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Whoa, 16:9 on a 4:3 SDTV
TM2 Rampage
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Or, "How I finally figured out the use of my Sony Trinitron Wega TV's '16:9 Enhanced Mode'"
So uh, I opened up Super Monkey Ball 2 for GCN for the first time today. In the options, they let you choose soon settings for your screen.
You can have 4:3, Letterboxed, or 16:9. It appears that "Letterboxed" is for people with SDTVs who want a wide picture... so it puts black bars on the top and bottom of the screeen, and yes you can see a bit more picture now on the sides (like, you can see more of the side of this hill in the background... although it seems like it cuts off the top a wee bit also... weird.).
Soo uh, I tried out the 16:9 setting. Everything looks squished and vertical. I suppose it makes sense since it's trying to stretch and squeeze a 16:9 image into a 4:3 screen area. So it finally hit me to go into my TV's settings and choose the 16:9 mode, which focuses all the scan lines on my TV into a 16:9 configuration. Ta-da... the 16:9 mode in Monkey Ball now looks correct. What's neater is that it looks more high-res than if I had just picked Letterboxed mode. I guess if you pick Letterboxed, the black bars on the top and bottom are taking away from the total 480 lines that you get on your TV... leaving you with less than 480 lines to display the picture.
Timesplitters: Future Perfect (which is the third in the series) also lets you do 16:9, although there is no Letterboxed mode.
Soooo I just thought that was neat. Even if your TV doesn't have 16:9 mode, you can enter the service mode (you need to enter a button combo on your remote to go into service mode... and you'll find the combo in the "service manual" for your TV that is floating around on the internet) and fiddle with the "vertical size" of your TV so that the picture gets squished down into a 16:9 ratio.
Hrm, I tried to do this for my PS2 a while back. In the menu for the PS2, you can change your aspect ratio to 16:9... but when I play a widescreen DVD, it doesn't fill up the entire screen or anything... it just displays in the correct ratio, so I can't use my TV's 16:9 thing to possibly achieve a bit higher-res picture quality, since it would just squash and distort the DVD picture.
So uh, I opened up Super Monkey Ball 2 for GCN for the first time today. In the options, they let you choose soon settings for your screen.
You can have 4:3, Letterboxed, or 16:9. It appears that "Letterboxed" is for people with SDTVs who want a wide picture... so it puts black bars on the top and bottom of the screeen, and yes you can see a bit more picture now on the sides (like, you can see more of the side of this hill in the background... although it seems like it cuts off the top a wee bit also... weird.).
Soo uh, I tried out the 16:9 setting. Everything looks squished and vertical. I suppose it makes sense since it's trying to stretch and squeeze a 16:9 image into a 4:3 screen area. So it finally hit me to go into my TV's settings and choose the 16:9 mode, which focuses all the scan lines on my TV into a 16:9 configuration. Ta-da... the 16:9 mode in Monkey Ball now looks correct. What's neater is that it looks more high-res than if I had just picked Letterboxed mode. I guess if you pick Letterboxed, the black bars on the top and bottom are taking away from the total 480 lines that you get on your TV... leaving you with less than 480 lines to display the picture.
Timesplitters: Future Perfect (which is the third in the series) also lets you do 16:9, although there is no Letterboxed mode.
Soooo I just thought that was neat. Even if your TV doesn't have 16:9 mode, you can enter the service mode (you need to enter a button combo on your remote to go into service mode... and you'll find the combo in the "service manual" for your TV that is floating around on the internet) and fiddle with the "vertical size" of your TV so that the picture gets squished down into a 16:9 ratio.
Hrm, I tried to do this for my PS2 a while back. In the menu for the PS2, you can change your aspect ratio to 16:9... but when I play a widescreen DVD, it doesn't fill up the entire screen or anything... it just displays in the correct ratio, so I can't use my TV's 16:9 thing to possibly achieve a bit higher-res picture quality, since it would just squash and distort the DVD picture.
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I knew about this feature, which is why I bought it, however, I too can attest to it's usefull-ness. Such useful-ness was made more obvious with Wii Zelda made me make sure the boxes were squares.
Does your TV take like 8 seconds for a picture to appear upon first powerup?
Yea, not 8 seconds, but it takes a while to turn on.
I hate that long startup time, but I've always been extremely impatient.
Is there any reason for this? I mean, besides annoying the impatient.
Warming up the awesomeness? I dunno, I'd assume it would have to warm for whatever reason first
And yes, it does take a while for my TV to display the picture when I turn it on. The sound turns on before the picture shows up.
Slightly annoying, but not a dealbreaker especially since it supposedly increases the life of your TV.
PS2s are weird about DVD aspect ratio - after the DVD has started playing, stop it, then bring up the Select menu and change the aspect ratio to fullscreen from there. That should display the movie in that squished vertical way that your TV can make look nice letterboxed.
Have you stopped the DVD? For some reason you can't change the aspect ratio while it is playing, or before it's started. Cables shouldn't matter, I've done it using composite.
Now I can play Wii games in widescreen (the ones that support them). Unfortunately, while Zelda looks neat in widescreen, it's just... smaller than I'm used to. Darn! And I've always been an adovcate of widescreen, but those black bars just kinda made me feel a bit enclosed/cramped/claustrophobic.
That's because it was meant for a wide screen, you know
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Does anyone know how to find out which games actually support widescreen and progressive scan? I mean an actual list and not fiddling with each game switching back and forth my setup to see what looks right.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Yeah, it looks sharper b/c the image is smaller... but I think it's also because of the difference in the number of lines of resolution used. Another example I have is Dead Rising. I downloaded the demo and the game is in a widescreen ratio no matter what. I tried out the regular way of just having my Xbox in 4:3 and the game putting black bars in... and I tried out the nifty way of having my Xbox in 16:9 and using the TV's 16:9 feature... it looked better to me.