Amiga widescreen?

[syntheticgerbil]

Since I've always lived in the United States, I've never really touched an Amiga computer. The closest I've ever gotten to that is playing the Coktel Vision conversions Sierra did of the Goblins games and a few others.

I started emulating some Amiga games Dave Perry and Nick Bruty did, and while I'm really confused, I seem to have gotten them to work. The weird thing is, just about every game has black space at the bottom of the game screen that's doing nothing. I think everything is in it's original aspect ratio, but this seems strange to me, like I'm doing something wrong.

Anyone from overseas here who had an Amiga remember much blank black space?

Here's a screenshot for reference. This looks pretty much the same as it does on my screen, except no black space at the top, as it's all at the bottom:

Edited August 20, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[James]

I never had an Amiga myself, but I know that some old systems had borders around all edges, which I think was down to technical stuff like refresh rates or memory or something. Perhaps it's something like that. Or perhaps I shouldn't respond to questions I don't know the answer to.

[syntheticgerbil]

That would make sense. I tried to run a few Amstrad games on a different emulator and they all had black borders around each side. I guess it's more jarring when it's just at the bottom.

[toblix]

It's probably related to the supported resolutions of the Amiga 500 (320x256 and 640 x 256 without interlacing), and also that I think they made graphics a bit narrower than the max vertical resolution to compensate for parts of the image potentially being cut when displaying on TV sets.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I believe it's actually to do with NTSC and PAL. Playing Amiga games in NTSC mode on my PAL system would remove the useless black space of the bottom of the screen, for example.

PAL was 320x256 and NTSC was 320x200.

So you need to stretch the image to a 4:3 ratio, in the same way ScummVM allows you to "correct" the aspect ratio.

[syntheticgerbil]

I believe it's actually to do with NTSC and PAL. Playing Amiga games in NTSC mode on my PAL system would remove the useless black space of the bottom of the screen, for example.

PAL was 320x256 and NTSC was 320x200.

So you need to stretch the image to a 4:3 ratio, in the same way ScummVM allows you to "correct" the aspect ratio.

Hmm, makes sense. I'm messing with the emulator here in my apartment on my lunch break and it seems like every game is set display at 740x568, which is a weird resolution indeed, but always leaves the black bar at the bottom. I can put in other resolutions, including 320x256, but it just chops off the rest of the screen and the game runs in the same resolution while my window just focuses on the top left corner.

There doesn't seem to be a way to correct the aspect ratio the way ScummVM does. I'm using WinAUE.

I'd imagine everyone is taking screenshots from the same emulator and that's why most of everything on Mobygames also has the black bars. Maybe it's not possible to fix it? I just had to double check and make sure this was normal to anyone who had vivid Amiga memories.

Thanks for the help.