It was pretty common for developers to take this stretching into account when producing a game's graphics. That TMNT example at 0:46 is perfect. Look at the tunnel in the background. It's an oval at native resolution, but a perfect circle when stretched. Personally, I'm not much of a stickler either way... so long as it's not stretched to widescreen. Only heathens do that.

Dude, your channel is so underrated! It's so awesome, I love everything about it.

Cool video man thanks. I prefer stretching to 4:3 but wasn’t even aware of low res mode on the megadrive! What I absolutely despise is stretching 4:3 to 16:9.. what some folks might enjoy but I just.. can’t.. accept 😅

Very interesting, I didn’t realise Hyperstone Heist used a lower res mode. It makes a lot of sense for Konami though as all their assets made for Turtles in Time could be easily shared with the Megadrive game. Personally I’m happy stretching to 4:3 as that was how the games looked back in the day. Sure, some developers didn’t take the stretch into account (like Nintendo for most of their 1st party games) but it’s still what we were seeing on our TVs back then.

Fascinating subject that I'd heard nothing about before now, thanks for documenting.

Well if the game art was designed with the stretched screen in mind, then there's no argument - that's the way it's supposed to look.

By the way, even in a resolution of 320x224 the pixels are not square but 32:35 and thus higher than wide. (This can also be seen in the test grid shown.) By calculating the frequencies, the exact original aspect ratio can be determined. For me, good emulation also means getting as close as possible to the original picture and sound output.

In Retroarch, on my 1920x1080 LCD, I use 1536x1120 (6x5 scaling) for 256 pixel games and 1600x1120 (5x5 scaling; square pixels) for 320 pixel games. For games that switch between both I use 1280x896 (5x4 scaling for 256x224, and 4x4 scaling for 320x224). For 240 line games I use 1200p (for 5x vertical scaling) instead of 1120p. In both 224 and 240 line games I can only see the center 216 lines, but most games from the 2D/240p/CRT era were meant to be overscanned so it's not too much of a problem.

Personally I prefer stretching to 16:9 and playing on my phone's touchscreen with the sound turned off so my teacher doesn't hear and a HQ2X filter to make it HD and -- just kidding.

The problem with the low resolution on the sega genesis was dithering. I didn't lead to the same color blending as the 320 mode. Both mode looks great, but, one thing that was interresting with the higher resolution mode was that it was possible to pack more details... games in 320 looked more detailed. By example, Contra3 versus Contra HC...

I didn’t have my own TV but my dads old monitor had the proper connections. I always played on that monitor which resulted in a really crisp image. I was totally unaware of the stretching effect.

Found your stuff on Sega-16 - I really love the technical/historical angle you take with your videos! I'd like to start incorporating more of those themes into my own videos. Subbed :D

I insist on playing my Genesis in pixel perfect (10:7). My videos from 2 years ago all consider this original aspec ratio. Remembering that 10: 7 in a CRT 4: 3 will also present "deformities" in geometric shapes (like Sonic in "spin" format). Great video and big hug.

I grew up used to clear pixel art on Game Boy consoles, so I prefer square pixels when possible and actively seek these options out. I dislike fuzziness enough to avoid dev intended stretching sometimes. I first ran into this when attempting to emulate Mega Man Wily Wars. It's pretty noticeable once you get into Bomb Man's stage: I don't know whether the stretch on the orb buildings is intentional, but either way the devs presumably chose the small resolution so that the camera (and thus enemy spawns) would effortlessly match up with the Nintendo versions of the game with no need for level design alterations.

Supporting the 256x224 resolution was necessary for the Master System Backward Compatibility. But in the end, there are indeed a few games that used this resolution. It allowed for ports from SNES and PC-Engine, or even NES (Megaman Wily Wars). Capcom reused assets for Street Fighter II, Konami for TMNT Hyperstone etc... It was also used in RPGs, probably to reduce the size of the artworks to draw (Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force I, II, CD, Lunar games on Mega-CD). The MegaDrive was still a more capable console than the SNES, it pushed quite a lot more pixels in 320x224 in games that already had quite a lot more stuff moving on screen. Also it has a clearer picture signal, leading to games much less blurry than SNES. MegaDrive definitely has a much clearer and hi-res picture overall, when compared to SNES. It was especially obvious to me as I live in France and the MegaDrive was bundled with SCART RGB by default here, while SNES was composite. But even with RGB, it is still a poorer signal (more blur). Sega really had great hardware.

I always wondered why some Genesis games looked a bit off, a little chunky

It seems the 320x224/320x240 resolutions on the Mega Drive are not with square pixels but with 32:35 aspect ratio. A fullscreen loop in Sonic & Knuckles's Sandopolis for example is 192 pixels wide and 176 pixels tall. If you do 176 x 35 / 32 you get 192.5 for height which matches the 192 pixel width. NTSC itself is said to have 10:11 pixels which is 32:35.2 or very close to the 32:35 claim.

I first learned about the difference in resolutions around the late 90s early 00s with emulation. I noticed that some games had bigger bars than others because I think the emulators back then did not stretch the image.

Super informative. I’m using exact 256x224 on snes with fw900 and this helps!

The fact I guess ia that when running in CRT you notice a lot less this stretch. The problem is when go to a nodern TV. I still prefer as concept in those glory days.

I have a CRT and a Raspberry Pi running Retropie and because of how CRTs sort of filter pixels to be softer and smoother, the wider aspect actually looks pretty good in my honest opinion. In fact when i emulate on my PC with Fusion, i set it to the 4:3 and use filters. I'm honestly not a super huge fan of noticeable pixels.. retro games and retro styled games on a HD TV look horrible to me as i'm not a fan of the noticeable pixles looking like noticeable little squares all over the screen. I often wish i could filter a lot of games now days that are made to look retro. I really miss using CRTs because the screen was brighter and more vivid to me, even more colorful.

I actually had no idea about the resolution change. As for preference, I just use whatever the emulators default as I don't mind either way. Only time resolution really bugs me is when someone stretches a 4:3 game to 16:9, that one actually bugs me a lot.

I play both Genesis and SNES games in 4:3 in RetroArch on my VGA CRT monitor at 3840x224p @120Hz with black frame insertion to remove the doubled frames.

I prefer the way they looked on real CRT back then, even if in some cases that might seem wrong.

For some reason, Master System graphics are also stretched, despite 256x192 already being a 4:3 resolution under square pixels. What's the point of stretching a 4:3 image when it's already being output on a 4:3 CRT?

I think people forget that these games were designed to be played on CRTs, where they were taking into consideration rasterization(where the image gets wider when it's brighter) of the image and the stretch. The same reason why sooo many games utilize dithering, because almost all consumers were going to use RF/AV, so using dithering tricks on something like PS1/SAT will allow them to use faux transparency effects that otherwise are completely wrecked even with something as simple as S-Video. I think a lot of the video heads need to calm down. I personally don't... prefer.. to play on anything lower than S-Video at least, but I'm not picky about stuff like 1:1 vs. 4:3 and the like. I'm also in the apparent minority that scanlines look better, most 240p games have them anyway folks.

I prefer stretched because that's how the graphics were designed. The sprite artists didn't create sprites for a square pixel game at 256x224. You should check out Capcom's CPS - it has a resolution of 384x224 which is close to a modern 16:9 aspect ratio, yet the games were not displayed on widescreen TVs. They were displayed on 4:3 CRTs, and the artists at Capcom accounted for this by designing sprites on a special grid paper with narrower grids, so that when the image is stretched an oval on the grid became a circle on a 4:3 screen.

I prefer the stretch. I didn't game much on the Genesis, but most of my gaming of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras was on a CRT, and I was never bothered by the stretch, when I even noticed it. When I replay my old library on emulators, I usually emulate the CRT pixel stretch and put it into fullscreen mode, to mimic what I was used to back in the days of CRT. I don't do this with homebrew stuff though - most of that wasn't designed for CRT stretch and thus looks terrible when you try to emulate what's seen on an old CRT display.

I can't remember what videos, it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure that there are quite a few SNES games in which developers took their time to make assets in a way they wouldn't look stretched on CRTs.

I love to play retro games at 4:3, this games were programmed to play them at 4:3.

For 1080p you can get a 4:3 aspect ratio *and* integer scaling for H32 by scaling 5x horizontal and 4x vertical, which gives you the exact same 1280x960 output as 4x scaling of H40. For 4K you could either double that to 10x by 8x (2560x1920) or go to 11x by 9x (2816x2160) and lose the top/bottom bars but be 2% off on the aspect ratio. For 720p there's no nice integer option (3x vertical would require 3.75x horizontal) but then again given Genesis's heavy use of dithering (as covered in another one of your videos) I find H-integer scaling completely unnecessary. V should be integer for smooth scrolling and nice scanlines (if you like those), but for H if you're filtering down to a composite-like bandwidth you shouldn't be able to tell if it's integer-scaled or not :)

I definitely wasn't aware of the multiple aspects ratios, but I would say in general it's preferable to have games run in the original display aspect ratio unless that leads to unmanageable scrolling flicker or something.

BizHawk is an example of a multisystem emulator that supports the Genesis, and has the option to display 1:1 pixel aspect for the systems it emulates Because of this, many games on Genesis will stretch the width on the physical window for the emulator accordingly, allowing you to get a better idea of when games perform these kinds of resolution changes

I can change he aspect ratio using the service menu config mode, although I surely understand that PVM's has nobs and more to change the picture sizes, I wish there was a way to create profiles so next time you can play a game and change the aspect ratio

So I recently played Bonks Adventure on the PC Engine. I also played Sonic 1 on the Mega Drive and Super Mario World on the S.Famicom and as far as NTSC terms Bonks Adventure showcases in Higher Resolution at 320 x 240. Where Sonic 1 and Super Mario World both showcase at 320 x 224. Somebody was telling me that it isnt a 320 mode for the PC Engine. Only 512, 356 & 256. But Bonk is 320 x 240 I measured it. I dont own Sherlock Holmes for the PC Engine but its said that that game runs at 512 x 240. My question is how can you measure 512 or even 356 when 320 goes from all the way up to down with no space on 4:3 ratio on my TVs.

Valis was an amazing series.

It depends on the game really, old tv's stretched the image so the developers that had it in mind made the graphics proportion to look just right stretched. If they didn't have this in mind, this means they didn't know or care and game will be stretched on the original console+tv anyway. The same happens with the snes, if the game was made for 8:9 aspect ratio is "correct" or if you prefer, as it should.

It all looked so much better unstretched

I never know a crt slightly stretches the image, but yeah knowing that, you have to take enough with one or the other,1, 0 latency input lag with a slightly stretched image. Or 2, having a pixel perfect view on a lcd display but experiencing 0,5 latency of input lag. Sure there’re crt pc monitors & some crt tv’s wich has the luxury of letting you adjust the H & V aspect ratio of the screen but these display’s are getting rarer.

Great, informative video. On a related note, would displaying the Genny's 320 mode on a CRT cause the pixels to appear square, or would they maybe even a little narrow/taller? Kind of what it looks like in the test suite grid you have in the video.

The only thing that bothers me is stretching to 16:9. Im fine with with everything else

To me, it depends on what game I will play. Some games are developed considering the stretch of a CRT TV, so, they are correct stretched.

What is this music?? I can't even pay attention to what you are saying because the music is so damn good!!!! Edit: nevermind, just read the description :p.

Flashback is a weird exception that probably made cross platform porting easy. I don't think it's square pixels people desire as much clean pixels when integer values are used the pixel shape changes. Mostly many newcomers were probably put off by the poor 4:3 stretching options emulation started out with and stuck with for many years, only the most recent techniques have started to make stretched 4:3 look more attractive. Mostly 256x224 looks worse the bigger the sprite gets, like SF2 everybody looks crushed horizontally.

The stretching tended to only be a problem when a game made for H40 mode was then ported to the SNES or another platform not using it.

Valis 3 cutscenes looks made to 4:3 but the text looks stretched.

I just noticed it on snatcher recently, because just like frankly it was ported directly from the PC ENGINE SUPER CD ROM

Correct(-ish) answer. Play at 1280.

I’m missing square so much :( why we didn’t make just bigger square rather than this rectangles

My preference goes for the way it was intended by the developers.

The only time the stretching kind of bothered me was anything that was obviously supposed to be round, looked more oval.

I've recently noticed that the short and fat sprites I get with my Super Famicom running on a CRT can be remedied by running in 8:7 mode on an emulator. I assumed that the Genesis games would run in proper 4:3 (320 x 224) but using Mega-Tech with the Arcade/Mame emulator, that has not been the case. Ghouls N Ghosts is running at 256 x 224. When I stretch it to 4:3 using the video options, it looks distorted with short and fat sprites. So, I much prefer 8:7 mode even though there is not really enough horizontal width.

Non stretch seems to give me much much less screen jitter and tearing on both Snes emulation and fusion.

I personally prefer PAR in most situations, but if you're saying that some games graphics were designed with the stretching in mind, looks like it's more complicated now and you need to google configurations for every game before playing. Sure it's annoying, but it is what it is...

...when you see the one square that doesnt line up

I adjust my CRTs to be slightly too thin for 320 to compensate for 256, 320 being slightly too thin is less offensive to me than 256 being too fat

It's also a huge dilemma for me... I have no definitive answer to the pure 256px vs 256px stretched to 4:3 question. Some games look better stretched like TMNT, some others like the Shining Force series look better with a perfect pixel aspect. What makes also everything more complicated is that crt TVs aren't the same, if you take two different brand, two different models the games won't look the same on both TVs, some will stretch it more than others. As for emulators I wish they all offered a choice, Kega does if you use the double or quad raw filters. Blastem doesn't. So while it's not convenient I go on a per game basis to decide between stretched and perfect pixel aspect.

I gave up on my Pvm when I found out fw900 can scale 240 native. Let’s be honest it was a 4080 svideo tiny screen

It's amazing how I didn't notice a lot of this as a kid, but then I'd look at some ripped sprites and realize their aspect ratio looks completely off. the more realistic something is, or the more it shows circles, the more obvious that becomes. But ima be honest I came here for cute 80s-90s anime girls and that is my main takeaway from this video. Bring that aesthetic BACK, dangit Japan! This current stuff is just not nearly as special.

If the emulator is outputting video to high resolution, then stretch the 256 wide pixel mode to 4:3 aspect ratio... If the emulator is drawing to low res screen like 640x480 then leave the square pixels... That's my preference...

I got fusion to accept 320x224 without scaling from what I can see… all the sudden it’s not working. I’m not sure what happened even within the config settings won’t allow it. I’m going to delete and re install see if it fixes it

For me it depends on the game some games look wierd if stretched some games that look ok bother me less stretched then with black bars

I always emulated on 4:3. I never knew there were games that differed.

I'm curious to know what gains the Genesis had in terms of on-screen colors and speed in lower res mode. The Super Nintendo had higher res mode but sacrificed colors and the lower CPU speed probably wouldn't be any good for games at higher resolutions.

I want to play games where circles are circles. That is my main goal and it seems impossible to match, since different games, of the same core, could have different resolutions. So I should set video options (and bazels if needed) by game, which is ridicolous since retrogaming enthusiasts (like me) owns a number of roms that could vary from 20k-ish to more than 100k. It's a nightmare :D

I knew the genesis always looked a bit sharper even if the colors weren’t as good. Personally just play it the way it was meant to be played. On a crt

Would love to watch this video but it won't load, KZfaq doesn't want me to watch it. Can watch every other video on this website but spent 2 hours on multiple devices and it won't load

The stretch is fine as long as it is on a CRT. If it's on a flat panel or emulator that does a bad job, you will see shimmering, and that's not ideal.

More master system coverage please!

4:3 was the meant standard.

Isn't the 320 resolution squashed? Like, the pixels are taller than wider in that mode when displayed on a 4:3 crt

I don't mind people stretching 8:7 to 4:3 and 4:3 to 16:10 but 8:7 to 16:10 or 4:3 to 16:9 and that's too much stretching you need to stop.

why would they design a non 4/3 output on snes ? that seems strange ? any info on why it was designed to be stretched ?

Gotta love how the view count for the Snes video is around 45 thousand...but the Genesis vid counts pale in compare, even though Gen pushes a higher resolution and a proper 4:3 aspect ratio unlike the 2 yrs newer Snes. Unappreciated system man ppl just don't care about it. Sry for potentially starting a console war in the comments but it's sadly true man.

I don't really have any issue with either ratio for Genesis games, or even SNES and the like, but what I REALLY despise is how so many modern KZfaqrs have started showing these games at full stretch to fit current 16:9 displays--and I honestly think said people should be banned from showing retro games entirely. Honestly though, I think we should be at a point where every way of playing these games now have the correct settings for each game individually configured by default (the way that's closest to how the original developers obviously wanted it to look), and then have the option for users to change that to their own tastes if they prefer something else. So, on Genesis it would be 4:3 for most of the games with a few at 8:7, all pre-set, and for SNES it would be 8:7 for most of the games. It wouldn't take that much time, effort or memory to program these settings in as standard to all modern emulators and the like.

We should always play a game as it was intended - if that means stretching the pixels or not is irrelevant. In every other case we should stick to the proper aspect ratio

I wonder how big must the performance differences be betweent the H40 and H32 modes

I am wondering why the 16 bit games used 224 lines instead of the 240 used by the NES?

Do a video on PS1 aspect ratios.

Are the Sega Genesis' colored borders a part of the H40 mode? In other words, is some of the definition wasted?

These pixels were never meant to be square, unoptimized ports aside. The artists knew what they were doing. It would be a disservice to force the pixels to be square.

The only true reason to stretch these games to 16:9 is if your TV is bad and doesn't let you do anything else.

wide pixels is a bit of a stretch

generally speaking, should probably display the game in the aspect ratio the developers intended it to be viewed at. the ratio of the individual pixels isn't as important

At the end you say there are great books on the topic. I'd be interested in reading more. Are there any in particular you would recommend?

Also, why is is it that the wider Mega Drive AKA Genesis games are 320x224 (yet still called '240p') as opposed to the more logical 320x240? Even 320x224 requires a stretch (vertically) in order to fill a 4:3 CRT & would result in non-square (taller) pixels also, no? I am a big nooB, though. Kinda reminds me of how all CGA & even many post-CGA PC-DOS games rendered at 320x200 or lower instead of the less insane 320x240 (or instead of the much higher resolutions facilitated by EGA & VGA, e.g. all of Id's pre-Quake games).

On my Mega SG I actually stretch wider than 4:3 for 320 games as it keeps circular objects from looking oval.

I believe the console you are talking about is the ‘Sega Mega Drive’ as there is no such thing as a ‘Sega Genesis’ outside of US.

I think that stretching matters on a game by game basis. Similar to the SNES not all developers designed their games to be stretched. If that was the intention and you use square pixels then all you are looking at is a squashed image.

I always use 4:3, as that's the way it was back in the day, so are how most games are supposed to be played. BTW I hate seeing 4:3 content stretched to 16:9

I'm gonna be honest, i clicked because of the valis 3 screenshot

I prefer no stretching at all unless probably if the game was built to look and feel correct stretched (don't think I've actually played any of those games though). If stretched and not designed for it, such as Megaman - The Wily Wars, it also looks and feels to me like the characters/objects are moving faster side to side than normal and is awkward to play like that.

I'm a simple guy, I just go with whatever doesn't make things look fat or slim.

thx

i dont settle for anything that isnt square pixels ever

There are people that turn their FOV way up in games, and don't care how distorted the gameplay looks.

I always use integer scale in 4:3 aspect with 100% scanlines for Mega Drive, NES, SNES and CPS games on emulators. If the emulator doesn't support at least square pixel integer scale and 100% scanlines (like MAME) I simple don't use it.

And now i know why there's stupid colored boarders around my Sega games. And they change color depending on the level, and are usually the color of the sky in the game.

We dont want quality we need a good story