Author Topic: Pulstar - Extended Horizontal Resolution  (Read 3339 times)

Offline neocvera

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Pulstar - Extended Horizontal Resolution
« on: June 08, 2021, 10:38:43 PM »
This is another tweak for Pulstar if the dev team is interested in adding support for it. I give full credit to: Clear Paper and it was from 2020.

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As with all video signals designed during CRT days, an overscan area was required and often we do not see the top-, bottom-, left- and right-most pixels of an original signal.

The Neo Geo has the ability to output a maximum horizontal resolution of 320 pixels.

Quite a number of games have a reduced visible screen width of 304 pixels (8 pixels on each side removed).

Interestingly, for some, the full graphics are still rendered there, however, they are intentionally overlaid with a black FIX layer.
(this was a practice so much so that there are default subroutines in the BIOS to do so)

On modern flatscreen displays, however, we can see these pixels clearly.

Pulstar's typical viewable gameplay screens are 304 pixels wide. I took a look and found the subroutines that perform this 'blacking', and these are the results of bypassing them.

I've supplied the link to Dink - should he consider it a worthy add-on, perhaps another IPS patch and commit to the source.

But perhaps with a little more work by the team:
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Note, however, that the movement boundaries for your ship is still within the original 304-pixel space. I'd very much like to see someone with better debugging skills than I attempt to remove this limit.

And if it's not too much to ask, resolve the slow down issue and the weird screen transitioning flicker.

Its pretty cool.
« Last Edit: June 08, 2021, 10:41:13 PM by neocvera »