Some games back then did indeed render at 320x400, but most VGA games were 320x200x256 colours.
I suppose I could try pinging David Braben to see what he says, but I doubt we’d get an answer
Perhaps
@AndyJ could chime in next time he’s on the forum? He knows the guts of the game like few others, and I’m always up for learning something new about the Frontier Elite games
I’ve taken a screenshot of similar screen to the lower right, and cropped it to display the same bits. When comparing the ratio of the two:
View attachment 266068View attachment 266069
Almost an exact match, I’d say
FFE renders its screen at 320x200 (VGA) and also has memory reserved for a front + back buffer that it can switch between for rendering the upper area. In fact, the issue with the missing videos in GLFFE (and originally FFED3D) is because in FFE their pixels are copied directly to an area of the buffer just before it is displayed, and with the enhanced engines taking over drawing the backgrounds and objects themselves, the videos were left drawing to the buffers and so never seen.
All rendered at 320x400, because VGA CRTs couldn't sync anything else. However only a few used all 400 lines individually, most were just doubling 200 lines, especially multi-platform ports. Regardless at the end the 0,8 render got squeezed back to 1,33.
Well the 3D engine clearly compensates, as ships and orbs look correct at 1,33. Line art (cross-hairs, fonts etc.) on the other hand has no option than just use one pixel horizontally and two vertically (at 200 lines doubled to 400).
The box art screenshots weren't real screen shots (pointing a photo camera on a screen, they almost never were) they are memory dumps. For the lady it's extremely obvious, she looks much healthier on screen than on the screenshot (people weren't as widescreen in real life in 1995):
Honestly not sure how the video card / CRT behaves when it displays the output, but the screen is 320 x 200 pixels.
I'm not sure I understand the comment about the 3D engine vs the line art. The images used in FFE are very low resolution and colour depth (an adaptive palette is used for the upper area IIRC)
Here's the cockpit image for example:
320 wide x 43 high
Other images are at a similar size - so they don't scale up very well.... (hence an AI upscale of them in my current build for a 'retro' graphics mode)
The 3D objects in-game are positioned in space very much like a modern 3D game. GLFFE / FFED3D use their original calculated positions and scaling to reproduce their own object meshes which results in an upscaled, more finely detailed object being drawn due to the higher resolution and increased colour depth.
I agree, wide-screen certainly wasn't a thing in the '90s, and 3D acceleration wasn't yet a thing when FFE was released either. The game was designed for 320x200 pixels displayed at the 4:3 ratio that TVs and monitors were back then. There is evidence however to suggest that SVGA modes were being looked at - perhaps the game's early release cost us that?
While FFED3D/GLFFE does allow for 'wide-screen' resolutions, this does result in distortion because the 'camera view' itself doesn't change...
That is - although the image has been made wider, the angle of the camera's Field of View remains the same - so things get stretched...
I'm not entirely sure what value it is in FFE, but in FFED3D the camera has a FoV of around 34 degrees. If we widen the display, then really we should also expand the FoV to compensate for this to keep things 'square' and to allow more of the scene to be .. seen. (Yes Steve, I have just had a quick experiment
)
[edit] forgot to mention - there definitely are ellipsoidal gas giants and stars to look out for, even in FFE!
Regarding the box art shot vs the in game photo - tbh the photo looks pretty accurate colour-wise to me, although it's a bit bright compared to the cockpit image I've posted.
If you look at the box art - well, it's very muddy and brown - check out the text that should be white, and the cockpit that should be silver!
I'd also suggest it's either a mock-up or an in-development screenshot (the * character on the number pad generated these in FFE) as one telling discrepancy - there are no values beneath the video image showing available cargo/cabin capacity or the player's credit balance!
Hope this helps - safe travels, Commanders!
o7
AndyJ
[edit] It seems to have eaten the quoted screenshots, I don't know why - they are there in the BB code <shrug>