why the heck all Street Fighter II ports on any consoles used a lover vertical resolution? since they all where completely re-drawed from the original arcade, i can't see any reasons why they used a lower resolution and put in those ugly black bars on top and bottom of the screen? even when different teams/developers ported the game on a very different platform (e.g. SFC -> Capcom, PCE -> NEC Ave...), the result was nearly the same: SFCPCEMD (* since this forum uses a black BG, you have to select the three pix for a better see of the black bars) how come? PS: NEC Ave. in a minimum was that smart, to use that useless black area for displaying the scores :lol:
The consoles don't all have the same horizontal resolution, so they set the vertical resolution to closest match the arcade's pixel aspect ratio. Also instead of expanding the background on the top and bottom, which many TVs will cut off anyway, and which wouldn't accurately reflect the arcade game, they are blanked to get more precious CPU time outside of Vblank.
I figure on older consoles it would be a terrible waste to render images on the overscan area of a TV screen. I think with aspect ratio correction, most black bars fall within the overscan area anyway, so you don't loose that much.
Calpis is definitely right. I think the CPS is somewhere around 384x224. So you don't want to just compact it horizontally and mess up the proportions. And then I suppose it's convient if you use that blank space for more vblank. But I think mainly it was just for the downscaling of graphics which was required for both the system's resolution but also the smaller amount of ROM memory you could have in a cartridge compared to what you could afford to put on an arcade pcb. Honestly I never minded SF2 or Mortal Kombat (which I believe does the same thing) having that letter boxed like effect. It certainly helps keep the aspect ratio feeling right.
How come the SF games on the Saturn Capcom Generation disc and Street Fighter Collection don't have those black bars? Is it because the Saturn can output the same resolution as the CPS1 board? Yakumo
The ports used redrawn graphics, so I doubt it is related to matching the arcade. Probably more a case of the consoles not being able to handle higher resolution and the bars are there to make them run faster. The PCE game has the score bars in the border, so it's not squashed down based on screen res. There is a design purpose there.
I believe the Saturn and PSX ports, use 320x240, and crop on the edges. They use the same graphics as the original though. You could find out if you compare screens from Saturn and an emulator to see how much of the background you can see at once. But I'm pretty sure this is the case as I noticed the energy bars and win counter token things being closer to the edge of the screen on PSX and Saturn compared to my arcade board or on emulators.
Ah, so that's why Saturn Capcom ports give you Arcade or Saturn screen modes. If you choose Arcade mode you're characters will move slightly off screen while in Saturn mode they'll stop at the edge of the screen. Yakumo
