Alright, first of all, this may be happening just to me, because I got a new 19' TFT a few months back and I'm still adjusting to having a 16:9 screen instead of a 4:3 one.

Anyway, my problem is this:

- My desktop res. is 1440x900x32 at 60 Hz. Inside Retrocopy, I've tried both 1280x960 (4:3) and 1440x900 (16:10) modes.

- Arcade, NES, Genesis and GG show image in 4:3 format, but in SMS does stretch the image up to 16:9.

- Screenshots can't demonstrate the issue, they all show proper AR.

- My system specs are Windows XP SP3, ATI RADEON HD4850 PCX and Catalyst drivers v10.1.

Are you running SMS in PAL mode? If so the correct AR for it is close to 16:9 .

Emulation Aspect Ratios


See the area of the screen that the game is taking up? The full blue frame is supposed to be 4:3, but as you can see the game is using an area closely resembling a widescreen aspect.

The NTSC SMS is different and has a closer to 4:3 aspect. If you stick to using the borders in fullscreen mode it should be close to 4:3 on your monitor, it's only when you zoom it I guess?

Maybe I could provide more options, even if they aren't accurate.

You're right, I was using a PAL SMS. Switching to NTSC gives me a far more reasonable result.

I'm a bit confused here... did really PAL SMS show distorted images? Or is it a cart related issue, was I using NTSC carts with a PAL system without noticing?

As for the borders and zooming options, I can't find them. Now that you mention it, I'd like to be able to disable the borders, even if that means choosing convenience over accuracy.

Yes the real thing displayed "distorted images", ie it wasn't a square pixel display. However PAL only games would have been designed for it, so it would be "distorted" for these games to not show them how they were on real system, at least in my opinion. Even NTSC games weren't square but they were closer than the PAL systems.



Check out the video capture above. See the actual area the sonic display is? It doesn't take up the full height, but it takes up the full width. So if we take just the Sonic content out it has an aspect closer to 16:9 , only when we display the full borders should it have a 4:3 aspect like a real TV.

The reason for PAL being so different is Sega didn't extend the height of the display for PAL users yet PAL TV's have more vertical lines. So basically we get the same image as NTSC users, but when put into PAL TVs with lines that are comparatively smaller than NTSC ones we get less height. PAL is 720x576 for instance and NTSC is 720x480, so there are 176 more lines that are filled with border on the PAL SMS.

If you press F3 it zooms in without borders, however this makes the SMS display almost perfectly 16:9 in PAL mode, just like the real content is displayed.