I was wondering about those CPS2 and by extension CPS3 games the other week because i picked up the PS1 version of SFA3.
Both CPS were 384x224. The Saturn can do 352x224 so it gets the full height, but to avoid scaling bg and sprites, they chop the background 16 pixels either side. The HUD stuff is slightly altered to fit.
I read somewhere that PS1 could do 384x but that was hearsay so i’m not sure exactly. The SFA3 port on PS1 is apparently 364x regardless, and so it has less of the background chopped but is otherwise similar.
In both games and the other CPS2 ports, there’s the option for “Arcade” or “Original/PS/Sat” screen modes which visually changes nothing except how far the character can move on the screen edges. “Arcade” lets them go out as far as what 384 would be, “Original” restricts them to what you can see of the background. So that’s more for gameplay accuracy than visually. Inexplicably, “Original” on PS1 SFA3 restricts the characters in, even further than what you can see, so they are about an arms width from the edge!
Because of those horizontal resolutions being lower, yet the sprites being the same as the arcade, the ports give the impression of having the wrong size sprites. Since Saturn’s resolution is lower and closer to 4:3, it gets squished the least resulting in more obviously “fatter” sprites.
Which got me thinking about the DC version. DC is 320x240 and 640x480…I don’t know if it can do anything in between tbh. SFA3 on DC was not 240p I think, and (from memory) had very thin looking sprites suggesting it was squished too much? But why would that be the case? 640x480 etc is 4:3 already, so I would expect a lot of the background chopped and the sprites not squished at all, and thus appearing fatter than the arcade game.
I remember DC SF3 1/2nd looking better than 3S too, as noted above, which is just bizarre that they’d regress! Perhaps something to do with 3S needing more grunt for some reason? Looking at vids, in 240p modes, 3S backgrounds appear to be shifted and cropped and possibly scaled, since it doesn’t look a straight cropped 384 down to 320 to my eye. The characters don’t look as fat as you’d expect either, they look about right or a bit thinner maybe. Then, there is this vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYhwou9hCEQ that mentions in the description that his setup spits it out at something like 5:4 instead of 4:3. By this time i had a headache lol.
But then i started thinking, even in the arcades, how the hell does 2nd Impact do the widescreen mode? Like CPS2, everything was designed at 384x224 to be squished to 4:3. But in 2nd Impact widescreen, the characters appear to be the correct width. It suggests to me the CPS3 itself is squishing all the sprites to their correct width, independent of the background, which just shows everything native, and of course more of the sides than you see on 4:3.
Makes me think maybe they were trying all sorts of shit to wrangle the DC’s resolutions into doing something that resembled the arcade games which is why they look varying levels of shit. Shifting/cropping/scaling backgrounds, scaling sprites maybe. Bottom line is it was probably a right pita and why we ended up getting stuff like 480i Alpha Anthology as well; they’d given up lol.
