True scaling emulators?

[Einzelherz]

Having only recently joined the world of HDTVs I've become acutely sensitive to screen stretching. Before that I played all of my older games on a pretty good SDTV. I've been searching for emulators that scale by integers not by stretching. Most people refer to the 4:3 to 16:9 stretching when they talk about it, but I mean stretching of the individual pixels at all (save for some 4:3 correction when applicable).

I've been searching for emulators that allow direct scaling (e.g. 2x, 3x, etc.) in full screen mode because I'd really like to play my old backups on the new TV via HDMI. It seems that most emulators, when switched into full screen, at best, will only maintain aspect ratio, but stretch vertically.

Granted, I'm only actively searching for these when I have a particular game I want to play since all of my emulators are drastically outdated (ca. 2006). I have found a few that will scale pixel-accurate and I wonder if anyone else has the same issue I do and have found some on their own.

VBA-M allows a 6x scale in full screen which leaves the games looking large and lovely on my 42" plasma. The Metroids in particular.

FCEUX worked well, but only in windowed mode (iirc). Megaman looked better than ever.

Snes9X wouldn't work properly with a combination of 4:3 correction and direct scale. One option would always take over the other.

I've been trying to find a PSX emulator that can do this, but since the resolution in any given game itself changes, I don't think it'd be able to do a direct scale anyway. The best I could hope for would be a smart scaling (for instance 320x240 goes 4x and if the next screen is 640x480 it goes 2x).

Has anyone else found any emulators that can output a perfect pixel fidelity to a 1080 screen? I haven't had a try with any Genesis emus yet.

 

[Fishaman P]

I'm confused: are you saying that you want emulators to achieve 1080 height while maintaining the original pixel aspect ratio?
Or are you wanting to get them as close as possible?

Either way, the easiest solution is to read up on the native resolution for each system.

 

[PityOnU]

I've found that at 1080p, if you set the emulators to fullscreen, maintain aspect ratio, and turn off any sort of anti-aliasing, it's pretty damn good.

Yeah, it's not pixel perfect, but good luck noticing at those levels of fidelity.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I'm pretty sure ZSnes can do this, since it has a lot of resolution related options, including some for scaling.
You don't want to do this for 3D PSX/N64 games or newer though as they benefit from the increased resolution and are actually drawn at a higher resolution instead of scaled.

I've found that at 1080p, if you set the emulators to fullscreen, maintain aspect ratio, and turn off any sort of anti-aliasing, it's pretty damn good.

Yeah, it's not pixel perfect, but good luck noticing at those levels of fidelity.

Agreed. I've never had a problem with emulator scaling on PCs. It's more of a problem on handheld devices where the resolution is lower and therefore even a single pixel that's not scaled the same amount as all the others will stand out.

 

[calmwaters]

Have you tried Higan? But I'm not sure if it can play PSx games, though. (Why can I never test something before I recommend it? I feel like such a turd.)

 

[Einzelherz]

I'm confused: are you saying that you want emulators to achieve 1080 height while maintaining the original pixel aspect ratio?
Or are you wanting to get them as close as possible?

Either way, the easiest solution is to read up on the native resolution for each system.

Not achieving the 1080 height, but scaling to the largest it can. So for GBA it would be a 6x multiplier giving a 960 height + letter boxing.

I've found that at 1080p, if you set the emulators to fullscreen, maintain aspect ratio, and turn off any sort of anti-aliasing, it's pretty damn good.

Yeah, it's not pixel perfect, but good luck noticing at those levels of fidelity.

You don't notice the errors on a static screen, I'll give you that. But you can notice them scrolling. I'll agree that in most cases it's hard to notice, but then my OCD acts up.

And SNES9x had its own strange error where a single line of pixels from the bottom left to the top right corner were missing so there was a "crease" displayed.


edit: Just tried Higan with Chrono Trigger and if you set the video to "Center" it appears to do exactly what I'm looking for. Resizing the window doesn't resize the game until it can move up to its next full integer scale. Thank you very much calmwaters.

 

[Einzelherz]

An update if anyone cares:

Higan set as standard will accomplish this goal for NES, GB, GBA, SNES. I just wish I could change palettes on the GB games.

KEGA will do it with the video settings at Fixed Aspect (fit) for SMS, GG, Genesis, Sega CD, 32X.

I still haven't found a PSX emulator that will do this. I'm sticking with pSX for its simplicty even though the pixels are getting stretched a bit.

 

[PityOnU]

An update if anyone cares:

Higan set as standard will accomplish this goal for NES, GB, GBA, SNES. I just wish I could change palettes on the GB games.

KEGA will do it with the video settings at Fixed Aspect (fit) for SMS, GG, Genesis, Sega CD, 32X.

I still haven't found a PSX emulator that will do this. I'm sticking with pSX for its simplicty even though the pixels are getting stretched a bit.

Thanks for the update. I wish more people checked back like this when they solved their own problem.

 

[YayMii]

Snes9X wouldn't work properly with a combination of 4:3 correction and direct scale. One option would always take over the other.

FYI, most SNES games render at 8:7 (256x224) even though the console displays at 4:3 (640x480). You won't be able to do both 4:3 and direct scale at the same time.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

This is of interest to me as I am getting a lot of people buying PC's and setting them up to use large 1080P TV's as monitors.... Works great for Netflix and I have spoke with some peeple about running old arcade games on these set ups...

I ask here because this thread seems really relevant to the question.

So has anyone set up MAME on a PC connected to a 1080P TV via HDMI and how did it turn out?

I myself like to use MAME UI 64, and it works pretty well on my 720P ish monitor (it's slightly higher res than 720P) but 1080 is a slightly different beast and the last customer I set up I had to adjust the scaling option so the entire screen in windows 8 would show up... (Windows 8... arrgh)

Also thank you to the OP for posting your findings with those emulators!!! This will go in my mental notebook of things to remember when I decide to update my whole home theater set up... Going to just bite the bullet and build a new PC for it with emulation and Netflix (seems nice enough at other peoples houses lol)

 

[Einzelherz]

FYI, most SNES games render at 8:7 (256x224) even though the console displays at 4:3 (640x480). You won't be able to do both 4:3 and direct scale at the same time.

Yeah I thought I addressed that. It probably sounds contradictory that I'm being stern about the pixel scale while allowing for the 4:3 correction, which does the exact same thing in the other direction. Well it's because when I first started playing with emulators in the 90s a lot of them didn't/couldn't 4:3 correct and every game looked awkward. 8:7 still looks strange enough that I don't even want to play it so I have to make that concession.

 

[PityOnU]

I myself like to use MAME UI 64, and it works pretty well on my 720P ish monitor (it's slightly higher res than 720P) but 1080 is a slightly different beast and the last customer I set up I had to adjust the scaling option so the entire screen in windows 8 would show up... (Windows 8... arrgh)

That's not Windows 8, that's how the TV handles input. You would have needed to do the same thing regardless of OS. 720P is (conceptually) no different from 1080P.

Most modern TV's have a "PC_in" input that would make it so you wouldn't have to do that.

 

[dudie]

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