Question 16:9 480p widescreen games

[sj33]

Something has been puzzling me regarding 16:9 mode on 480p games, specifically on the Wii, GameCube, PS2 etc. Very often, these games will still have vertical borders when run in 16:9. Now, I am familiar with the how anamorphic widescreen works, and I am also familiar with how overscan works and how this is the reason that many retro games (correctly) still have horizontal borders on LCD/Plasma/etc even if played in the correct aspect ratio. TVs. However, it seems strange to me that so many games appear to have vertical borders but *not* horizontal borders. Overscan with necessitate both.

Does anybody know why this is? I of course have my TV set to display the full image with no overscan.

[EvilBoris]

If guess it was something to do with the internal rendering resolution being below that of NTSC or PAL.

Many Gamecube games output 640x528 which would produce horizontal and vertical bars

[nakamura]

It's because most games were not really widescreen. They were produced on a 4:3 unit with borders and then zoomed in for 16:9 displays.
Resident Evil 4 is a prime example of this.
God of War cuts part of the screen when using 16:9 from the top and bottom.

[Baseley09]

Believe that's true for many GameCube games, I recall rogue squadron and beachspikers having black bars and clearly weren't actually widescreen, just zoomed 4:3.

[EvilBoris]

The white area is the native rendered area for a Gamecube game



by the time it ends up in 16:9 this is how the borders look


As you say shakey, 5% overscan would kill that off, it wouldn't suprise me if some developers rendered selectively rendered even lower to help with framerate of whatever.

Games really varied even, ICO for example ran at 512x224

which would be this area