I'm considering to work on a project that will have MSX1 games running on a 240x160 screen. The native resolution is 256x192. This means I'll have fairly big overscan: 8 pixels lost on each side, and 16 pixel lot on top and on bottom of the screen...

My question is: do you think it will still be playable?
How big is the impact of the loss of pixels?

Thanks,

Adrian

how big is the loss of pixels ? well, consider this: nemesis 1/2/3/sala/paro all show the number of collected pods at the bottom of the screen.

I made a version of brmsx for gba some time ago, it worked exactly on this resolution. I went for the "crop" solution... the exact point of crop changed from game to game. Antarctic Adventure could lose lost of pixels on the top side without affecting playability at all.

Yeah, I've ported some MSX stuff to GBA too. And I too went for the good'ol crop. It all depends on the game you're porting though. In my experience most games can be succefully adapted though, without affecting playability too much. The other method would be to resample the whole thing to the correct resolution. Generally this won't work too well though. You could use the excess colors for this, but the aspect ratio would still be off and you'd be working with odd sprite and cell sizes. Generally, try to find some area on the screen you can 'cut'. That usually works best.

might as well use the standard scaling stuff on GBA, Sonic The aspect-ratio won't be correct and it won't look as good as a non-scaled version, but at least you can see the whole screen.

240x160 sounds like GBA resolution. Are you going to kill GBA's and connect it's display to MSX?

8 pixels on the side is not a big problem, many TV's already do that.
for the vertical resolution, just don't draw each 8th line, and don't display the top and bottom 4 lines.

yeah that's a nice way to do it. Console makers (at least MS) have rules regarding which area of the screen may be used to display vital info, just because TV's might not display the full picture.

Well, leaving every 8th line out is great unless you're dealing with pattern games. Most MSX2 games (that are worth porting) use 8x8 patterns which fit neatly into the GBA's pattern function. In that case it's usually easier to just find an area to crop the screen. The GBA scaling function is great, except that it looks like crap. I've achieved much better results by resampling the graphics beforehand. And yes, you'd still have the aspect-ratio problem. All in all, there's a number of ways to attack this problem. It just all depends on the game... I guess with MSX1 games it should be even easier to find a crop area somewhere. Which game are you planning to port? (I'm just assuming you're doing a GBA port, are we even on the right track?)

If we're talking about GBA indeed, then you can ofcourse still use the GBA patterns and use the GBA scaling to leave out every 8th line. It can't look like crap, because GBA doesn't do resampling.

Original NES had 256x240 resolution, and NES eReader games somehow fit in 240x160. It's probably a full rework of original games for new resolution.

Nah, that's only true for PAL NES. NTSC NES has a 224 line resolution.

Well, but are we talking about a GBA port? And which game?

Since dhau mentioned "MSX1 games" I'm thinking it may be an emulator maybe?
Due to RAM constraints, the GBA isn't really suitable for MSX2 or higher emulation anyway..

Haha, wrong... I already hinted in another forum what I plan to do in gba cart form-factor eventually...