Originally posted by ClaudioSH2@Wed, 2005-08-03 @ 01:37 AM
The max res of VDP1 are 640x480 or 640x224 ? Using 3d can use high res?
[post=137818]Quoted post[/post]
The resolutions you can use are:
Horizontal: 320, 352, 640, 704
Vertical: 224, 240, 256 (PAL-only), 448, 480, 512 (PAL-only)
So the largest ones are 704x480 (NTSC) and 704x512 (PAL).
The VDP1 3D graphics are limited by the framebuffer size. The framebuffer is 256K and can be any of these sizes:
512x256, 16-bit
512x512, 8-bit
1024x256, 8-bit
For a high-res display, you are limited to an 8-bit framebuffer and furthermore can only have a increased vertical OR horizontal resolution. So you can have a 640x224 display (Virtua Fighter 2 uses this, IIRC) or a 320x448 display (like Tekken 3 on PSX) but not any bigger.
If you use a larger screen size, the frame buffer is repeated in the empty areas IIRC. In theory you could use a 640x224 screen and use the windows to hide part of the border to display a 512x224 16-bit frame buffer if you really wanted to. Maybe the border could be filled with a status bar generated by the VDP2.
For the VGA and EDTV modes, there is a bit that basically doubles each pixel and each scanline to map a 320x240 / 352x240 area of the framebuffer to a 640x480 (VGA) / 704x480 (EDTV) display. Maybe this could be used in the regular display modes to map the a smaller frame buffer to a high-res VDP2 display. The 3D graphics would look blockier but you could have a mix of high and low-res graphics.
Anyway, as you can see the high-res 3D capabilities of the Saturn are very limited, which is probably why so few games used them.