News Thread 64 - Max Headline

“Remaster” is pretty dumb language for what is actually being done with these and it’s really just a more marketable if less accurate word than “enhanced port,” right?

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Well, to the extent they’re going back to higher-detail original assets like Amano’s concept art for the SNES FF characters, then the “remaster” analogy holds. Although I doubt that kind of thing accounts for more than 1% of the changes they’re making in these

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having said this… remakes are super cool! I love a remake! if you wanna substantively reinterpret something be my guest. but none of this in-between “definitive” shit

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The biggest problem with an emulation-based approach is it’s very hard to adapt the aspect ratio that way. It would require incredible emulator wizardry and most modern programmers who are perfectly capable to build something with a modern engine would have no idea how to begin doing that.

Sega Ages found a nice compromise by projecting some of the RAM data pulled from the emulator onto the side as a HUD. But that’s not going to be helpful in every genre

it’s been done for emulation of many platforms! there are near-turnkey implementations (usually depending on games’ offscreen drawing behavior). I think it’s actually pretty comparable to the Sega Ages approach to pulling RAM data, and I think both are great, if we agree that the aspect ratio can/should be fixed in the first place

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More game remakes/remasters/refucklers should just embrace their original aspect ratios. Pillarbox that shit. Cowards.

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Ah, I hadn’t heard of that. I imagine that would be doable on emulators for 3d consoles, but does it exist for 8/16-bit ones (which probably are typically written in a more rigid, resolution-coupled way)?

fewer (there’s usually more need to patch the offscreen drawing on a game-by-game basis, and the emulator has to take a lot of liberties with memory access), but yeah – I’ve seen it done with some megadrive stuff offhand

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I’m aware of usable widescreen implementations for the SNES and Genesis, but that’s about it for 2D systems.

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it would be fine if it was actually just pillarboxed, but what usually gets released is hideous borders

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i think the reflective tv bezel shaders are kind of swag… obvs original aspect ratio should be kept tho and i think it’s barely worth considering what they should do with “extra screen space”

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but I really do feel strongly about this philosophy. I think charging for emulation is absolutely OK for the same reason that there are lots of Intel and Microsoft engineers working on the Linux kernel, and the same reason that charging for access to new transfers of old movies on streaming services is absolutely OK – it all contributes to the cultural record and our way of reviving it, and in consumer terms, I’m gonna steal it anyway

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there are specific instances where original aspect ratios should always be retained, particularly when composition and framing is a big element of a game’s visual language. it’s really nice that the (exemplary) remasters of killer7 and REmake, fixed-camera games which really emphasize this, offer the option of 4:3. also i always wonder if the REmake remaster’s title “resident evil hd remaster” caused some of the contemporary confusion around remaster vs. remake because people thought “remaster” referred to the original remake of resident evil 1 rather than the remastering work done on the remake…

absolutely agree

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i honestly can’t comprehend how you could produce something as unwieldly and niche and expensive as a VR headset and manage to do this

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IMO except in very rare cases, pillarboxing is pretty much indefensible and really does need to be addressed somehow. It’s a giant waste of screen and it kind of destroys the composition in its own way with the distracting border contrast (a fixed color like black is also a distracting border that wasn’t present in the original experience)

Aspect ratio changes rightly got a bad reputation in the case of films, but I think the situation in games is very different. Pan-and-scan used to systematically cut off part of the scene, but we’re talking about the inverse here, adding more space. And most games are primarily scrolling or player-controlled-3d-camera so there’s not as much in the way of composition to disrupt

I was a purist, but I really like seeing all that extra space in the FFIII Pixel Remaster.

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Stricly Limited release of Osman/Cannon Dancer. i personally have to/must/cannot not get this

postcard x2, folks

it’s not a mister core but i suppose it will have to do

https://store.strictlylimitedgames.com/collections/cannon-dancer

The theory of a movie projector screen is that you can throw any aspect ratio onto that void and, with nothing surrounding it, the image will look complete. I think that transfers over to games just fine – certainly it helps if you don’t have poor light blooming, but I think black works best at fixing attention onto the image in the center of the screen.

Is it different for you because it’s not in the darkened theater context, that it’s in a bright living room or floating handheld display?

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this isnt entirely true… often times films were shot “open matte” and meant to be projected with a mask over the intended visible area and even now movies are shot digitally and cropped. sometimes they will be released on home video or broadcast on tv etc. in this open matte aspect ratio, and usually have completed vfx in the masked off area! its very much the case in these instances that they add image space rather than subtracting it and it’s possibly more common than not for a film in “cinematic” (i.e. cinemascope) aspect ratios shot with spherical (i.e. non-anamorphic) lenses to be shot open matte excepting 2-perf systems like techniscope (e.g. good time)

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