- Home /
What resolution to make retro pixel game to scale up to HD?
What resolution should I make my retro pixel game (that's supposed to look like playing a SNES/Genesis title but as if they had widescreen back in the day) so I can scale it correctly to fit a modern HD 1080p resolution (without stretching the image and/or losing anything)?
I thought the original Genesis resolution of 320x240 was going to work but it doesn't scale quite right and loses some pixels on the x axis.
Answer by sacredgeometry · Aug 14, 2019 at 02:31 PM
What you are looking for is either perceived DPI (if you want resolutions to display more content but retain the aesthetic)
So in the 1980s a 16 inch tv was pretty common so lets look at that DPI
320x240 which is a 4:3 ratio with a 16 inch diagonal is 25 DPI.
So you are aiming for each inch of your displayed game, roughly being 5x5 pixels to get that aesthetic.
Or if you want to just extend the resolution but with a new aspect then in which case
Just find out the ratio by dividing the two
i.e. 16/9 = 1.7777777778
then multiply your height by that ratio to get the width.
i.e. 240 * 1.7777777778 = 427 (rounded) so your res is 427x240 for a 16:9 ratio screen like 1920x1080
@impurekind Fixed the maths. Sorry was doing two things at once waiting for a build at work.
Well it's not perfect as it means it will be a pixel or two over once scaled to fit on a 1080p screen, but I guess that's about as good as we can do nowadays. Or maybe I'd be best going for 426 and when it scales there's just a few pixels that are blank.
Pixel rounding is unavoidable unless you want to restrict the screen resolutions people can play at. i.e. a windows experience.
Otherwise you would have to find the closest perfectly divisible resolution at that aspect ratio. Which might be trickier (If you want to do it dynamically).
I mean 384x216 is perfectly divisible (5 times) by that res. Which is quite close. Is that better @impurekind?
Yeah, that's great for 1080p and 4$$anonymous$$ too. Doesn't quite work for 720p. But a decent choice methinks.
I'm extremely confused about how I make one retro resolution that can properly fit into the various HD-and-above resolutions out there these days without distorting the visuals so they're pixel perfect.
Your answer
Follow this Question
Related Questions
how i can make my player lose 1 live after HP = 0 ? 0 Answers
[2D][Beginner]How do I heal my character when pressing a key while next to a health pack? 1 Answer
[ANSWERED]UNDERTALE Game Over screen [2D] 1 Answer
Proper way to dynamically place UI elements in cropped viewports? 0 Answers
How to change objects scale based on distance between 2 points 4 Answers