Replying to Avatar Thorwegian (old account)

nostr:npub1hemdxvjcfz0zt39ymgxwv77k5vrr4tkk25zzg486e4t8sw5rwyksafrq92 if you google "80x25 mode" the first thing that comes up is VGA text mode, but was found across a range of IBM compatibles. heavily associated with IBM in the popular mind, and what i had in mind. so we're talking computer screens here.

you would emulate non-square pixels because they were intentionally non-square, and to get the right aspect ratio on modern square-pixel systems, you need stretching.

PAL did not have an aspect ratio of 5:4. the screens were 4:3 but the way it's usually encoded digitally (720x576) looks 5:4, i.e. horizontally stretched pixels, as opposed to the vertically stretched pixels of many early computer and gaming systems.

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Thorwegian (old account) 2y ago

nostr:npub1hemdxvjcfz0zt39ymgxwv77k5vrr4tkk25zzg486e4t8sw5rwyksafrq92 in technical terms, analogue video signals have no pixel count horizontally speaking, so you can't speak of non-square pixels in the analogue domain. but you can definitely say that the screens had an aspect ratio of 4:3.

a digital image doesn't have an aspect ratio until you choose a pixel shape. these days, it's usually square pixels.

if you play games in emulators and they don't get the pixel shape right, stuff will look squished or stretched, which is ugly.

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