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| Combat, in a superauthentic 2:1 PAR |
As one of the first commercial console systems ever, the Atari 2600 didn't handle resolution or aspect ratio in a standard way. MAME, when emulating an NTSC model, assumes a framebuffer of 176x223, but this is misleading; the vertical resolution was whatever the programmer wanted it to be, and can even change frame-to-frame, which plays hell with upscaling hardware (but works fine on analog televisions... or emulators). Atari themselves recommended using 192, but even they didn't always follow this. As for the horizontal resolution, 160px was the effective maximum, and only the very limited sprite capabilities could even use that degree of resolution, but some developers would make it less than that by extending the HBLANK period, effectively buying their code some extra clock cycles in exchange for resolution.
Consequently, the system's authentic display aspect ratio isn't really straightforward. You can certainly assume 4:3 is correct and expect your framebuffer (itself an anachronism) to just scale up to a 4:3 resolution. That's the default behavior of MAME and Stella, and this typically looks okay, but it isn't truly authentic; a real system on a real NTSC television wouldn't use the entire display most of the time. Nor is this necessarily my preference! I had been overriding this on a case-by-case basis almost from the start.
To seek superauthenticity, we should be looking at PAR rather than DAR. According to MAME's source code, the NTSC Atari 2600 has a sprite-pixel aspect ratio of 12:7, or about 1.714:1. Background pixels are four times as wide. I'm not going to bother with PAL calculations.
Combat
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12:7 PAR is indeed very close to 4:3 DAR, and could well be the reason why the MAME developers settled on a 176x223 resolution.
However, for this particular game, there's a good reason not to use it. The game has rotating tank (and plane) sprites, and only double-wide pixels let them retain their correct dimensions in all orientations. Atari's artwork simply assumed the pixels would be doubled. Not because they actually thought this, but because this made plotting out the rotated sprites much less work.
Though I will say, the scores look better with square pixels.
Verdict: Double pixels
Adventure
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12:7 looks best to me.
Verdict: 12:7 PAR
Space Invaders
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Funnily enough, I think the square pixels look best! Better approximation of the arcade's vertical orientation, and the invaders (and laser base) get very chonky as you go wider.
Verdict: Square pixels
Yars' Revenge
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This is another game with rotating sprites, and only double-width pixels preserve their dimensions, but in this case I think the spritework looks better with 12:7 pixels.
Verdict: 12:7 PAR
E.T.
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E.T.'s a short, chubby little guy. But the humans look best at authentic PAR.
Verdict: 12:7 PAR
Ms. Pac-Man
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You might assume that Ms. Pac-Man's vertical sprite is just rotated, but she isn't. Atari did the responsible thing here and re-drew it to consider non-Pythagorean scale pixels. It's still a bit too wide, but 4:3 comes the closest to a perfect rotation.
Verdict: 4:3
Let's look at some Imagic games next!
Demon Attack
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This is interesting. The Imagic logo? Perfect match for the official printed logo at square pixels. And the rest of the game looks fine with square pixels too.
Verdict: Square pixels
Atlantis
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Subjectively, this one also looks best to me with square pixels, especially those ampoule-like domes.
Verdict: Square pixels
We'll finish this series with some Activision.
Pitfall!
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Square is very obviously too thin. I defer to authenticity here.
Note the thicker than usual black bar on the left side of the screen - Activision games tended to give up some of the active picture to prevent the artifacts that you see in other games.
Verdict: 12:7 PAR
River Raid
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Verdict: Square pixels.
H.E.R.O.
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This one seems a bit off at any aspect ratio, but square honestly looks the most okay, even if R. Hero looks a little bit skinny.
Verdict: Square pixels.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
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| PAR: | |
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Authentic 12:7 looks the best. Easily.
Verdict: 12:7 PAR.
I'm not really sure why I did this series; I'm done with the Atari 2600 whales and I don't know if I'll ever play another one, and I doubt many people care about optimizing how good their Atari games look. Comprehensiveness, I guess. But it seems to me that Atari developers were very inconsistent about designing for the system's pixel aspect ratio. Square pixels are objectively wrong; you'd never get a vertical 160x192 display on original hardware, and yet subjectively, most of the games not by David Crane or by Atari themselves look better this way.
We'll be returning to the simple, square-pixel world of Macintosh games soon enough, if only for a little while.
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