Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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> You're referring to differences in individual TV overscan settings.

I’m not referring to differences in overscan settings—I’m just talking about the fact that overscan exists. It’s a setting, but it’s generally not user-configurable on consumer TVs.

Even with TVs that have more accurate overscan, the TVs still have overscan, so you cannot use the entire area. The HUD goes right to the edge of the screen, but the 256×224 area continues past this. My feelings are that it is up to your judgment exactly what the safe area is, but taken for granted that it is smaller than the full picture.

Newer games and systems were still affected by this—the Nintendo 64, Xbox, PlayStation 2, etc. You could not reasonably put your HUD all the way to the edge of the framebuffer on any of these systems. Overscan only died (sort of) with the arrival of LCDs and HDMI.

> Certainly far more than 160 vertical pixels.

Yes, that would be absurd.

The "active display area" of a CRT is 224 vertical pixels - all of those pixels are intended for display. The actual number of scanlines is 240. The top 8 and bottom 8 rows of pixels are not intended for display. This is the overscan area. 90s era CRTs were generally very accurate in their overscan calibration. Although there might have been a very small range of error, generally, the intended 224 scanlines were being displayed.

I might be wrong, but it seems you are under the impression that a percent of the active display area was used for overscan. That would only occur if the TV was not calibrated correctly. That's the reason hardware manufacturers instructed developers to not put important content too close to the edge of the screen. However, developers absolutely would have assumed most TVs were displaying the active display area accurately, which is why in the 90s most games had HUDs extending to the edge of the active display.

But this is all really beside the point, because if you watch the posted video, you can see countless examples of how GBA developers had to account for the massively reduced vertical resolution. Look at the Super Mario World example - the GBA version is massively zoomed in, greatly reducing the amount of the screen that is visible.

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