File talk:Mindead.jpg

A word on aspect ratios

16:10 isn't actually the correct aspect ratio for games created in 320x200; at least, not the one in which they were designed to be displayed. A quirk of the 320x200 VGA specification is that it uses rectangular pixels instead of the squares of higher resolutions. With CRT monitors, it wasn't an issue to display 320x200 games in the intended 4:3 ratio, but when those same games are viewed with the square pixels of modern resolutions, they come out squashed to 16:10.

To illustrate this point, compare the following:

This screenshot and the same scene on the U6 box

Or

This screenshot and the U7 advertisement

The images on the box and advertisement are photographs of a CRT monitor. Then there is this:

Direct screenshot and a high-res rendering of the same scene

That last one is especially obvious; the pentagram is elliptical in the screenshot, whereas in the render it is a perfect circle, as it was always supposed to be.

This is why both DOSBox and Exult each have options for aspect ratio correction. Unfortunately, displaying screenshots of the games in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio cannot be done on modern displays without introducing artifacts, as far as I know. Pixel count and aspect ratio correctness are now mutually exclusive, so while neither one is wrong, we'll never have screenshots that are 100% faithful to the original experience. --Terilem (talk) 13:19, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

I of course know that, but for the sake of screenshots, correct aspect ratio is, when the image is shown how it really is, and not through some artificial distortion like before. I also have often seen that the undistorded ratio was the correct one in programming and distorting it later had unfortunate effects.--Tribun (talk) 13:30, 29 September 2013 (UTC)