Black Borders

[johnpeterson]

Could you fix the video scaling so that the black borders are removed? Here's the black border's status of a few games in pSX 1.13 ('-' means no black borders):

Chrono Cross (NTSC): Top and bottom (10%)
Crash Bandicoot (PAL): -
Gran Turismo (NTSC): -
Final Fantasy 7 (PAL): Top and bottom (12.5%)
Final Fantasy 8 (NTSC): Top and bottom (6.6%)
Final Fantasy 9 (NTSC): Top and bottom (6.3%)
Metal Gear Solid (PAL): Left and right (0.3% and 1%)
Resident Evil 3 (NTSC): -
Ridge Racer Revolution (PAL): (6.3%)
Tekken 3 (PAL): Top and bottom (6.3%)
Tomb Raider 4 (NTSC): -
Vagrant Story (NTSC): Top and bottom (6.6%)
Wipeout (NTSC / PAL): -

The Metal Ger Solid borders are so small that they may not be a problem with pSX, they could be produce by MGS itself.

(By the way, if pSX was open source I would be happy to fix this issue myself. I fixed the same problem in the Dolphin emulator.)


Thanks for making a great emulator
JP

[Gamesoul Master]

Removing the black borders means either the window is being resized to fit the aspect ratios (nobody likes auto-resizing windows... lol), or the aspect ratio is being thrown out the window to stretch the images to fit the window (nobody likes wrongly proportioned images either).

So... does your request involve something else being done, or some other solution?

Sorry... I'm not trying to pick apart your request. It's just that ignoring aspect ratio is terribly ugly, and an auto-resizing window would be distracting, not to mention very complex with pSX. Would seem simple at first until you look at all the different resolutions a game can and will use.

[Truth Unknown]

Normally these black bars are not seen on most NTSC TVs, these bars would normally be covered up by the edges of the screen from over-scan. Many sets used this to cover the anomalies of Cameras (rounded corners from some lens), recorded video artifacts and coded broadcast information from national networks. But for the side of games, rendering less of the screen of which most TV sets would not displayed helped cover up rendering anomalies or to save frame rate.

Now-a-days most broadcasts and almost all games don't use over-scan at all. But before that about 10% of the screen is usually safe for all types of video to cover up.

[johnpeterson]

May 7, 2009 3:13:47 GMT -5 Gamesoul Master said:

Would seem simple at first until you look at all the different resolutions a game can and will use.

Why would it matter what the resolution is? A TV is 4:3 or 16:9. The in-game video is always fulls screen except for a few old PAL version that were not converted properly.

May 7, 2009 14:52:34 GMT -5 Truth Unknown said:

Normally these black bars are not seen on most NTSC TVs.

Sure. But I think the Metal Gear Solid borders are the only ones that may be there on the actual PSX, and possibly part of the FF7 (PAL) borders, some PAL conversions has been given black borders on occasion.

Update: If someone is interested, I made a program to remove the black borders, you can take a look at it here. You can download the binary from Downloads, and you can take a look at the code if you want to change how it works.

Update (2009-05-14): I added a Chrono Cross (NTSC) black border fix, it has a 10% black border.

It still only works well on widescreen monitors, the top border can't be removed on a 5:4 monitor.