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[JoshuaJSlone]

Hey everybody. We all know official and unofficial NES emulation on Game Boy Advance has been pretty popular, even with the way the graphics must be smashed and cropped. To go from a 256x224 image to a 240x160 image, first every third and fourth line from each set of four is combined, which would create a 256x168 image, which from there can be cropped without too much further loss to 240x160.

With the DS having more pixels and each screen having a ratio much more like how the games would be displayed on TV, I was curious to see how NES and SNES games will probably be fit onto those screens in official and unofficial ways; don't be surprised to see some of these as SNES Classics, basically. My solution for this was to combine every seventh and eight line from each set of eight, to make an image of 256x196. From there it's only a very tiny bit of cropping necessary to give a 256x192 image.

Here are some PNG shots of comparisons between originals, GBA version, and DS version of these shots:

http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock06.png : Final Fantasy IIj
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock07.png : Deja Vu
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock08.png : Kirby's Adventure
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock09.png : Super Mario Bros.
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock10.png : Super Mario Bros. USA/2

http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock01.png : Super Mario World
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock02.png : Super Mario Kart
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock04.png : Street Fighter II Turbo
http://www.2and2.net/Uploads/Images/gbadsmock05.png : Final Fantasy VIj/IIIus


I know some of you would be more interested in how such emulation would look on a PSP screen. I'd make some to go along with these for comparison, but it's less obvious to me what solution will be the most used, and I'd rather not make a whole slew of variations. Going from 256x224 to 480x272, these are the main possibilities that come to mind:

Leave it 256x224, have significant border.
Stretch to a more correct ratio of 310x224, have significant border.
Stretch to 377x272 for correct ratio and right/left border, using bilinear filtering.
Stretch to 480x272 for a much too wide ratio with no border, using bilinear filtering.
Using one of the methods current PC emulators use like HQ3X or 2xSaI and then downsizing through bilinear filtering to either 377x272 or 480x272.

 

[SoulCaliburX]

How do you copy the Nes/Snes games on GBA?

I heard something but I dont have enough information about it.

I saw on Link-Sang a cart to watch movies and to emulate Nes games, but the limit is 192Kb for games.

 

[ImNotLikeThem]

How do you copy the Nes/Snes games on GBA?

I heard something but I dont have enough information about it.

I saw on Link-Sang a cart to watch movies and to emulate Nes games, but the limit is 192Kb for games.

this isn't what he talking about.
and i think you messed up some of those shots, specifically the cropped gba/ds ones. theyre the same image from the scaled versions, but then for some reason cropped from those. shouldn't they have been cropped from the original version?
ah nevermind now i see. you didn't scale them down to the actual gba/ds size, but something close to it, am I right? then the cropped is fit to the screen from those. odd way of doing it, or maybe im looking at it wrong.
ah and to answer the psp question, i know i'd probably prefer to keep the same pixel size and not have any resampling done at all on the image, even with the borders. but i know many people wouldnt even care about the stretching and would rather just fill the screen completely. I think it depends on the person...

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

ah nevermind now i see. you didn't scale them down to the actual gba/ds size, but something close to it, am I right? then the cropped is fit to the screen from those. odd way of doing it, or maybe im looking at it wrong.

One could do a direct resize from 256x224 to 240x160 or 256x192, but things would be less even. Odd way of doing it or not is opinion, really, but that is how things like the NES Classics rereleases or the PocketNES emulator go about it since it gives a decent image without awful losses and is easily doable on GBA hardware. From there I just extrapolated a similar process to 256x192 for the DS.

So yeah, the images on the left are just the ones before the final cropping is done. Mainly to show that the GBA version loses quite a bit more around the edge than the DS version: 10.7% of the whole image lost versus 2.0%.

 

[Naked Snake]

Threads like this one fucking rule.

 

[The Faceless Master]

PocketNES also has unscaled options for the sprites and background, as well as sprite tracking so the aera of the screen with the tracked sprite is centered...

bottom of the page shows their examples on scaling etc -> http://www.pocketnes.org/screenshots.html