can everybody create 320*240 @ 16

for a retro release i need to know

can anybody this ?

;b3d
Graphics 320,240,16,0
WaitKey()

or come a "unable to create" on some computers (win)

Graphics 320,240,16,0 is certainly do-able (as it were).

Lots of people won't be able to run that (in release mode, as opposed to debug mode) as many cards and monitors are no longer able to run such low resolutions fullscreen. Windowed would work, but for fullscreen, you'd have to go to at least 640x480 and even then, a few will slip through the net.

windowed maybe ?

The question is not "can you?", but "would you want to?". You don't need to make a game look bad to get a retro feel.

You can have a windowed game at any weird-a*s resolution you fancy. Doesn't have to conform to any given aspect ratio.

Mmm, my 8800 GTX system cannot do it.

My ATI X800 XL system can. Technically, it is outside of the cards default resolutions, but it runs okay.

Ah, yes - of course - it is also monitor dependent and my Philips can drop lower than my CTX - the 8800 GTX is on the CTX and the ATI is on the Philips.

EDIT:
Then again, surely Blitz doesn't know the monitor capability? So it would just be graphics card related - unless the GPU feeds back the monitor capability.

Blocky images is something I'd relate to retro, then again, nothing against having a big 2x2 'pixel' in 640x480 eh.. :P

There's even some charm to superblocky images.. think of the original Rockford character in Boulderdash.. it simply works, and I couldn't imagine an uplifted/hi-res version would still have the same charm..

Allow the user to set resolution, scale to fit.

My system ATI X1600 on an iMac will let me do a 320x240 but i'll get a 640x480 resolution with a window in the lower left corner covering 1/4 of the display ie 320x240 pixels.

I quite like the old 320x240 blocky look myself.

I get the same as ImaginaryHuman although the 320x240 is centered in the middle of the screen - gf8600gt. My old gfx440mx allowed 320x240 in fullscreen on the same monitor so it looks like it's purely gfx card dependant.

For fullscreen you could always set the res to 640x480 and do your rendering in a second camera with a 320x240 viewport, copyrect to a texture and display this texture on a sprite, scaled to fit your main 640x480 camera. Shouldn't be too slow.

Safest option would be to stretch everything you draw up to the desktop resolution the user is using when going fullscreen.
You can always build in other resolutions in case GFX card and monitor suport it.

Maybe best is to have a look on the Mame emulator which uses this stretching technique.

In my case for example I'm using a 32" Samsung TV as monitor using 1360x768 as native resolution.
I can use 1024x768 without any troubles and after tweaking my GeForce I could use 800x600 and 640x480.

I will try to create something simple later today when I'm back home with a stretching function I created earlier.

I'd say go for it. I have seen smaller resolution (windowed) indie games.
For fullscreen mode it should be ok on most computers although on the latest gfx cards i can't tell.
(edit: at least up to a Geforce 8600 gt)

No.

My monitor supports it, but I do not. A game does not have to be unplayable to be retro. Believe it or not, back in the day 320 x 240 @ 16 with pretty sprites was considered top of the line. If you want to truly "remake" it instead of port it, then it would be best to respect that original feel.

If you really don't want to, best bet is scaling the graphics themselves upwards to look horrible on the user's chosen native screen resolution. This avoids having a painfully slow and flickery graphics startup, gives you freedom to choose the most useful scaling algorithm and avoids the blurriness that people experience with low resolutions on LCD monitors.

No,

not on flatscreen anyway, only on a crt (assuming the card still supports it).

Even 640x480 and 800x600 are on their way to the legacy pile. My new flatscreen wont work with either. My old laptop screen supported 320x240 (but not 320x200) but it was 50/50, sometimes it worked & other times it would go all green and pink plasma-fractal looking.

I advise scaling up to 800x600 or something. Or remake using modern techniques so it has a retro feel but more modern look...See http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/droid-assault-released/ and other games by the same company for what I mean.

depends, i have a 22'' wide hyundai flat screen and it supports a 320*240 fullscreen resolution.

Interesting, ive never seen a modern one that does. (With the exception of older monitors/laptops). I doubt many of the cheap (and of course most common) made now would support that.

Ive had 3 moniitors in the last few years and only one of them supported 640x480 let alone 320. The latest wont even do 800x600, its 1024 minimum.

You'll probably have better compatibility if you use 640x480 and draw all your pixels twice as big... But even that resolution won't work for everyone anymore.

If 640x480 isn't supported anymore how are these monitors supposed to install Windows etc?

Just use your 320x240 but scale your pixels to a resolution that the card+monitor feel natural with. You can always read teh list of available resolutions within Blitz3D and use some 2D package to scale your stuf, like Draw3D or FastImage.

Here:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=78304
http://www.fastlibs.com/

not tried the code on this TFT it would probably work on my old w98 box with a CRT

edit: it made it windowed so thats a no then to full screen

if you use 640*480 and double up the pixels you could half bright the second line as if its an old telly (someone posted about this in the showcase i think)

im looking at a minimum of 640*480 for my if i ever start it deflektor clone just cos its double the width of the amiga version i got some screen grabs off years ago but i might stump to 800*600 but have some form of border instead of resizing the sprites to fit

but iir (many moons ago) someone made a windowed game at that resolution (320*240) and it was god awful to see at 1024*768 if they just made the sprites twice the size or gave a fullscreen mode it might have worked

My Geforce 7600 GT can't do any resolution less than 640x480 in full screen. I'm still trying to figure out why they would phase out these resolutions on newer cards. If I'd have known that half my old BB programs wouldn't run full screen with this card, I wouldn't have bought it.

i was wondering the same.

I made something just for this thread

In this you can move an UFO arround using the cursor keys on a background and it seems that the resolution is only 320x240, but it is actually working under 1024x768
With other keys it's possible to stretch the game, rotate it and even move it arround just to let you see what is possible with it.

Here is an example on how I tackle this together with source code :

http://server.dedicatedservices.org/upload/zip/retro.zip

This could probably be coded better, but it still works good enough for me.
But any comments are welcome.

It must be some generic mode, as on mine it appears as a smaller unscaled square with a large black border (same with the XP loading screen). However when i try and invoke 640x480 fullscreen using a game or B3D it goes black with the monitor generated message: "Mode not supported".

I think the setup and loading screens must use standard VESA rather than the windows graphics driver (which may do the graphics at another refresh or something that the monitor doesnt understand)

Can you not just create a 512x512 texture, draw everything to the 320x240 section in the top left and then blit that texture to the screen, stretching it to fit the screen ( possibly adjusting for aspect ratio )

That way you could disable texture filtering and get a nice pixelly appearance while using 3D hardware to scale it all up cheaply for you.

Well they all support a VESA mode (but that's not going to do you much good for a game), and the graphical installer can run in multiple resolutions.

Because nobody uses them, and even if they did, the lions share of available monitors, won't be able to display them correctly anyway.

Exactly.

Using a higher resolution and scaling images is recommended, as mentioned before. At least my laptop can display small resolutions, but since the monitor has a built in resolution, it will just occupy a small area in the middle. Even 640*480 is bad, anything below would be a real pain.

Resolutions are alweays a tad unpredictable, because even if the video card supports them the monitor may not... but you can never tell for sure, because I know my own computer will support some resolutions just fine, even though they're not included in the list of available resolutions returned by BlitzMax.

(For example, 512 x 384 works just fine in fullscreen on my machine)



One big reason is that 640x480 is pretty much useless on a widescreen monitor, and most of the new LCD's sold are in the widescreen category. (Even the smaller sizes, since they're cheaper to produce than non-widescreen. A 17" widescreen is less square inches than a 17" non-widescreen, after all)

Simulate 320x240 into a higher resolution like 800x600. The game graphics should be centered to be compatibe with widescreen`s.

by the way.. in this way open microsoft paintbrush and scale the sprites bigger, too.