Widescreen Gaming in the 90s
mistys-internet.website
mistys-internet.website
I seem to remember monitors being 800x600 around that time, and a few years later did we even see 1024x768 become the norm.
It's mind blowing to imagine what 1080 would be like back in the day.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927044427/https://geek.com/...
That and Monster Truck Madness were our goto's.
I didn't have a godlike monitor like that widescreen monster. Although I did drop $2000 on a 20" (22?) Sony multisync that could do 1600 x 1200.
I managed to get the company I worked for to buy the Intergraph. And I managed to sell a used Silicon Graphics monitor at a slight profit, to take some of the sting away from the Sony.
I was out of my mind. Those were strange times.
Nice box, though.
Except JC.
Who else? Doug Engelbart? Woz? The list is pretty short of these universally loved and respected gurus
The answer is yes, but they were fairly uncommon. Most of these games were produced around the same time that DVDs were new to the scene. One of the "killer features" of DVDs was widescreen content and much-better-than-VHS picture quality, finally allowing the average person to get something very close to the movie theater experience in their own home. If they had a large high-end widescreen TV, that is...
The "widescreen" TVs at the time were mostly projection TVs (which did use a CRT tube, but were not usually referred to as CRT TVs) and plasma TVs. Plasma displays were somewhat popular for a fairly short period between the dominance of CRT and LCD TVs. But they were fairly expensive, so the vast majority of households simply went directly from 4:3 CRTs to widescreen LCDs once the prices on the latter dropped dramatically.
The companies releasing DVD movies typically either sold a particular movie in separate "standard" or "widescreen" editions, or bundled them both into the same box/disc because it was clear to _them_ that widescreen in the home was the future. And it was easy: pretty much every film was widescreen already. However, video game makers were targeting the existing market which was mainly 4:3 CRT TVs and designing a game for both aspect ratios was usually not trivial. Hence why there were not many games that supported it. It was just a nice bonus for trade show booths and rich kids.
I'm sure no one, but a few prescient individuals, ever considered retro gaming/emulation would be a huge thing in 30 years. Even I can't believe it when I see seven year olds wanting to play SNES games.
The film industry had been around long enough by the 90s to have realized that there will be a market for classic movies and that it behooved the industry to future-proof when possible, especially for blockbuster films.
[0] https://www.manualslib.com/manual/321453/Sony-Wega-Klv-15sr1...
..in America. Widescreen SDTV was very common in the UK and Europe.
After that I always had a nice monitor and it really was true. No matter how slow my computer was / is ... having a big screen to use it on makes it a lot easier to tolerate.
I always found it funny how some games were able to handle wide screen with no issues, others much more difficult.
Your computer will change, and has little to know difference on your health.
Your monitor, keyboard, mouse (and chair/desk can also be included) are your long term tools that you use to interact with your computer. They can be a benefit or detriment to your health (eye strain, RSI, back pain). If you have to work with your computer for your job, and do so for many years, it's worth it to purchase tools that have long term benefits.
Good luck finding an LCD with any concrete health benefits beyond any other. The industry literally just adds a bunch of gimmicks each year to see if people bite. All I can say for sure is IPS prevents you from needing to fix your head in one angle (especially for low contrast images), and most LCDs are too bright.
This reminds me of another issue: If you have a monitor with overdrive and use a color temperature adjuster like redshift, the overdrive smearing is often super bright while the rest of the screen is mellow.
En Europe we had WSS (Widescreen signaling), a digital signal embedded in line 23 describing the aspect ratio: full 16/9, full 4/3, letterbox 16/9, etc. It was very useful in late 2000s for owners of 16/9 CRT TVs.
Model 3 also had a couple of 2D tile map layers which are more difficult to handle consistently.
You can see an example here (a few seconds in, there is a scene with a foreground layer that isn’t stretched, revealing the expanded viewport behind it): https://youtu.be/fGQodD4I600
In the intro sequence, a driver hops out of a burning car and then freezes at the edge of the screen. This normally would have been outside of the visible viewport. Otherwise, everything looks as expected.
In my experience, building game UX for non-fixed aspect ratio requires a different and much more complicated architecture from the very beginning, so I would be quite surprised if any game developers of console titles in the 90s managed to do it. Even with modern game engines and layout tools proper support is still a headache.
And BTW, game UX is pretty different from the usual business app UX: you have a LOT of images that take up tons of texture budget (which you can save by slicing it up in creative ways) and you can't just stretch them: you have to anchor things up in pretty complicated ways. And once you add localisation, support for far-eastern languages and cultures (which have a different design language) and RTL, things get really interesting.
EDIT: Moving rest of my comment to the new dedicated thread for Super Mario World Widescreen:
To put on my pedantic hat for a minute: the Wii was only ever 480p and never truly output in widescreen
However, there was one exception: Super Smash Bros Brawl had a "widescreen" mode where it could widen the virtual camera such that if you stretched the 640x480 picture across a wide-screen TV, it would look correct
Edit: I should have read the article! Brawl did exactly what's described here as happening on older consoles
Loads of original Xbox games supported 16x9 too. Stuff like HL2 and Doom 3.
Didn't realize more games used the same trick, though