Sonic 1/2/3 Megadrive 16:9 ?

Hi!
I don't know if this question has already been asked.
I wondered if a Sonic rom could be emulated in 16: 9?
The 4:8, even with the extended camera of Sonic CD is not enough in some times, there is an emulator or a way to do that?

 

no.


The VDP, and therefore the games are hardcoded for the 4:3 aspect ratio as 16:9 would not be mainstream yet. At best you could do is stretch the graphics but it looks shit.

 

The graphics are stretch on Kegafusion while fullscreen, but yes it "looks shit".

 

While emulation on the MegaDrive can't pull it off (yet), I've seen the DreamCast emulator has an overload polygons option instead of stretch.
This works well for the Dreamcast because it's all processed off-screen, while the MegaDrive is only loading what IS on the screen.

What you could do, though, is try some sort of fangame engine. While it's not recommended, it's also one of few ways to get it going right about now.
Sonic 1/2(/3K) on iOS were running widescreen through the Taxman engine (I think...) as a port, which you can look at to see if you really would benefit from 16:9, but in all seriousness..

The HD widescreen TVs and monitors we know of today weren't around for the MegaDrive, so there was no support to a nonexistent substance.
On the other hand, the extended CD camera is a workaround if you have something far-out that needs quick reaction time, but I also feel that the widescreen idea isn't necessary.

Why do you "need" more space?

GameBoy Colour's Super Mario Deluxe managed to play Mario 1/2 with much less resolution and still be enjoyable, so if you make your widescreen-esque levels on 4:8 and show it off a little, then maybe we'll find out that widescreen isn't all that helpful for the level designs you have in mind.

 

To be fair, it's extremely hard to make jumps in levels with the screen limit, as about 80% of the time (at least for me) they often end up being blind jumps due to the screen limit. The Sonic CD camera is the only way to solve it, as said above.

 

I don't "need" more space, it's just a technical question i ask myself since a long time.
I haven't noticed that the megadrive support only what is on screen.

 

Really, the whole 'Sonic needs widescreen' thing irks me. The game was made to be played in 4:3. Running into enemies, not seeing obstacles coming, that's a mess of other problems.

 

Really, widescreen isn't that big of a deal. It's one of those things that's nice to have, and sort of helpful, but ultimately unnecessary. It's just level designing where it really seems to take a tole; the original series had levels specifically built just right for the player to see everything that was needed. Custom levels can be a whole different story, though (especially if you set your level editor to be zoomed out by default, which I bet most everyone does).

 

So you will not play Sonic Mania? (just kidding).

 

This subject was actually something that I had discussed over four years ago in my first original post on this forum, I still wonder to this day why emulators for the Genesis/Megadrive, Sega CD/Mega~CD, and Super 032X do not have a Widescreen Hack feature, even though some of the more standard versions of Gens and Gens032 do have screen stretching to put an image from 04:03 into 16:09 or 16:10, Gens Rerecording (Revision 0341, anyway) does not stretch the display unless you are displaying something that is shown in the 0256x0224 resolution, which naturally had the feel of the 08:07 Aspect Ratio before being stretched out.
What I believe the problem is with Generation IV era Sega console emulators attempting to use Widescreen outside of the original hardware and screen resolution capabilities (and why nobody has done it perfectly yet) is probably from the worry that such a title would have to be used on a specific emulator with those capabilities, it would kind of be similar in relation to how games that exceed the 6024 KB mark could only be emulated on Gens032 and BizHawk emulators (BizHawk apparently could play Genesis/Megadrive ROMs that go up to 032 MB, if I am reading their documentation correctly), it's probably not that it can't be done, but the availability to emulate it would be violently scarce because most emulators don't have that luxury yet; maybe in Future~Time, we will get an emulator (hopefully a Rerecording variant) that is capable of doing this, but for the time being, I don't expect this at any point soon, it definitely would be nice to take for a spin though, a true Widescreen Gen IV Sega console title or ROM hack is pretty long overdue, it would be a great moment in the ROM Hacking or Homebrew scene to view that come to light someday.

 

Widescreen hack, huh? Think about it: extending the horizontal display size may display the plane maps mirrored two times,even. Would not it be weird to see the left side on the right too, not to mention the now visible tile reloading as the levels scroll? (Can be avoided with special coding from game's side, but its obviously not going to work with any originals)

 

If you want to play the classics in widescreen, just stick with the Taxman ports of Sonic 1/2/CD. A widescreen hack/emulator is pretty much impossible, and in the long run, even if it WAS able to be done, it wouldn't be worth it in my opinion.

 

Understood, everyone! :/
Thanks!

 

A wide screen effect is easy to simulate, and will even work on hardware. All you need to do is mod the game to have thicker black borders and shrink all the object and level sizes down so that the display resolution is 16:9. After all, Wide-screen is just a ratio, so it can be simulated but you might struggle to see what's going on.

Now if you want a real wide screen effect maintaining everything else the way it is now, but with a wider area on screen, then you're out of luck. The hardware was designed to display 4:3 and nothing you can do will change that.

 

Just play the game in PAL mode =P

 

Well, I've recently seen that an older version of Gens can rip directly from the VDP, and from there, show the entire Sprite even though only part of it is rendered on the screen.
A custom-crafted emulator to use that render instaid could hopefully spit out longer Sprite rendering, and some of the background that's overflowed, but the level chunck a would need X number of more loads to the left and right to keep the effect even.

I guess it could be done with a special emulator (hence RetroChannel and S1EE), but it's not assumably not a simplistic task.
Sure, "play the ports," but what about editing them? That's another.. Topic, I suppose, so I'll hold that for later.

Either way, I think that a quick way to widen a MegaDrive's display would be more appreciated after it's existence being pumped out. Think about 3DNES, for one.

 

Yes, but then it won't be Mega Drive 16:9, it'll be 'this one emulator' 16:9. I thought the point of this hobby was to work within the Mega Drive's limits. We could've switched to fan engines long ago, if we wanted to.

 

Hacking in "sort of kind of maybe functional almost" 16:9 support isn't a great idea. You'd see objects popping in and out of existence, you'd see level getting cutoff to the opposite side of the plane and possible duplicated parts on both screen edges (because plane isn't wide enough), and just some really weird and obscure issues (like layout loading being slow fuck in Sonic 1, you can already sometimes see this in the original!). Also all it is a gimmicky hack on top of the Mega Drive, good luck supporting your hack for it, or just end up with the same broken mess anyway. Rewriting the game engines may fix these issues, especially if its made to work with 128x32 plane size, but it seems kinda.... Not worth it.

 

it's interesting because both the tile planes and the sprite plane are actually large enough to support 16:9 (at about a 398x224 resolution), and it wouldn't be too much effort to make your engine support it, it's just the vdp doesn't support outputting that resolution to the screen. i mean, why would it, considering no tv at the time it was created was 16:9?

e: also if tvs were 16:9 at the time they could have just still used the 320x224 resloution and just compensated for the non square pixels, after all that's what every single super nintendo game does with it's fucked up 256x224

 

Nevertheless, the point in the topic is to answer the fundamental question:

I think Calvin's post answers that question quite nicely d=