Good news everyone!

[+ T +]

Having said all that, I got a bit lost in the discussion earlier: are you all saying that most of these games in the arcade had different resolutions but ended up being stretched to a 4:3 anyway? Apologies if I got completely the wrong end, there.

That's correct. Arcade games run at a huge variety of different resolutions, but when output, the display device will stretch the video horizontally to fill the screen. The amount of stretching would vary slightly from screen to screen so there is no way to have one single value that is arcade perfect, but 4:3 is a great all-round ratio that gives a visually accurate representation of how the game would look on an arcade monitor. All 'pixel perfect' does is take the game's internal resolution and doubles/triples it which means you end up with all kinds of crazy shapes and sizes which you would never see on a genuine arcade machine since all standard arcade monitors are 4:3 or 3:4.

 

EDIT: As to your question about how to set the screen in FBL. By default FBL displays horizontal games in 4:3 and vertical games in 3:4 which is exactly how they should be so really you shouldn't need to adjust anything at all. Unless of course you have an HDTV in which case you would need to switch it to 4:3 mode (I don't have one personally so I'm assuming that's possible) to get a visually accurate display.

Edited July 29, 2011 by + T +

[sbpaabck]

if you can add an option to disable audio for video preview too

 

 

Thats a good shout, would really like to see that implemented in a future update, the ability to disable audio for video previews. I always thought that feature was missing every time I play FBL and would be cool to see it added.

 

 

Also I know I shouldn't be requesting game drivers etc, but its such an important game I thought I'd request it anyway. "Golden Axe II revenge of death adder" is very glitchy in coinops.

 

Could such a thing ever be ported over to FBL and working 100%?

 

Thanks

 

 

omg I forgot about that game, I gave up hope of it working in coinops as it couldn't be fixed for whatever reason. I think because of extremely complicated driver issues. Shame because that game looks excellent and I never even saw it in the arcade so would love to play it properly (the glitches render is a bad gaming experience!)

 

well suggested! I second that!

 

 

 

che che check it!

Edited July 29, 2011 by sbpaabck

[sbpaabck]

Also I know I shouldn't be requesting game drivers etc, but its such an important game I thought I'd request it anyway. "Golden Axe II revenge of death adder" is very glitchy in coinops.

Extremely unlikely to ever see this in a playable state on fbal.

The more I improve it on coinops the more it runs like crap. The tradeoffs are graphics or frame rate. You get one or the other.

For fba, I would have to port the cpu core, graphics routines, and a lot of intermediate junk. You're not looking at a few hour process. Even after that, there's no guarantee that it would run at a decent frame rate at all.

 

oh lol sorry should've read this first. Sounds fair enough to me....

 

How about a dedicated xbox emu stripped down to run this game and this game alone? Or one built just for this game?

 

IQ, is there just not enough grunt in the xbox? I appreciate it would take too long to do this unless you had a real desire to do it for yourself or if you were getting paid a pretty penny for your time!

 

Anyways thanks for the above post nice to know the issues behind the lack of death adder 2.

 

Cheers

[sbpaabck]

Never understood the appeal of 'pixel perfect' myself. Just seems like an inventive way of making arcade games look completely different to how they actually looked in the arcade. All these crazy numbers may be 'pixel' perfect but good old 4:3 is arcade perfect.

 

Same here. This is trend that appeared about 2 years ago (after Cospefogo pointed this out). I had a try and never feel excited. Well, everyone has his own trip.

 

 

lol each to their own, i've been trying to use pixel perfect and those edges still look jaggy no matter what I do!

 

hehe feel better for having it on than having it off if you know what I mean.

 

Erm... yeah

[RatherAnnoyed]

Having said all that, I got a bit lost in the discussion earlier: are you all saying that most of these games in the arcade had different resolutions but ended up being stretched to a 4:3 anyway? Apologies if I got completely the wrong end, there.

That's correct. Arcade games run at a huge variety of different resolutions, but when output, the display device will stretch the video horizontally to fill the screen. The amount of stretching would vary slightly from screen to screen so there is no way to have one single value that is arcade perfect, but 4:3 is a great all-round ratio that gives a visually accurate representation of how the game would look on an arcade monitor. All 'pixel perfect' does is take the game's internal resolution and doubles/triples it which means you end up with all kinds of crazy shapes and sizes which you would never see on a genuine arcade machine since all standard arcade monitors are 4:3 or 3:4.

 

EDIT: As to your question about how to set the screen in FBL. By default FBL displays horizontal games in 4:3 and vertical games in 3:4 which is exactly how they should be so really you shouldn't need to adjust anything at all. Unless of course you have an HDTV in which case you would need to switch it to 4:3 mode (I don't have one personally so I'm assuming that's possible) to get a visually accurate display.

 

Thanks for the confirmation, + T +.

I did not realise this. With all the fuss about Pixel Perfect I assumed that what this meant was that we would be seeing the games exactly as they were in the arcades! Obviously not. I'll bear that in mind in the future.

 

Maybe my strange FBL behaviour is related to the fact I'm putting it through an HDTV, yes. And yeah, it's at 16:9.

If I recall correctly, it seems to default all games to a 4:3 square that doesn't quite fill the vertical space available (i.e. I have to resize it if I want it to fill the screen vertically).

I'll try switching the TV to a 4:3 ratio the next time I fire it up. Thanks again.

 

EDIT: just in addition to this subject (and this IS related to the thread), these Cave games - was it the same deal with these? I remember the resolution of them being very strange (a very "thin" vertical resolution, if you get me), but were they stretched to a 3:4 screen in the arcades also? You know what? Thought just occurs... never seen a Cave game in an arcade!

Edited July 29, 2011 by RatherAnnoyed

[Mr Feud]

Extremely unlikely to ever see this in a playable state on fbal.

The more I improve it on coinops the more it runs like crap. The tradeoffs are graphics or frame rate. You get one or the other.

For fba, I would have to port the cpu core, graphics routines, and a lot of intermediate junk. You're not looking at a few hour process. Even after that, there's no guarantee that it would run at a decent frame rate at all

 

Thanks for the reply, I understand it could be a real pain to port into FBL but the game is such a good one I just had to ask what the possibility was of having it playable in FBL. The biggest flaw I think when you play it in coinops is the character sprite shadows are white instead of black as seen in that video that sbpaabck posted.

 

How about a dedicated xbox emu stripped down to run this game and this game alone? Or one built just for this game?

 

IQ, is there just not enough grunt in the xbox? I appreciate it would take too long to do this unless you had a real desire to do it for yourself or if you were getting paid a pretty penny for your time!

 

Anyways thanks for the above post nice to know the issues behind the lack of death adder 2.

 

Cheers

 

There used to be an emulator called Modeler v0.9.3a which was an arcade emulator that ran Sega System 32, Sega System 32 Multi and Sega Model 1. The emulator itself is quite old now but it ran about 15 games in total I think, its a shame this was never ported to xbox as Golden Axe II revenge of death adder ran perfectly.

Edited July 29, 2011 by Mr Feud

[neoryu]

Not to knock anyone who wants pixel perfect, or Cospefogo. He knows a lot about native resolutions for vintage hardware and he really, really cares about this hobby (as we all do). But I'm not so convinced that there's a true way to define perfect pixels on a screen that's either 4:3 or 16:9 these days. It's all in the eye of the beholder.

 

Fortunately for me, I literally grew up in US arcades at their peak. Over here, I can confirm with 100% certainty that "pixel perfect" was nonexistent then. And in my opinion, it still is now. Even on RGB monitors here, the games were all stretched to fill the screen, be it horizontally or vertically. No monitor here fit perfectly around CPS2's 384 x 224 resolution. NeoGeo MVS? It was filling our screens too and still looking gorgeous by those standards. Monitors were either 4:3 (mostly, and sometimes huge in size) or 3:4 for vertical shmups in major US arcades. Between 1990-2000, gamers dropped their coins into these machines and were still wowed by arcade graphics for two reasons:

 

1. the fact that most game consoles could not compete with arcade game performance then, whether polygonal 3D or 2D sprite based.

 

2. the vast majority of US gamers did not own an RGB monitor, therefore we were stuck with composite video or the terrible RF signal. Seeing an arcade game was like going from 20/50 vision to 20/20.

 

I'm not dismissing pixel perfect or anyone who prefers to have it. I just realize that "pixel perfect" is a nonexistent concept in reality. It exists only in subjectivity and comes down to personal preference. Look at FBAL in 480p with Scanlines enabled on a 4:3 CRT. Or look at any of Madmab's edition of emulators in HD. Put them side by side with real hardware. Notice how much better the Xbox versions look. Lucky for me, I was able to do this with a few of my MVS and CPS2 boards just out of curiosity. The disadvantage some people claim the Xbox has of not being able to output native 240p is actually an advantage if the right initiative is taken. If anything, trying to make these games fit in visually with a primitive video standard is working backwards.

 

In the end, it all really depends on user settings, what kind of display the user has, and what type of connection they're using from the Xbox to the display. Those 3 things are crucial. If someone wants to add pixel perfect to an emulator, there's no problem at all with it being included. But the notion that an emulator is somehow "disadvantaged" without it is a bit ignorant and shortsighted. Fact: Almost every graphical filter we use distorts the sprites. Yet, most don't care because they just want the games to "look better" to them. Pixel Perfect? No different. It is still distorting the image in a way that may or may not make it "look better" to a user. 99% of our console classics did not have borders on our screens.

 

Just my personal take on it. The developers here will decide if they want to add it or not, but it's been a fun discussion for a moment.

Edited July 29, 2011 by neoryu

[Sparda]

CPS2 was made to be played on 4/3 ....even if the resolution is wide..it must run on 4/3 screen...pixel perfect is a good feature....but whats more important us how your SDTV is set...finding the correct geometry, purity..adjusting yoke..purity rings, convergence; playing with magnets...only "few" peoples are skilled and are able to set a SDTV perfectly...even PVM needs tweaking.

[+ T +]

While we're discussing screen sizes, can I just ask everyone a question? Currently FBL uses separate screen size settings for every single game and I've always found it inconvenient having to adjust each game individually to fit my screen, and even more inconvenient having to use approximate values meaning that no two games are ever exactly the same size. I've also never come across a situation where I need a particular game to have it's own separate screen settings.

 

So my question is this; would it be better to just use a single global screen size setting for all games similar to the system MAMEoX and it's derivatives use? So any changes you make to the screen size are carried over to all games or do people actually use the individual sizes for some purpose? Clearly it would be great to have the option for both but right now I'm interested in which people would prefer if it could be either one way or the other.

[destronger]

While we're discussing screen sizes, can I just ask everyone a question? Currently FBL uses separate screen size settings for every single game and I've always found it inconvenient having to adjust each game individually to fit my screen, and even more inconvenient having to use approximate values meaning that no two games are ever exactly the same size. I've also never come across a situation where I need a particular game to have it's own separate screen settings.

 

So my question is this; would it be better to just use a single global screen size setting for all games similar to the system MAMEoX and it's derivatives use? So any changes you make to the screen size are carried over to all games or do people actually use the individual sizes for some purpose? Clearly it would be great to have the option for both but right now I'm interested in which people would prefer if it could be either one way or the other.

 

i like your idea... madmab emu's do this and it's very convient. i have a 50" and having to adjust everytime i try a new game gets old.

 

could you somehow do this for capcom (sf2 type) & snk games too? i set the buttons a certain way and use the same set up for them all.

 

 

side note:

 

could ya tweak mameox next...

[A Murder of Crows]

While we're discussing screen sizes, can I just ask everyone a question? Currently FBL uses separate screen size settings for every single game and I've always found it inconvenient having to adjust each game individually to fit my screen, and even more inconvenient having to use approximate values meaning that no two games are ever exactly the same size. I've also never come across a situation where I need a particular game to have it's own separate screen settings.

 

So my question is this; would it be better to just use a single global screen size setting for all games similar to the system MAMEoX and it's derivatives use? So any changes you make to the screen size are carried over to all games or do people actually use the individual sizes for some purpose? Clearly it would be great to have the option for both but right now I'm interested in which people would prefer if it could be either one way or the other.

 

i'd like to see a "global" setting and an individual setting. global setting would put everything at a certain "starting point" but would be able to be changed. individual game settings would override global settings.

[+ T +]

Clearly it would be great to have the option for both but right now I'm interested in which people would prefer if it could be either one way or the other.

Quoted for clarity.

 

 

could ya tweak mameox next...

I'd like to have a go with MAMEoX as I'm sure there are many drivers that could be added from subsequent versions of MAME. Unfortunately the source to MAMEoX128Plus which I consider to be the most solid version of the MAME core on the Xbox was never made available so I'd be going back to the same old version that CoinOPS is based on. Plus there's the issue of time as well, I'd like to make a go of keeping FBL alive and I won't be able to devote the kind of time I have over the last couple of weeks to it on a continuous basis, so it'll be a case of doing what I can when I can which doesn't really allow for a second concurrent project.

Edited July 30, 2011 by + T +

[Bigby]

Clearly it would be great to have the option for both but right now I'm interested in which people would prefer if it could be either one way or the other.

 

Well if it's a choice between the two, for now I'd say go with the single global screen size setting.

[Sparda]

+1

 

global size settings with an option for "pixel perfect" like madmab's emus

[PhilExile]

Hey +T+

 

I'm actually curious about how many people here are using SDTV or HDTV. Do you think you could put up a poll?

 

Also, I think it would be fine to do a global, scaled setting - but leave the option for a custom screen size. I wouldn't take features away.

 

What were the enhancements in MAMEoX128Plus?

Edited July 30, 2011 by PhilExile