What is the origin of the Engine's default or "preferred" resolution choices in video.txt?

[oldyz]

i think it would be a nice read to have the technical reasons.


here is my results of experimenting over the years:

back in 2019 i wanted to make a game compatible with the wii verison of openbor, and that meant compatibility with 16:9 resolutions.

for best results i tested the following:
426 width by 240 height.

the default options have a video mode of 240 by 480 as the lowest option, but video.txt allows you to set anything.

long story short, for some reason, the lowest 16 by 9 video modes one can input manually are:
426 240 (non divisible by 4, but accurate) 428x240 & 640 by 360 (divisible by 4)
extrangely, they are prone to fail on some hardware when entering full screen mode.

i have made such test with emulators and with Ikemen on some computer games, and all the hardware i get access to goes 426 240 fullscreen without problems

why does the hardwares get finicky with openbor 6391 and those older builds compatible with wii, who knows....

and so, for fail-proofs sake , the game ended up as 240 480 2:1 aspect ratio....

anyway, personally i find it odd that there was no further looking into when it comes to the very standard 16 by 9 aspect ratio, but as time moves on and monitors and tv screens get wider, i think that it is a "happy accident" that openbor has the width that it does.

 

[DCurrent]

i think it would be a nice read to have the technical reasons.

OpenBOR's pre-defined choices are all based on bog standard resolutions.

• 320*240 - 0.25 VGA (see below).
• 480*272 - PSP screen.
• 640*480 - VGA.
• 720*480 - North American standard definition.
• 800*480 - Application standard for Android devices.
• 800*600 - SVGA.
• 960*540 - North American standard definition widescreen.

On 320*240, you need to recall that 320*224 is typical for 4th gen arcade hardware and consoles, Neo-Geo included. At the time the original BOR released, VGA was still a common display type on PCs. So, 320*240 was a perfect choice. It closely approximates 320*224, but being exactly 25% of VGA, could size up to full screen without distortion.

Now of course you can dial in your own custom size, but if you input a nonsensical resolution, you're going to get nonsensical results. Personally I recommend 480*272 for most projects. We don't support PSP any more, but it's a perfect 16:9 ratio that provides plenty of screen real-estate for SD assets without going overboard.



 DC