Want to say Hello

[tueidj]

If you run the games on a wii using Devolution you can capture direct framebuffer screenshots, in the native resolution.

[Aleron Ives]

Sadly, the fact that Sega chose to render PSO at 640 pixels wide with a 1:1 IAR means that the game displays at the wrong AR on your TV, but oh well. The game should be 1.33:1, but it becomes ~1.2:1 due to Sega's poor rendering choices.

[tueidj]

Not sure what "IAR" means but they don't render using a square viewport.

[Aleron Ives]

Image aspect ratio (ie picture aspect ratio, except that's easily confused with pixel aspect ratio). The 640 active pixels that get rendered create the 4:3 image that Sega was apparently trying to display, but since the image is padded to 720 pixels wide for transmission to the TV and then converted back to what would digitally equate to 640 pixels, the game ends up getting distorted, since the TV crops to 704 and then scales back to 640, rather than simply cropping back to 640.

The benefit of doing it this way is that none of the active image is lost from overscan, but it also squishes the image horizontally. (You can easily see it by comparing Dolphin's output with AR correction enabled vs stretching the image to a 4:3 window size: the PB meter on the HUD is too skinny if you use the default 1.2:1 AR that the GC wants to use, but if you force the game to 4:3, the PB meter becomes round, and the entire HUD matches what it looks like on BB.)

[tueidj]

Nah, neither the rendering nor TV display work like that.
Don't rely on Dolphin at all, it is missing several steps of the video output process. The scaling they ended up using for "AR correction" is not actually based on the hardware, but what was agreed to "look right".

[byte.me]

^ So I can't get accurate screenshots for the image size from Dolphin instead?

[tueidj]

No, most of the time Dolphin doesn't even implement the external framebuffer.

[Aleron Ives]

You need to enable the Real XFB option to get accurate colours, but getting output equal to that of a GC means you have to disable all of Dolphin's enhancements. They make games look far better than they do on real hardware, so you probably wouldn't want to do that. There's no better way to get screenshots than with Dolphin, at least if image quality is your main concern.

[byte.me]

^ Nah, I just need the screenshots to find out what native resolution the games are in. Do all games have a height of 480 pixels (or was it 448)? I don't have a Wii, but I plan to get one later on. So if that's the only way to get actual picture size data on GCN games, I guess that's fine by me.

[tueidj]

Height can be anything up to 528.