Gamecube & PS2 borders

[marcus]

Everything I play on my gamecube and PS2 has a 1.5 inch border on both the left and right hand side of the screen. Ive always assumed its normal and so have never bothered to look into it until now, this is also the same for my PS2. The Xbox is fine though. I use component cable connections, everything is NTSC.

[dfq23]

RGB shift i'm afraid m8, something complicated to do with sync and signals, even though its called RGB shift, it happens to some degree on all inputs, and also depends on your TV. You can centre the GC screen through the menu on boot up, but the only option on the PS2 is to use the in game screen adjust if it is available. The Xbox picture is slightly bigger than needed, so it fills the screen. You can see this if you access the service menu of your TV and move the pic around.

If you are using the Argos scart splitter, press the RGB button, to see how much shift you have.

[Saurian]

He's using a plasma tho ennit - you're using component cables for all machines ennit? (not to clued up on that output I'm afraid)

[Mayhem]

If it was picture shift, then there'd only be a black bar on one side of the screen. He's got them on both... curious...

[Concept]

I get this on my PS2 using RGB. No other console. Just the PS2.

The frustrating thing is that my TV doesn't have a picture scroll, and out of all the next generation consoles, the PS2 is the only one which won't let you manually move it about in the option menu. ><

(EDIT: Actually, I don't think you can position the Xbox screen either in its boot-up menu. But I've never had screen problems with the console using RGB).

And on top of all that, it seems a lot of PS2 developers never even seem to think about putting a screen positioning option into their games.

Hmm. Mmm. Hmm.

[Geoff D]

Just to throw myself into the mix, I get this with my DC through RGB - no other console though.

[Pirotic]

underscan mate, most cheap TV's have overscan where it trys to display the image to big and crops off the edges, some TV's however have horizontal or vertical underscan which leaves black borders either at the top and bottom or on the side. its rare but i've seen it before, the xbox does however produce a picture to big for the screen anyway, so it cancels it out.

[Papercut]

I've played around with the picture size of my TV quite a lot, so I have some idea about this.

The screen display size used is smaller than the maximum screen size the console can produce.

This is to make sure you can see most of what should be on the screen, as there is such a large varation in picture calibration across domestic TVs.

The area that isn't considered safe to display graphics in is usually referred to as 'overscan'. Thats a slight misnomer, as overscan is really the part of the picture that the TV itself can't display. You can think of the borders as 'overscan compensation'.

The Xbox, and less so the Dreamcast, seem to use more of this 'overscan' area than the PS2 and particularly the GameCube.

One place you can always see this is when the Dreamcast system menu appears after displaying the logo animation. If you look at the left and right sides of the screen vertical borders appear when the system menu appears.

Also when you boot a Dreamcast game, the borders disappear then reappear after the 'Produced or Licensed by Sega' splash screen.

The size of the overscan area differs between games on the same console. On the GameCube almost all Nintendo games use the same part of the screen, whereas Super Monkey Ball and Resident Evil use smaller borders top and bottom.

The GameCube's smaller display size is most noticable on vga. While the video mode is 640x480, the actual display size is closer to 600x420. I'm constantly adjusting my monitor between that and the Dreamcast (which uses a larger display area) in order to fill the screen

[Ten]

Hiya Marcus

Not sure how accurate this is, but I have the same problem on my screen , I believe it might be something as simple as the PS2 and GC don't have widescreen settings, the XBox does.

Could be totally off base though

Ten

[yashiro]

You need to mess with your TV settings I guess. There must be some tweaks on that fancy TV of yours.

Maybe even a hidden service mode...

[Hitcher]

Are you sure you're not just looking at a 4:3 image on a 16:9 (widescreen) TV?