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Laptops that have no sound problems with Meka?
Post Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 12:24 am
I have an important question to ask. I was considering maybe getting a new laptop and I was wondering if everyone who has a laptop that does *not* have any sound issues with Meka could please tell me exactly what laptop they have, including its stats, but brand a model especially. I figure if I'm gonna get another one anyway, I may as well get one that I can play Meka on without any problems because I'm pretty sure that the other emulators I use will work fine anyway. The other emulators I use are Gens for Sega Genesis, FCEUX for Ni****do and ZSNES for Super Ni****do. Those along with Meka cover my four favorite classic systems.

Of course, if there is any problem running any of these emulators on your laptop, please let me know, but I figure those other three will probably work fine. It's Meka that I'll have to cater to because it's the one with the picky sound issue. Like I've said before, if not for that sound issue, it's definitely the best Sega Master System emulator ever. I sure do miss playing Meka on my old computer where it had great sound...

Oh, and also, another important thing to note is that I'm looking for a laptop that has a screen with a regular 4:3 aspect ratio. I don't know why all this wide-screen crap started and I don't understand how it managed to take over not only all new laptop monitors but also every new TV in retail stores, but I don't see what's so special about wide screens. All it is is just an optical illusion anyway, and why no one else is capable of realizing that I don't know. You're not "seeing more of the picture". You're still seeing the same amount of the picture that you'd see on a 4:3 aspect ratio. The only difference is that it's stretched out horizontally in a rectangle shape. Especially on something as small as a laptop screen, it's really not gonna make any difference except that your screen is shaped like a rectangle instead of a nice even square.

Please excuse that mini rant. This *forced* wide-screen crap is just *very* frustrating to me. I mean, we should at least have a choice. Because of this lack of a choice, I'll be looking to buy the laptop on Amazon.com where such things can still be found.

...But anyway, so it's gotta be a 4:3 aspect ratio too, especially because these classic games were made before all this wide-screen crap started and so displaying them on a wide screen distorts their images by stretching them horizontally. I don't want Bock to be breaking rectangle blocks with the Thunder Saber in Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap. I want him to be breaking *square* blocks like they're supposed to be!

So anyway, if everyone who has 4:3 laptops that have no sound problems with Meka could please let me know what laptop you have, I'd really appreciate it. And please specify if you have to use that "set-affinity" thing or not.

PS. In case you couldn't tell from the above text, wide screens suck! Especially for classic games!
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Post Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 3:33 am
Seriously you should be using Fusion or RetroCopy for gaming purpose. They are just more modern and fit to the purpose.

Also, my laptop has an option in the BIOS to select how screen should be scaled, you can disable the full stretch scale.
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Post Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 1:55 pm
Zillion Knight wrote
...But anyway, so it's gotta be a 4:3 aspect ratio too, especially because these classic games were made before all this wide-screen crap started and so displaying them on a wide screen distorts their images by stretching them horizontally. I don't want Bock to be breaking rectangle blocks with the Thunder Saber in Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap. I want him to be breaking *square* blocks like they're supposed to be!


Actually the PAL SMS had an aspect ratio very similar to a 16:9 screen. If you use an emulator which lets you "zoom" in correctly taking this into account you get a more accurate representation than simple square pixels on a 4:3 display. If you were brought up on an NTSC machine it's a bit different though. :)

The other thing to consider is laptops with 16:9 displays usually have similar "vertical heights" as a 4:3 display, so the difference is very little in most cases.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:39 am
I have to say, this is the first time I've ever registered a message board account just to disabuse somebody of their misguided notions, but hey, it's for a good cause.

Zillion Knight wrote
All it is is just an optical illusion anyway, and why no one else is capable of realizing that I don't know. You're not "seeing more of the picture". You're still seeing the same amount of the picture that you'd see on a 4:3 aspect ratio. The only difference is that it's stretched out horizontally in a rectangle shape. Especially on something as small as a laptop screen, it's really not gonna make any difference except that your screen is shaped like a rectangle instead of a nice even square.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

When displaying a wide screen picture, wide screen displays are able to show the full image with little to no letterboxing (black bars on the top and bottom). This has zero correlation with stretching things out horizontally. I will repeat, this has zero correlation with stretching things out horizontally. When displaying a 4:3 image (which is not a "nice even square"; think about why it is called 4:3 and not 1:1), there are a few options for wide screen displays. Firstly, and probably ideally for most, it can display the 4:3 image at its center, with black bars on either side. Secondly, and here is where you seem to have become confused, a wide screen display can, most often optionally, display a 4:3 image stretched to a wide screen aspect ratio. Key words in that sentence being "can" and "most often optionally".

What all of this means is that when displaying a wide screen image, you are "seeing more of the picture" than a cropped 4:3 display. See the below images for an example of what I mean by this (note the tables on the right in the wide shot, which are largely unseen in the cropped 4:3 shot). Now, it is true that a 4:3 display could achieve a similar picture through letterboxing, but this effectively reduces the resolution (i.e. quality) of the picture and so a wide screen display is the ideal when displaying a wide screen picture. When displaying a 4:3 image, either a 4:3 display or a wide screen display can display the full image as intended by its author, the 4:3 screen by having the image take up the entire screen, and the wide screen by displaying the 4:3 image in the center, with black bars on the sides which the 4:3 image is not wide enough to use.





How does this impact emulation via Meka or any other emulator of systems with 4:3 or close to 4:3 pictures? As stated above, the PAL SMS displayed a fairly wide image, but relative to 4:3, this is also true of the NTSC SMS. This is why emulators such as Kega Fusion horizontally stretch and filter your image by default; it is an attempt to match the true aspect ratio of the SMS, which is not 4:3. This means that for a 4:3 monitor to display an accurate facsimile of a real-world, physical SMS's picture, it would have to add letterboxes to the image, reducing the vertical resolution to make room for the horizontal resolution, which would otherwise be wider than a 4:3 screen. On the other hand, a wide screen display is able to display both a "realistic" stretched SMS picture, as well as a 1:1 pixel ratio "unrealistic" 4:3 picture, without resorting to letterboxing the image (though in both cases you will likely have bars on either side of your image as the SMS did not have quite as wide an output as most wide screen displays).

My apologies if any of this sounded excessively harsh, I am just trying to be as clear as possible on this subject. Your beliefs about wide screen displays are misguided and while none of this information may be important to you (you may simply prefer to play SMS games with an "unrealistic" 1:1 pixel ratio), it is information worth knowing if you have any intentions of say, watching TV or movies, or playing modern video game consoles, which can output a wide screen (but not stretched) picture. Thank you for taking the time to read through what did end up as a rather large post, I hope it has been informative and perhaps entertaining. Have a nice day.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:58 am
Well, it's a little long :) but some people will never quite understand how this stuff works.

Most games were designed assuming square pixels. This works well with computer screens as they mostly have square pixels too.

However, if your emulator switches to "fullscreen mode", and you have selected a fullscreen resolution that is 4:3 (such as 320x240 or 640x480), and your monitor/screen stretches images instead of letterboxing them, then the pixels won't be square.

If you are running it windowed and your desktop has non-square pixels then there's no hope for you.

The complication is that the actual hardware didn't have square pixels. So games appeared a bit squashed on the TV - circles were not circular, squares were not square. Kega will emulate this, but I prefer square pixels. This is nothing to do with the display stretching, though.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:18 am
It's a bit hard to say the games were designed with square pixels when they likely were developed on television sets, isn't it? They designed the game to look good on a TV, taking into account all that means. That said, some ports of games may have suffered moving onto the SMS if they were lazy with the graphics, but still. What examples can you remember that show the squished effects the most Maxim?

That said the square pixel look can grow on you the more you use emulators...
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:59 am
PoorAussie wrote
What examples can you remember that show the squished effects the most Maxim?

Anything with circles or squares, or rotation of any sort. That's pretty much every game :) Any game attempting to compensate will look as if it is stretched vertically (objects being taller/thinner) when shown with square pixels.

Non-square pixels make designing the artwork a lot harder, especially with 8px tiles. Most artwork was designed on a computer screen. We discussed the pixel aspect ratio a while back; it seems even a pixel aspect ratio of 1.375 is ignorable. 1.6 isn't, hence the complaints from people who can't configure their 16:10 monitors.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:29 pm
I remember running massage and squishing up the vertical size on my old CRT. That emulator ran at 320x200 iirc, pixels TALLER than than square.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:18 pm
Maxim wrote
PoorAussie wrote
What examples can you remember that show the squished effects the most Maxim?

Anything with circles or squares, or rotation of any sort. That's pretty much every game :) Any game attempting to compensate will look as if it is stretched vertically (objects being taller/thinner) when shown with square pixels.

Non-square pixels make designing the artwork a lot harder, especially with 8px tiles. Most artwork was designed on a computer screen. We discussed the pixel aspect ratio a while back; it seems even a pixel aspect ratio of 1.375 is ignorable. 1.6 isn't, hence the complaints from people who can't configure their 16:10 monitors.


I was hoping you would have some screenshot examples! :)

Well I guess my point is, even if the artist was attempting to do a circle, how it was shown to everyone who ran the game was a certain way (up until emulators), the art was displayed in a way that it isn't a circle or square, but a rectangle or oval. The end result being that our visual memory of the game is with the graphics being oval/rectangle not in the square pixel way, the same with the developers designing the game.

Of course since emulators are used more these days than the consoles the way emulators show them is becoming the new norm, the new visual memory. Neither way is really right or wrong, but if you're going for the "feel of the designers" then seeing it how they saw it when they designed it is probably how you would do it. (real console, real TV or an emulated equiv. :) ).
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:20 pm
DMEnduro wrote
ran at 320x200 iirc


That resolution often gave people without a 3D card back in the day at least a chance to play unreal or half life. If you were looking for that little edge, the push over the cliff, you went with 320x200 over 320x240.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:17 pm
Maxim wrote
Anything with circles or squares...

Take a look at the planets in Phantasy Star (the first one in the intro for example), they look horribly squashed with square pixels.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 4:21 pm
I guess it all depends what the developers used.
I heard that most PC Engine developers used fancy RGB monitors during development, while no player in Japan actually used them (I think only France had RGB output for NEC consoles).

Graphics were likely drawn on computers monitors and not everybody bothered about the aspect ratio.
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:31 pm
I believe the artists used computers, either IBM compatibles with the Sega Character Editor or Amigas with DPaint.

The Phantasy Star planets are distinctly pointy, suggesting they were never particularly circular, just drawn by hand. They do, however, seem to have rotational symmetry, i.e. they're not compensating for the pixel ratio.
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Post Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 12:25 am
Why does everyone here prefer Meka to Kega Fusion?
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Post Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2010 10:27 am
Because it's the MEKA forum?
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 2:28 pm
This is a little old, but I DID want to point out that widescreen laptops CAN be set at 4:3 resolutions....using a netbook here at 800x600 NOT stretched, ie, in a nice neat box....native res is 1024x600...gonna change that real quickly, just wanted to see if the screen would act appropriately
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