2021-06-18: Vitor's Super Mario World widescreen patch is available: https://github.com/VitorVilela7/wide-snes#download
bsnes-hd (called "HD Mode 7 mod, for bsnes" in early betas) is a fork of bsnes (great SNES emulator by Near) that adds HD video features, such as:
Rendering the rotated, scaled or pseudo perspective backgrounds at higher resolutions. This does not involve new custom imagery or upscaling algorithms. It is a higher resolution version of the process the SNES uses.
Extending the scenes to the left and right, without distorting them. Works for most Mode 7 scenes, but also for some other scenes/games, after some setting tweaking.
Objects/Sprites will not be visible correctly in the widescreen areas. Fixing this will require ROM-hacks. Some technical information is available below.
Color calculation are done at true color instead of the SNES color depth (3x8 instead of 3x5 bit). With the optional line color smoothing color "steps" turn into actual gradients (without influencing the sharpness of the artwork).
Smother color gradients and window effect, not limited by the original resolution or integer precision.
like the ability to disable background layers, sprites and window effects for screenshots for wallpapers.
Feel free to suggest features. Please remember that this fork focuses on HD and visual output.
It would be helpful to know how the framerates of different scale levels is on various devices, especially handhelds and consoles, Android and others.
If anyone with OpenGL/Vulkan programming and/or shader knowledge would assit me, we could work on a fork that improves both quality and performance using the GPU. This is a long-term goal that I won't start on without help.
I have a view ideas for a banner and an icon, but not the skills to design and render them. I hope someone can help me out with that.
all in Settings / Enhancements / "HD Mode 7 / bsnes-hd"
names in parentheses are for the options of the libretro core
The resolution Mode 7 is rendered at. Higher setting drastically increase CPU usage. "disable" uses the classic Mode 7 code, disabling some of the following features. (defaults to 2x, to show the effect with the smallest possible CPU impact)
Whether and how pseudo 3D perspective are optimized, avoiding limitations of SNES integer math.
How to handle Mosaic effects on Mode 7 backgrounds.
Allows basing every resulting pixel on the average of multiple pixels. At 1x scale it allows using the higher precision at the original resolution, e.g. for use with CRT-shaders. At higher resolutions it is basically expensive anti-aliasing. (defaults to "none") Keep in mind that to estimate the performance impact you have to multiply(!) this value with the "scale" value.
Enables experimental widescreen functionality
Specifies the widescreen aspect ratio. 16:9 at 5x scale results in a width of 1920, which (with the default overscan setting off, see below) results in exactly 1080 HD. (defaults to 16:9)
Sets how the backgrounds of the widescreen areas are filled
Allows highlighting the edges of the widescreen areas in some ways.
Specifies how translucent the widescreen markers are. (defaults to 1/1)
Settings for the background layers.
Settings for sprites/objects.
The x-coordinate used as fallback for "ignore window". (defaults to 128 (the center))
The amount of neighboring lines used to smooth color gradients that are applied to the frame, e.g. to improve perspective Mode 7 effects, by fading to dark for the "far away" top. "0" disables this smoothing. The default is "4".
The amount of neighboring lines used to smooth Window effects, like iris transitions, shadows or spell effects. "0" disables smoothing and is the default. (This feature is considered a preview, as the lines at the top and bottom of effects are currently not entirely HD and it still has noticeable issues. Please let me know about any games/scenes/effects that work noticeable badly or well)
In bsnes the overscan setting allows switching between cropping 8 and 0 lines form top and bottom, which are unused due to the way TVs in the time of the SNES worked. In bsnes-hd it switches between 12 and 8 lines, defaulting to 12 (off). This cuts of 4 lines on both sides that technically contain content, but should not cut important information as these lines are still in an area that wasn't safe to use (12 lines is 5%). The reason to do is that the resulting height of 216 is exactly a 5th of 1080, so you can integer scale to HD and 4K resolutions, e.g. 5x at 16:9 is exactly 1080 HD with every Mode 7 pixel rendered specifically.
Renamed Aspect Correction to Pixel Aspect Correction to avoid confusion with the widescreen aspect ratio.
The amount of pixel columns added to both sides for the various aspect ratios are, depending on some settings:
The maximum width for widescreen areas that still can have places objects in them is 96 (exactly 2:1 AR with overscan on and pixel aspect correction off or 21:9 with overscan on and pixel aspect correction on).
At that maximum width 352 is the only coordinate that places a large object (width 64) entirely off screen. Smaller value make it reach into the screen from the right, larger ones from the left.
Along with (or instead of) widescreen patches you can override certain settings via a file with the same name as the ROM and the extension ".bso". It is searched in the same way as patches. The easiest way is to place it in the same folder as the ROM.
The file must contain alternating letters and numbers, each pair overriding a setting.
| Description | Letter | Values |
|---|---|---|
| widescreen mode | w | 0:off 1:on(always) 2:on(mode7) |
| widescreen sprites | s | 0:safe 1:unsafe(widescreen) 2:clip |
| widescreen aspect ratio | W | 0-200:widescreen-extension 201+:AR (see below) |
| widescreen background 1/2/3/4 | b/B/c/C | 0+:WS 10+:crop 20:disab 1000+:line (see below) |
| widescreen marker | m | 0:off 1+:line 11+:darken (see below) |
| mode 7 perspective correction | P | 0:off 1-3:auto 4-6+:on (see below) |
| scale factor | f | 0:off 1-10:factor |
| disable sprite limit | l | 0:off 1:on |
| ignore window | i | 0:none 1:outside 2:outside&always 3:all |
| ignore window fallback x-coordinate | I | 0-255:x-coordinate |
| overclock CPU | O | 100+:percentage(100 is normal) |
| stretch windowing | S | (for widescreen patches only, see below) |
| pixel aspect ratio correction | p | 0:off 1:on (libretro only) |
| overscan | o | 0:off(216 / 5th HD) 1:on(224) (libretro only) |
Values of 200 and less specify the widescreen extension on each side in pixel columns. The value is rounded to a multiple of 8.
Values larger than 200 specify the aspect ratio as (horizontal*100+vertical), e.g. 16:10, 16:9, 2:1 and 21:9 as 1610, 1609, 201 and 2109, respectively. From this AR the widescreen extension is computed in the same way as for ARs specified in the settings dialog, except that arbitrary ARs can be specified here. The resulting additional columns are rounded to a multiple of 8.
0:off, 1:on, 2:auto(horizanotal+vertical), 2:auto(horizanotal), 10:crop, 11:crop(auto), 20:disable. To enable widescreen for the background only above or below a certain line the value must be the line number plus 1000 or 2000 respectively.
Values from 1-10 and 11-20 enable lines and darkening respectively. The values in the respective ranges vary the opacity.
1-3 and 4-6 trigger auto an on respectively. In both cases the 3 settings are in the order: wide, medium, narrow.
A value of 2 causes all windowing coordinates to be stretched, i.e. their distance from 128 is doubled. This allows widescreen patches to extend windowing effects into the widescreen areas at the cost of precision. But it also requires the patch to adapt all windowing coordinates in the ROM.
To force enable widescreen, including for sprites and setting a widescreen extension of 64 the file can simply be:
w1s1W64Any character that is not a letter or digit is ignored. So you can also do:
w : 1
s : 1
W : 64The percent character ("%") disabled and enables interpretation, allowing comments:
% HyperZone %
B : 2100 % bg 2 includes dashboard (non-ws) and far away bg (ws):
enable widescreen for line 100 and below %
s : 1 % unlimited sprites (not perfect, but worth trying) %
m : 0 % no ws markers %