Hardware New screen resolution and its consequences

[pachura]

So, the new touchscreen for 3DS will be 320x240. What are the consequences ?

If 3DS is hacked and homebrew is possible, then all the DOS-era games could be ran without downsampling. For instance, ScummVM 3DS could run Sierra/Lucasarts games at their native resolution (320x200), with the touchscreen interface being a clear advantage over PSP. If 3DS' CPU is powerful enough, DosBox (x86 emulator) could be ported to 3DS and allow almost every DOS game to be run. This is seriously super cool.

Amiga, however, had 320x256 resolution. But I guess one can live with 8 horizontal lines cropped from the top and from the bottom... WinUAE (Amiga emulator) has been ported to many platforms, including PSP; not all the games run at full speed, but some of them seem to be really playable.

Backwards compatibility with NDS is quite a different animal. DS has 256x192 resolution, so Nintendo can offer two things: either to run at 1:1 (which would mean that a picture as small as 2.6" is displayed), or to upscale. While upscaling can give reasonable results for 3D games (e.g. Metroid Prime Hunters), I am afraid that upscaled hand-drawn games (e.g. Castlevania) might look really ugly... the same for fonts in dialog boxes.

Just my two cents.

 

[Arnold Schwarzen]

I always thought upscaling the 3D games would make them look worse since it'll be more pixilated and that 2D games would look better but still not as good as they used to.

 

[Twilight Loz]

its just like using a symbian s60 v3 software on a symbian s60 v5 phone. It may be compatible but the resolution will be ugly. Id prefer it to stay at its own size. I wouldn't mind the game not filling up the whole screen

 

[spinal_cord]

I always thought upscaling the 3D games would make them look worse since it'll be more pixilated and that 2D games would look better but still not as good as they used to.

Nope, upscaling 3D looks fine because all the images are vector, the edges will stay sharp. Upscalling 2D will create uneven pixel sizes and looks terrible.

 

[QuietShark9]

They could use the 3D slider to do the same as the LR buttons for GB games on GBA. Full 3D would make the screen stretch to fit. No 3D would make it 1:1.
They can't use 3D on backwards compatibility anyway, unless there are DS games with special 3DS features, like some DS games did with DSi.

Or even let users decide with an options screen.

 

[Jamstruth]

I always thought upscaling the 3D games would make them look worse since it'll be more pixilated and that 2D games would look better but still not as good as they used to.

Nope, upscaling 3D looks fine because all the images are vector, the edges will stay sharp. Upscalling 2D will create uneven pixel sizes and looks terrible.

Problem is that it probably won't scale up the vectors and just scale up the native resolution image ala iPad.

 

[DiscostewSM]

If the 3DS does do any upscaling with NDS games, it will most likely upscale like what is done with 2D because of how rendering is done. Of the 4 2D background layers the NDS is capable of, the very first one handles displaying the 3D output from a 48 scanline buffer, that is filled up prior to the screen refreshing, and then continually buffered/emptied as the screen is refreshed from top to bottom. Plus, there is a memory register that is readable that holds the current number of buffered scanlines. Should they stray away from how the NDS deals with rendering to try and have it upscale via vectors would break any game that relies on information from the hardware like this.

 

[ryan90]

i doubt they could do actual upscaling, they can't seem to do it in the ds emulators, they just stretch the image, which is exactly what the 3ds will probably have to do, i imagine the home button could be used to change those settings

have it native or stretched, i think if gba games and gbc are released on 3ds virtual console they will also have to upscale gba games because they will look tiny.

 

[pachura]

i doubt they could do actual upscaling, they can't seem to do it in the ds emulators, they just stretch the image

I always thought upscaling = stretching the image ?

 

[Veho]

I always thought upscaling = stretching the image ?

It's not just stretching, it's also resampling the picture in real time to smooth the edges and blur the pixels so it looks better than just a stretched image.

Here's a comparison: this is the original image:

This is just stretching:

This is resampling:

 

[ryan90]

i was talking about vector upscaling to make the game have a higher internal resolution, the textures could be re-sampled too but what i was saying is that we haven't seen this on ds pc emulators

 

[alucard77]

Is there somewhere where I can read up on this?

 

[DiscostewSM]

Basically, they would do one of two things. Either have the hardware so it would be backwards-compatible just like how the DS was with GBA games and the GBA was with GB/GBC games, or they would just emulate it. Wasn't here something months ago about the 3DS's CPU able to fully emulate the DS's two CPUs with room to spare?

 

[pachura]

This is just stretching:
...
is is resampling:
...

OK, so by "stretching" you mean "resizing using the nearest neighbor algorithm" and by resampling "resizing using bilinear/bicubic resampling". Well, since PICA200 has internal support for bilinear filtering, I would say it will not make much sense to "stretch" instead of "resample".

QUOTE(DiscostewSM @ Jul 1 2010, 07:35 PM) Basically, they would do one of two things. Either have the hardware so it would be backwards-compatible just like how the DS was with GBA games and the GBA was with GB/GBC games, or they would just emulate it. Wasn't here something months ago about the 3DS's CPU able to fully emulate the DS's two CPUs with room to spare?

We're discussing the resolution issue here, not the emulation. Anyway: DS' secondary processor was completely compatible with GBA's core processor (both ARM7), so the emulation was very easy hardware-wise. Many are speculating that 3DS will include the same ARM7 as secondary processor, and some more powerful, but backwards compatible ARM as the main one (e.g. Cortex A8), being able to be downclocked to run at DS' frequency. The only problem will then be to emulate the shitty and very specific 3D chip used in DS; but maybe calls to its proprietary API could be transalated to PICA200's OpenES ? We'll see.

 

[DiscostewSM]

We're discussing the resolution issue here, not the emulation.

Yes, the talk is about resolution and about how NDS games would be dealt with on the 3DS with bigger resolution screens, but emulation CAN deal with the issue also. I bought up emulation because unlike downgrading hardware to match specification of the device it is trying to be backwards compatible with, emulation can enhance what the original device could not do. Current emulators do these kind of things, like increased resolution (even SNES emulators like SNES9x are making the Mode 7 effect High-Res and not just resampled), filtered sound, etc. But, more onto the point of resolution. With the DS's viewport for 3D, it is limited to 8bits per point of a rectangle. With emulation, the points can be extracted, then expanded to fit more or less within the 3DS's capable resolution. The frustrum will already match with the viewport, so 3D elements could then be based on the 3DS's capabilities, including the increased resolution. The 2D hardware can be emulate with 3D, and possibly use bi-linear filtering to clear up the pixilation. But, unlike 3D on the NDS, the 2D hardware for things like sprites use whole-value positioning, not fixed-point, which could lead to not-so-smooth movement.

 

[ryan90]

nope my guess is the cpu in the 3ds will accept instruction for the ds cpu like the wii does for the gamecube and the ds does for gba, the cpu will probably also have to translate some of the gpu instructions before sending them to the gpu. Since running full 3d graphics on the top screen will be quite taxing on a cpu i have every reason to believe it will be able to handle it, along with nes, snes, gb/gbc, gba, megadrive, sms and the small possibility of seeing n64 games on 3ds virtual console although i doubt it since they are already porting two n64 games.