It really works best with photos, but sure. Looks like it analyzes all the fading and blurring / "anti-aliasing" and creates a larger image from that. None of that is present in a 2D environment like ZSNES.
raster vectorizers are hardly well-suited to real-time performance. Two slightly different scenes could take wildly different amounts of time to vectorize. And they're just plain slow. You have to do a multipass approach, re-processing the image maybe 50 times to get the scaling in the example image you posted.
Not only that - non-commercial/open source vectorizers really aren't that good (at least, I haven't yet found a good one).
I believe in this stretch technology for picture manipulation programs, especiallay to make bigger prints of small jpeg files. But for emulation it is not suitable. Maybe some technology could be derived to make the picture look a bit better and doesn't cost you all CPU power.
But I think Zsnes should play and emulate games like a real Snes did, not only for nostalgia reasons.
imo the existing stretching modes are more than enough already. The hq modes are nice (when not running on a slow machine), but even the regular hardware stretch is good enough for me. Let's face it, in snes we're not looking at a huge hi-res screen but a tiny low-res screen. I am almost sure that the ability to blur the image as it is now, even with regular bilinear, would have been a popular thing on the real snes. What zsnes and more emulators really need is a selectable aspect ratio when stretching in fullscreen. I've only seen 1 or 2 emulators do this but it is nice. This way you can play fullscreen in the original aspect ratio. Some Europeans may want the PAL snes aspect ratio. Or the common 4:3 aspect ratio could be displayed on a weird monitor, like a tall TFT or a widescreen.
edit: The SVN has it I see, I haven't tried it. I hope it works since I've gotten a wide and there's no choice about it.
Last edited by Echoecho on Mon Jul 24, 2006 11:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
Yes it's slightly different, but I doubt anybody could see a difference. On a NTSC screen, 224 lines make up all the screen area; on a PAL screen the same area contains 240 lines. So the first 224 lines are compressed down to 224/240=93.3333... percent of their NTSC size.
That's not enough to make the videogame graphics look squished, IMO.
creaothceann wrote:Yes it's slightly different, but I doubt anybody could see a difference. On a NTSC screen, 224 lines make up all the screen area; on a PAL screen the same area contains 240 lines. So the first 224 lines are compressed down to 224/240=93.3333... percent of their NTSC size.
That's not enough to make the videogame graphics look squished, IMO.
Oh, then you haven't played a PAL console.
Though if you get used to it, of course you won't notice it anymore. It's just that when you switch straight from playing a fullscreen version of a game on Zsnes to playing a real game on the console with PAL borders that you see it immediately. The black bars are pretty huge.
It has a certain nostalgic value. :p
[size=75][b]Procrastination.[/b]
Hard Work Often Pays Off After Time, but Laziness Always Pays Off Now.[/size]
blackmyst wrote:Oh, then you haven't played a PAL console.
Though if you get used to it, of course you won't notice it anymore. It's just that when you switch straight from playing a fullscreen version of a game on Zsnes to playing a real game on the console with PAL borders that you see it immediately. The black bars are pretty huge.
It has a certain nostalgic value. :p
I concur.
whicker: franpa is grammatically correct, and he still gets ripped on? sweener2001: Grammatically correct this one time? sure. every other time? no. does that give him a right? not really.
blackmyst wrote:It's just that when you switch straight from playing a fullscreen version of a game on Zsnes to playing a real game on the console with PAL borders that you see it immediately. The black bars are pretty huge.
Yeah, I'm sure you can see the difference when you compare the two next to each other. You'll still see squares as squares though, not as rectangles.
blackmyst wrote:Though if you get used to it, of course you won't notice it anymore.
That must be it then... never saw a NTSC screen, only PAL.
just so you guys know that image is bullshit. if you see in the larger image, the dog has whiskers that aren't in the reduced image. there's no way a computer can just go and create whiskers on a dog's face like that. also brown spots have white streaks of fur not visible on the 'original' image. unless when they photoshoped it they put too much jpg compression, which makes the smaller image appear worse off than it was at first.