[chaotic_thought]

I have played a few games in emulators on my PC and a little unclear about the resolution that is actually used by the PSX. I am mainly thinking of the Final Fantasy games because of the numerous full-screen rendered backgrounds, where it is easy to detect internal distortion due to scaling. For instance, 640x448 is exactly twice the length and height of 320x224 and when I tell an emulator (it doesn't matter which) to use a 640x448 window size, there is no distortion in the backgrounds (so, the width:height ratio of the backgrounds seems to be 10:7). But 640x480 results in many of the horizontal lines being repeated, resulting in portions of the screen that look uneven, and very poor to my eyes, especially on my LCD monitor which cannot stretch the display very well. Yes, I can turn on smoothing to help somewhat, but it is insufficient--all it really does is make those repeated lines less noticeable. My eyes will not be happy until all the emulated pixels are a perfect square of physical pixels on my LCD monitor (i.e. 1 PSX pixel => 2x2 physical pixels, or 1 PSX pixel => 3x3 physical pixels, etc).

Anyway, my two questions are:
1) Is 320x224 (or 640x448) actually the resolution used by the real PSX?

2) I want to make a custom video mode in Windows that is a multiple of 320x224: i.e. 640x448. Yes, I know some emulators have a "preserve aspect ratio" option, but when I do this there is sometimes annoying garbage in the leftover 32 horizontal lines of the 640x480 screen (there should be black borders on the top 16 lines and bottom 16 lines, but they are not always black). So, I want a custom 640x448 resolution--of course, the monitor will think it is 640x480, but the top 16 and bottom 16 lines should be invisible to Windows and DirectX. This type of custom "video mode" is easily done in Linux/XFree86, but I would like a Windows/DirectX solution.

 

[Dark Watcher]

OK..to answer your question. Playstation has various resolution modes dependant on the games. Also keep in mind that MDECS (Movie cutscenes) also vary from actual gameplay. So trying to lock a single aspect ratio will always show some distortion depending on the game in play. Also keep in mind that pixelation is masked by normal televisions, and so it won't look as good (Particularly on LCD monitors) without graphic accellerated plugins, smoothing options, higher resolution settings, and FSAA.

We choose not to use the aspect ratio option unless we are using Video Out to our TV

Here is just a list some resolution ranges the PSX can do. This is just NTSC..It most likely varies with PAL

* NTSC Display Resolution

+-------+--------------------+-------------------+
| Mode | Resolution (H x V) | Scan |
+-------+--------------------+-------------------+
| 0 | 256 x 240 | |
| 1 | 320 x 240 | Non-Interlaced |
| 2 | 512 x 240 | |
| 3 | 640 x 240 | |
+-------+--------------------+-------------------+
| 4 | 256 x 480 | |
| 5 | 320 x 480 | Interlaced |
| 6 | 512 x 480 | |
| 7 | 640 x 480 | |
+-------+--------------------+-------------------+

 

[hushypushy]

it doesnt really matter what's used by the actual PSX. the playstation was meant to be played on a TV, which is a 4:3 aspect ratio (320x240). so no matter what internal resolution the PSX uses, it's alway stretched out to fit a 4:3 ratio on a TV.

like Dark Watcher said, you are going to be seeing the distortion A LOT more on a computer monitor since the TV blurs a lot of it out. the PSX isnt very pretty, sometimes you might have to live with that

but, if you prefer the 640x448, keep it that way. unfortunately what looks cool in some parts might feck with the MDECs or other scenes...i'd suggest it at a 4:3 ratio.

 

[chaotic_thought]

Are you sure the TV is actually 320x240? I seem to remember the NES using 256x224, which is what prompted me to try a multiple of 224 as the height when I saw the ugliness when playing my PSX games. Yes, I know I may not be able to universally eliminate the distortion, especially with an LCD, but by "internal distortion" I'm actually trying to refer to the uneven bitmap-scaling (not polygons or textures) and not really the true ratio of width:height of the screen.

Anyway: maybe someone can clarify the right terminology for this issue, but imagine a bitmap that looks like a checkerboard of pixels (white, black, white, black, ...) with dimensions of say 50x50: scale it to 100x100 and now you have (white, white, black, black, white, white, ...), but try 133x133 and you've got something really ugly, and if you smooth it--just some shade of gray.

An example that still drives me crazy in Windows--notice that all of the icons on the taskbar and on your window top-left corners are bitmaps with some dimensions. If you set the "Font Size" of Display Properties to "Large," all of the icons are enlarged as well as the text, but if you look at the enlarged icons closely (or just glance at them casually, if you're picky like me), it looks really ugly because there is no smoothing applied (but if you could tell, I'm not really crazy about smoothing either). Personally, this is the only reason that I don't use "Large Fonts," because I can't stand the ugly scaling. The same for my PSX games.

 

[cloudvii]

Are u sure the NES used 256x224 for res ? I thought that was SNES

 

[hushypushy]

nope that was NES.

 

[Dark Watcher]

The resolutions are what the console puts out. The image is then stretched and blurred on television screens (Although on widescreen monitor televisions the picture is noticeable). Obviously on a monitor it is not so friendly

Now back to chaotic_thought
We are trying to understand your issue..but are somewhat still confused. Are you needed to apply onscreen smoothing? FSAA? Interpolation?

Better yet...Take a screenshot of a game that contains your biggest complaint. Maybe use a windowed mode and use printscreen (since the internat screenshot ability may not demonstrate your gripe), and then highlight the areas that are a prob. Then post your plugin settings and type of graphics card. We can then assess the problem and suggest solutions...
If push comes to shove we will get a hold of Chris Ray or Demigod....They are well versed in "Graphics talk"

 

[Katsuya]

It sounds like he may need vsync...

 

[__Creeper__]

what do you mean by internal distortion??

I know in panzer front, even with petes opengl2 and 2/2 internal resolution, bullet tracers look like blocks when they are in the distance, the farther away something gets, the more pixilated it gets, plus the sky is pixilated

why such large pixels, or whatever they are called, (squares)

 

[__Creeper__]

what plugin allows me to apply interpolation or FSAA

 

[hushypushy]

what plugin allows me to apply interpolation or FSAA

do you know what either of those things are?

interpolation is, hmm how do i explain this. kind of like putting a 5x3 texture into a 4x3 area? man i dont know how to really explain this. pixel interpolation on an LCD monitor is when you have a 1280x1024 resolution (1280 dots across the horizontal plane) and you make a resolution of, say, 800x600. one pixel is no longer one pixel, it's actually spread over a few pixels.

FSAA is Full Scene (Screen) Anti Aliasing. you'd enable this in your videocard's control panel.

 

[n_w95482]

I think interpolation is averaging the values of adjacent pixels for a filtering effect. All of Pete's plugins offer some form of filtering.

 

[dpence]

Just to clear somthing up. A television is not measured in Pixels. No Dot pitch, not resolution so to speak. A TV is measured in Lines of resolution. Meaning, a standard NTSC Television can produce, on screen, approx 400 lines of visable image (Some can go a little higher, most go even lower though) An NTSC Video Signal, however, actually consists of 525 lines (Lines are vertical) the remaning undisplayed lines are the contol lines such as Blanking, Color carrier, Closed captioning, etc...
Now for my point. It doesn't matter what Pixel resolution you throw at the TV, it will display it. Try setting a tv out card to 1024*768, it will show on the TV, Albeit pretty blurry, as the pixels are so close together that the tv can not clearly display them.
Aspect ratio (4x3) will always be 4x3 provided the Horizontal sync is 15.7Khz and the vertical sync is @ 60Hz (pal resolution is not 4x3, if I recall correctly it is closer to 3x4 due to 50hz vertical) a Wide screen TV is 16x9 and does not use standard Horizontal/vertical sync rates. Wide screen TV's are much closer to PC monitors. They can do a wide range of horizontal and vertical sync frequencies enabling the aspect to change.
So, if a console is using 224*224 resolution it will still be 4x3, the difference over using it vs ummm 640*480 is that the pixel output of the console will look larger. Use an old atari 2600 for example one pixel at it's incredible low resolution looks like a 4x4 box, compared to that of say, a Ps2, which is so small you wouldn't notice it on it's own.
Anyways I am done... Note that I know most already know this stuff, but I posted it cause it seems to come up pretty often.