Stunts YouTube Channel

[Daniel3D]

Alright.. The channel is alive. We worked hard behind the scenes (making use of Telegram chat) to make it happen. One voice for  Stunts and Community related content. Good existing videos may be added, and networking with external content creators is being worked on.

Of course, it is a community channel so everyone may create content bits or help with ideas. If you want to make a whole video, let us know we will help where we can.

Take a look yourself.
Check out our channel

[Cas]

I celebrate the inauguration of our official community channel!

I've already been preparing a special user on my computer with a clean desktop and the things I will need to record videos. I've also been preparing a script, then I realised that, since I don't have two monitors, I will have to copy the script to my laptop computer to be able to read it while I record so it doesn't show up on the screen.

Should I make the videos all full HD all the time or is it OK to post in other resolutions?  For example, a video that would be the size of the window of Bliss and stay like that. How does that work when it gets to YouTube?  Anyway, full HD seems to work well. I'm just being curious.

[Overdrijf]

I did my video in full HD because it seems to be the standard for Youtube. I did feel pretty silly doing it since the game footage as well as some of the custom visuals (to make them match) are just 320x200. (Which luckily is pretty close to full HD in aspect ratio, much better than 640x480. Good thing early 90's computers were so slow that Stunts decided to go with the smaller rendering size.)

I also set the framerate to 20 f/s when exporting to match the game's inherent speed. Between Dosbox having its own recording speed and the Youtube upload I'm not sure it did anything, but I felt clever thinking of it. (Youtube's standard seems to be 25 f/s, which would presumably mean repeating every fourth frame of the game footage and might look juuuuuuust a little less smooth.)

As for your question: I'd say try it. It feels easy enough to re-export in a different size if it doesn't work for some reason.

[KyLiE]

Which luckily is pretty close to full HD in aspect ratio

I think you will find that your in-game footage is actually quite stretched since it's supposed to be presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio:

No, MS-DOS games weren't widescreen: Tips on correcting aspect ratio

Still, your video is excellent and you should be very proud of it!

[Cas]

Old CRT monitors had a physical resolution that varied. This resolution wasn't exactly a number of pixels wide times a number of pixels hight. Instead, there was a matrix of colour cells and they weren't always aligned in a square grid. Some had sub-pixels that were rectangular and three of them would make a "pixel", but then, these pixels were places staggered like in this image:

https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fdjjrhhcrflq51.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3f824b4d01f029f7ff185df2f3a3ae794fafb46b&sp=1674334567T4b9768937330ee33f1482d7485ee5712a29e2fcf6cfef8e24d7f190ee1051686

Or you could have bubbles like these:

https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F9%2F9f%2FCRT_screen._closeup.jpg%2F800px-CRT_screen._closeup.jpg&sp=1674334567T15dc1acb2f18f97e92935782c68131454bb0fa0d62071388ee5d8105cba7a3df

The "logical pixels" that the video board defined had more to do with time than with space. The CRT cannon would sweep the screen horizontally at a defined speed and the card would turn the cannon on and off to hit the desired "physical pixels". If a memory unit (say, a byte) represented a certain fraction of the line, then you had to wait that much before using the next memory unit to decide whether to turn the cannon on or off. This would get more complicated with colour. At the end of the row, the cannon was turned off and moved quickly to the beginning of the next line. How much it moved down depended on the controller configuration. You could set up the VGA registers via ports. This space down defined the logical pixel height. Therefore, in theory, you could give your screen any vertical definition you wanted, although physically, the more logical resolution, the more blurry it was going to look.

I had a colour VGA monitor that could support up to 720x600 physical pixels. This was pretty standard, if I know well. While that standard graphics resolution was 640x480, you needed 720 pixels wide for 9-dot wide characters in text mode and the CRT cannon supported a vertical resolution of 600, because it had enough time to complete the cycle. But you could tell, if you forced that mode, that it was "suffering", ha, ha. SuperVGA monitors at that time could do 800x600 or even 1024x768. The same game playing at 320x200 with the same aspect ratio on both monitors would look very different. There was clearly a lot more blur in the VGA monitor than in the SuperVGA.

But this isn't the same kind of blur as what you see if you interpolate and represent in a physical-pixel based LCD monitor. It was a more "organic" blur because you weren't adjusted a square-grid resolution to another square-grid resolution, but to something different.

Anyway, most of the time, I prefer the sacrifice in aspect ratio because I don't like the artifacts, nor the slowdown that results from the interpolation. Also, some games (not the case of Stunts, but see Supaplex or Jill of the Jungle), did use 320x200 as if pixels were square so they actually look more natural now in widescreen. This was done because calculations were easier if image blocks were, say, 16x16. Then you'd draw your object and rotate it 90 degrees like it were a square.

EDIT: Changed image to links. I don't know why it doesn't show the images, though.

[alanrotoi]

Can't see the images

[Daniel3D]

So, from the previous posts about aspect ratio.
To emulate the stretched pixels for old monitor's and prevent distortion and blurring.

The solution

So, how do we fix this? Well, we cannot stretch pixels like the analog monitors did. And since a pixel is the smallest graphical unit we have, you cannot "borrow" 1/5 of a nearby pixel either. What we can do is multiply an image's width by 5 and height by 6, so that every pixel becomes a 5x6 "mega-pixel", and thus proportionally 20% taller.

Creating a 1600*1200 image.
This should be possible for video as well.

[Overdrijf]

People are going to be playing it on modern monitors though. I feel like 320x200 is a good compromise between doing some justice to the original look, looking like the experience people get when they do decide to download and run the game for themselves and not filling the screen with black bars when looking at Stunts video's.

That third problem does become a lot less annoying if you do a proper overlay though. A bunch of channels playing old Pokémon games do this: they have the square game screen and then next to that a picture of the mon they're using, the moveset they currently have, with base power adjusted for effectiveness against the current opponent and stuff like that. If you can think of good stuff for on an overlay the 4:3 aspect ratio could really work. But I don't mind the "comprimise stretch" either.

[Duplode]

I play Stunts on DOSBox at 4:3 (aspect=true, windowresolution=960x720), and scale my car graphics accordingly. Still, I think 320x200 for videos is acceptable, for the reasons Cas and Ovedrijf have mentioned. While making 4:3 recordings is an idea worth exploring, it would be best to only switch to it once we have a reproducible way of doing it conveniently and without unwanted side effects.

(Ideally, DOSBox itself would be able to capture post-rendered videos, so that no further processing would be needed given an adequate configuration. Right now, DOSBox Staging can take post-rendered screenshots but not videos. The developers have recently talked about possibly implementing that, so there's hope.)

Can't see the images

Using my Admin Goggles®, I can see the links got entangled on some kind of preview URL. Here are the links to the images (cc'ing @Cas -- in case you want to edit the post):

• Staggered pixels: https://preview.redd.it/djjrhhcrflq51.jpg?auto=webp&s=3f824b4d01f029f7ff185df2f3a3ae794fafb46b
• Bubble pixels: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/CRT_screen._closeup.jpg/800px-CRT_screen._closeup.jpg

[Overdrijf]

I play Stunts on DOSBox at 4:3 (aspect=true, windowresolution=960x720)

Well I can't argue with results, maybe I  can get faster by doing this too. 


Edit: Also, funny I only just noticed this, Dosbox fullscreen does not actually stretch to fullscreen, it leaves the same size black bars as my video, meaning it's just 320x200 upscaled. So it's not as much of a middle ground as I thought. Maybe I should endeavor to join the correct aspect ratio with overlay side.

[alanrotoi]

My configuration is:

Code Select Expand

aspect=true
scaler=normal2x
windowresolution=1200x900
output=overlay

I'll adjust the resolution to a 320x200 multiplier.

[Cas]

I've changed the images to links. I really don't know why the "img" tag doesn't work there. The edit dialog actually tells me to enter the URL there and auto-generates the tag.

With my older monitor, which was 1366x768, I used scaler=normal3x, which almost filled the screen. Scaling integer multiples is a lot faster and looks sharper than interpolating. But then, with my full HD monitor now, I found that DOSBox does not have a normal4x option, so I was forced to using a more complex configuration. I asked in another thread about it. I don't remember any more how I ended up doing it, ha, ha.

[dreadnaut]

Links also don't work   Might need an account or something. Proxying through a service is neat, but it means things will break when the service stops working as it does today. Uploading attachments is the only safe archival strategy here.

[Cas]

I think I copied them from the wrong place. I usually select to view the image first. Anyway, it's true that it's always better to just upload them

[JTK]

Great channel! Good work! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 (JTK = "Okatjerute" on YT)