Created on 06.01.2013 - 02:21

Hi everybody and happy new year!
I have a very specific question/request....I venture to ask you so thank you in advance for reading this message

Is it possible to put the video in a letterbox (like movies) using a simple shader ?

I use epsxe on a good old Crt TV to have a special grain ( real scanlines etc...)
Since i also want to benefit of image enhancement
i use this wonderful plugin.
The problem is that it is not designed for that...

So, I have to tweak many option to achieve it to display properly in low res TV and for a lot of complicated reasons I use a custom 640x240 fullscreen resolution.

A lot of games are in 320x240 so i stretch and it works well...
but as you know some games are not in this mode... and many games uses different resolutions sometime several in a single game.

Xenogears has 216px heigh, Metal gear solid 224px ....

and when the resolution change during the game from 240 to 224. the "new" picture is stretched to 240... The results are ugly especialy for the text.

If the picture was incrusted in a 240px height letterbox i wouldn't have this problem...

I know that the best way would we an option in the plugin itself ( full horizontal stretch only ) but since Pete won't problably work on it anymore

Thank you again to pay attention to this problem that concern probably only me... although i still think that this kind of render is very interesting and worth it
also excuse me for my weird english.

Created on 07.01.2013 - 07:16

If I remember correctly, gpuBladeSoft has an option to correct the aspect ratio to proper 4:3, so that games are always in the intended aspect ratio, even after a resolution switch. Only problem is, you need a very powerful CPU if you want to play past native internal resolution.

Created on 07.01.2013 - 08:53

Thank you for your advice.
It's true that i don't have this problem with gpubladesoft!
A very interesting plugin but I have random results.
There's even a "native resolutions" mode but it doesn't perform well on my computer.
sadly it resolves my problem but creates a bunch of new ones.

Created on 07.01.2013 - 12:28

Yes, gpuBladeSoft is probably the best plugin, hands-down... or it would be, if it didn't require a top-of-the-line CPU for resolution enhancements and such. I can use it at native resolution just fine on my i7 860, but even increasing the internal resolution by one step makes it chug. This is because unlike Pete's plugins, it's actually a software-based plugin, so it relies entirely on the CPU as opposed to the GPU.

If you have an extremely powerful PC, though, there's basically no reason to ever use another plugin. It's very accurate and does everything, even shader support and polygon jitter reduction, and in the future may even support texture replacement.

Created on 09.01.2013 - 06:15

There's few reasons to keep using pete's plugin but
I can force real antialiasing in the CCC, for me it's priceless :p and i can simply use it normaly
gpubladesoft is better but only in theory since the growing power of cpus tends to slowing down. I don't think that this plugin will be usable before a century

And I have verified and it is not really pixel accurate... you can verify by yourself.

Take a 2D game and use it in a window 2x bigger with bilinear filtering off.
move in horizontaly or verticaly and you'll see it's badly scaled.
To correct this visually i have to remove 2 pixel on each side for example with 256x240, i'll use 510x478 instead of 512x480

I have a similar problem on pete's plugin...

Really if i knew how to program, i would code a shader to add a "letterbox" i'm sure it's not difficult to draw a black box behind the picture