed to work, and thus should not be enabled for encodes we make.
sgrunt wrote:
Is it possible for a game running on the actual SGB hardware to be displayed without borders, or with borders but at a 7:6 AR (i.e. no AR correction)?
For the first question: No. But on the other hand, many people are used to SGB games on their DMG, CGB, or AGB, where they don't have borders.
For the second, yes, see above.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
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Pokémon isn't a TV game. SGB happens to run it on a TV, but that's not its main platform. Most people play SGB games on a Game Boy (Pocket/Color/Advance/Advance SP). In this game's case, it has to be played on a Game Boy to be completed without glitches. Most viewers aren't going to expect SGB games to be displayed at a TV aspect ratio. Doing so also introduces problems that aren't present in the original SNES analog output, such as horizontal interpolation.
By the way, 256:224 is 8:7 in lowest terms. 160:144 is 10:9.
If you want the encodes to be so accurate, fix NES encodes since they don't display with a 4:3 aspect ratio even on a 4:3 TV (as I described in my previous post).
Also, it's not the SGB outputting the incorrect aspect ratio. It's the SNES.
Joined: 11/22/2004
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sgrunt wrote:
I now see that there's been very little discussion of the topic at hand other than by those who originally prompted this thread to be created again stating their arguments.
I think that's not entirely accurate. The reason why there's been very little discussion is because people seem to agree that aspect ratio correction is unnecessary. That includes moozooh, Lex, Flygon, Nach (in this specific case), Bisqwit, Noob Irdoh and myself. I don't think anyone besides you is explicitly for keeping the aspect ratio so far.
As for the average viewer, I don't think we'll be hearing that much from him. People probably don't care too much about this. I mentioned in the other topic that if you search Youtube for DOS games from the mid-90s era that used 320x200 as their standard resolution are also pretty much exclusively uploaded without aspect ratio correction. People don't know or don't care enough about it.
But let me address the core issue here that you correctly raise:
sgrunt wrote:
To begin with, one of the founding principles of the site was that the site's movies should look as though they could have been played with authentic hardware. This is reflected as far back as the very first draft of the movie rules
The thing is that the SGB is really just an adapter for playing GB games on a SNES with some extremely minor differences. These games weren't made for the SGB—they were made for the GB. I would argue that the games we're playing have far more recognition in their original aspect ratio for that reason. At the very least, it's what these games were designed for. And not to put words in anyone's mouth, but Bisqwit mentioned he didn't have this particular scenario in mind when he wrote those rules. I think not stretching the content would be more in line with his intentions of making sure encodes are seen as people would recognize them.
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Nach wrote:
Therefore, I don't think 4:3, 8:7, and other display parameters are actually part of authentic hardware, since it's perfectly legal to plug an NES into a device with different video output parameters.
This is true; I posit, however, that the display most commonly used with these consoles (at the time of their peak popularity, at least, and thus resonating the most with our viewers) would be a CRT outputting at 4:3.
(This is the only reason I can think of that the 4:3 tag came into existence in the first place, as I mentioned earlier.)
Lex wrote:
SGB happens to run it on a TV, but that's not its main platform.
Perhaps not, but the run in question was explicitly made for the SGB.
Lex wrote:
Most viewers aren't going to expect SGB games to be displayed at a TV aspect ratio.
So... viewers don't expect a platform that by its very nature outputs to a TV to output to a TV. Right.
Lex wrote:
If you want the encodes to be so accurate, fix NES encodes since they don't display with a 4:3 aspect ratio even on a 4:3 TV (as I described in my previous post).
One of the finicky points about CRT displays (TVs in particular) is that they can be adjusted to display at smaller than the full screen size. I think it is reasonable to assume that most people using a CRT will have the screen adjusted to use, as closely as possible, the full screen size.
Unless, of course, you have a different idea of what the most common aspect ratio for, say, the NES would be.
(I admit that there are more fundamental differences than this. To the best of my knowledge, these have not widely been tested for encoding purposes, though I'd be interested in seeing the results.)
Lex wrote:
Also, it's not the SGB outputting the incorrect aspect ratio. It's the SNES.
Wrong - as Nach correctly points out above, the console itself has nothing to do with the aspect ratio being displayed. The TV / display, on the other hand, has everything to do with it.
Dada wrote:
The thing is that the SGB is really just an adapter for playing GB games on a SNES with some extremely minor differences.
"Displaying on a TV" is something I would consider to be a significant difference, and, indeed, is one of the major motivating factors for this discussion.
"Playing with colour graphics" is also something that I would consider to be a significant difference, but more on that in a few moments.
Dada wrote:
I would argue that the games we're playing have far more recognition in their original aspect ratio for that reason.
I admit that more people will have played the games in their original handheld form. If this was the sole motivating factor, however, we would have expected to see the run in question made for the GB or the GBC, which it was not - the run itself was made for the SGB, and the resulting encode should reflect what viewers would expect to see if the run were being played on that platform.
Would a viewer familiar with the game from the GB be expecting coloured graphics? No, they would not.
Would a viewer familiar with the game from the GBC be expecting the larger variety in coloured graphics that the SGB offers relative to it for these games? No, they would not.
You can't have it both ways - a run targeting the SGB platform should be encoded as though it was running on an SGB, just as with any other platform the site makes use of.
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sgrunt wrote:
Lex wrote:
Most viewers aren't going to expect SGB games to be displayed at a TV aspect ratio.
So... viewers don't expect a platform that by its very nature outputs to a TV to output to a TV. Right.
Why did you quote this out of context? It goes with the other points in that paragraph. Learn to read. I said it because I made the point that games which happen to have SGB support are primarily played on GB systems.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
sgrunt wrote:
Dada wrote:
The thing is that the SGB is really just an adapter for playing GB games on a SNES with some extremely minor differences.
"Displaying on a TV" is something I would consider to be a significant difference, and, indeed, is one of the major motivating factors for this discussion.
"Playing with colour graphics" is also something that I would consider to be a significant difference, but more on that in a few moments.
The fact that it outputs to TV is not insignificant, but my point is that it's basically a slightly augmented Game Boy. It was meant as a secondary console for people who wanted to play GB games in a different setting. Since there was no point in including a display (since that's what the original GB is for) they made it output to TV because that's the most convenient. But it's not like it was designed specifically to screw over the aspect ratio of every game ever released; that was just a consequence.
Aside from minor extras, the GB is the one that sold 118 million units worldwide: that's the platform the games were made for.
sgrunt wrote:
Dada wrote:
I would argue that the games we're playing have far more recognition in their original aspect ratio for that reason.
I admit that more people will have played the games in their original handheld form. If this was the sole motivating factor, however, we would have expected to see the run in question made for the GB or the GBC, which it was not - the run itself was made for the SGB, and the resulting encode should reflect what viewers would expect to see if the run were being played on that platform.
I would posit this wasn't on the runners' mind. And frankly, I think this is an awkward argument. It's like you're saying that the runners should have consciously chosen to use the GB/GBC instead of the SGB, if we were to expect to be allowed to encode it without aspect ratio correction.
sgrunt wrote:
Would a viewer familiar with the game from the GB be expecting coloured graphics? No, they would not.
Would a viewer familiar with the game from the GBC be expecting the larger variety in coloured graphics that the SGB offers relative to it for these games? No, they would not.
You can't have it both ways - a run targeting the SGB platform should be encoded as though it was running on an SGB, just as with any other platform the site makes use of.
This run doesn't target the SGB. It targets a game that was made for the GB, that people have mostly played on the GB and was specifically designed to look best with a square pixel aspect ratio, as on the GB.
Besides, colors are far less important than the geometry.
It's like you're saying that the runners should have consciously chosen to use the GB/GBC instead of the SGB, if we were to expect to be allowed to encode it without aspect ratio correction.
I have to agree with Dada, if we know that SGB encodes will MUST be stretched, then players should deliberately choose to use GB/GBC modes instead to keep them not stretched. But! That's actually not possible as per the rules.
So unless something is going to change, people will have to make runs on the SGB, which in turn will need to be encoded stretched. It is a bad scenario in my opinion.
(again, my actual opinion about SGB runs is that the border should be hidden altogether; making not stretched encodes with border is my second best opinion)
Joined: 11/22/2004
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Noob Irdoh wrote:
Dada wrote:
It's like you're saying that the runners should have consciously chosen to use the GB/GBC instead of the SGB, if we were to expect to be allowed to encode it without aspect ratio correction.
I have to agree with Dada, if we know that SGB encodes will MUST be stretched, then players should deliberately choose to use GB/GBC modes instead to keep them not stretched.
Actually, I think it's unfair to expect the runners to make this decision. That's why I don't really buy the argument that "if the runners had made the conscious choice not to use SGB, things would be different".
I don't believe it! This is the discussion about DMG abbreviation, vol. 2, in all of its ridiculous glory. :\
1. Once and for all, SGB is not a console. It's a GameBoy-to-TV adapter, GameBoy-to-SNES if you will. The amount of games released for it exclusively, i. e. that won't run on either GB or SNES, is zero. You are playing GB and GBC games, there are no SGB games. If the nomenclature used at this site leads you to believe otherwise and somehow think SGB is a separate platform that should be treated as such, it can seriously go fuck itself. It's a piece of hardware that won't run without a GB(C) game fed to it, and without a SNES to plug itself into. I don't see why we should respect the artifacts of a piece of hardware that is itself an artifact to both host systems.
2. Running a GB or GBC game through SGB, depending on the game, will change the appearance of the game by using one of the predefined pallettes, borders, or provide additional functions. We don't even make use of the SGB menu that can change borders or pallette on most games compatible with it. Multiplayer functions provided in singular instances are essentially useless since all of them that I'm aware of are designed to give the second the role played by AI in the original version of the game. In any case we're talking purely cosmetic changes, nothing that affects gameplay.
sgrunt wrote:
Perhaps not, but the run in question was explicitly made for the SGB.
So... viewers don't expect a platform that by its very nature outputs to a TV to output to a TV. Right.
See above.
sgrunt wrote:
I admit that more people will have played the games in their original handheld form. If this was the sole motivating factor, however, we would have expected to see the run in question made for the GB or the GBC, which it was not - the run itself was made for the SGB, and the resulting encode should reflect what viewers would expect to see if the run were being played on that platform.
See above.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
1. Once and for all, SGB is not a console. It's a GameBoy-to-TV adapter
Well it does have the complete Gameboyhardware inside. So it is kind of a console. But that console is a gameboy. ;D
Anywho I don't get this discussion. The images stretched to 4:3 look like crap. Even the borders do. We should aim for what looks best.
Nobody is going to remember that the super gameboy used to stretch the image and that that looked crappy. I sure don't.
So the argument that it should be TV aspect ratio really has no merrit because nobody is going to remember how it looked anyway.
Btw. in the case of Pokemon there was not only the SGB on TV, but also the gameboy player in Pokemon Stadium and I'm pretty sure that one had correct aspect ration. So maybe people are going to remember that one and get weirded out by this wrong looking ratio?
Also soon (or already) there will be VC versions that will also have the correct aspect ratio. The only odd one out is the SGB and people are going to think we are incompetent in encoding stuff, not praising us for keeping it real.
Btw. I also think you could just crop out these borders. In Pokeon they don't do anything, so you might as well remove them and get a bigger game picture.
PS: I think there hasn't been much life in this thread because people who are not encoders usually don't come into this subforum. I only saw this thread through a link in the "gotta catch em all" submission thread.
But I doubt anybody will agree with sgrunt, to be blunt.
To me, the aspect ratio is the least of the display problems authenticity-wise; the crispness and color differences are much more jarring when compared to the average television screen of the '90s. Instead, I think of the emulator-captured videos as more of the "designer's view" of the game, and in Nintendo's games at least, the graphics seem to have been designed without regard for the television-induced stretching. I can't recall an instance where a circular coin was designed at, say, 12 SNES pixels wide x 14 SNES pixels tall so it would look correct on a 4:3 TV.
Personally, I prefer encodes either with graphics presented as the designer designed them (which is pretty obviously square pixels in every SGB game I can recall), or fully accurate to the display medium with scanline-blurring and NTSC color quirks. Stretching the pixels while ignoring the other television distortion factors is a very unappealing middle ground for me.
Yeah Hopper is right. Our encodes look way too good. There have to be some unsharpening filters applied and the contrast reduced. Otherwise it won't look like it did on console! [/sarcasm]
Joined: 6/25/2007
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We could also go in the opposite direction like was done with a high-resolution (and TASVideos-official) Zelda: OOT encode. It looked completely awesome and it didn't adhere to nonsensical rules regarding authentic look. There was also a TASVideos-official high-resolution Sonic 3 encode done with HQ4x (though I don't agree that scaler looks good).
The point is, almost everyone knows TASes are done in emulators. If they don't know that, it's probably best not to try to trick them.
The reason why there's been very little discussion is because people seem to agree that aspect ratio correction is unnecessary. That includes moozooh, Lex, Flygon, Nach (in this specific case), Bisqwit, Noob Irdoh and myself. I don't think anyone besides you is explicitly for keeping the aspect ratio so far.
This was very true for me at least.
I'm pretty sure the run was made for the SGB not because the authors wanted the image to be distorted, but because they found the border to look pretty and on an emulator SGB mode doesn't distort the image, so they never noticed how ugly that would be.
Thinking about what's the "correct" or "proper" way to render the image is the wrong question to ask here imo, the question should be how the video can be rendered to produce the most enjoyable result. If 4:3 distorts the pixel art, then I really doubt it's the best solution for any game at all, regardless of the fact that it technically is the "proper" way to encode SGB games in 4:3 format. If some strange people really preferred the distorted image that much, they could still make their video player stretch the image for them. >_>
Just remember these videos aren't encoded for robots but for people. Keeping the beauty of the pixel art intact should come before being technically accurate.
I am an advocate for the banning of SGB runs, on the grounds that in their current state, they emulate a console that does not exist.
When I first heard of SGB, I thought "Oh, these folks decided to run their GB game on Snes9x. Weird, but I can see the appeal." I soon learned that this was built into VBA. There are some inherent problems with this:
You cannot reproduce anything like what is shown on a Game Boy.
It's not really emulating SGB; it's just extracting a border and changing the games colors (Thanks Lex).
Calling this SGB implies that this runs like a Super Game Boy. It doesn't:
Super Game Boy is an emulator, in the sense that it tries to run a cartridge as if it was another system. Sure, it uses much of the same hardware, but to assume that there aren't any inaccuracies is very hasty.
Super Game Boy runs faster than a Game Boy (Thanks itsblah).
Considering all of these things, I think we should either ban the use of SGB runs altogether, or wait until Snes9x can support the actual Super Game Boy cartridge and create runs on that. I'd still think that latter would be a bad idea, as times could be manipulated by abusing emulator glitches, regardless of whether the emulator is official or not. At this phase in the game, disregarding what we do in the future, I think all SGB runs should be converted to GB runs.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Brandon wrote:
Considering all of these things, I think we should either ban the use of SGB runs altogether, or wait until Snes9x can support the actual Super Game Boy cartridge and create runs on that.
I propose a third option: don't publish runs as "SGB runs", but make nice-looking encodes using VBA's SGB palette extraction (and borders for games where it looks nice). Encodes don't have to be accurate to be nice-looking.
Looks fine for me elsewhere.
