Thanks for responding! Please talk to GOG about having your text color changed to the "developer color" so you stand out. :)

P.S.: Getting back to one of my previous posts, as a word of warning, it looks like the original ROMs will not be extractable, which is indeed a pity. MAME lovers need to look elsewhere.

"Full-screen" mean - black bars. You are on Good OLD Games store, get it what is 'normal fullscreen' mean.
Wide-screen displays mostly a junk in technical aspects until 2k/4k. At least this displays can handle what old every CRT monitors can do back in old days. Still high refresh rate are not guaranteed on this displays, while CRT having better screen, better resolution (1600x1200) usually also have 90 hz or some displays even more. 90 or120 and that on maximum 1200p. Just 1200p require 4k wide-screen display to properly scale it. Of course still with black bars (or very smoothed and wrong proportion scaled image).
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fullscreen_(aspect_ratio)&oldid=1108676661]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fullscreen_(aspect_ratio)&oldid=1108676661[/url]

Original aspect(5:4/4:3/3:2/any else) of this games not matter. It never be "full" in meaning you used for this term.

I wonder if GOG will ever get the Linux versions of these games, since they are now available... elsewhere. Or is it 4 more games for the "second class citizens" thread? :(

for those who still are not aware, it is now (has been for a week or so) possible to get all four games at once, for $20 (just under) by going to any of the four game's pages and at the bottom right you will see a small link that say "grab all four" or such. very hard to miss, but this is gog for you..

@andreas

1.) bring Wunderling DX to gog too. yes, i know it was already asked on steam forums but your answer is weak. just dump it as is minus need for steam and people here will love it. no effort to "port" it to gog as a basic working dump. yes, i have it on steam, and want it "forever" here too. do it!!

2.) have your forum name upgraded to "developer" status already!!!!

3.) i like to know things and such, so how come the gog version is tied to the galaxy64.dll which is 14mb. sure, it is drm-free, but it ties itself to a 14mb file. the steam version is "pure" at just the exe at 1.5mb or so. is there a VALID reason why the gog 1.8mb exe requires that TEN times larger dll too?

Truxton reminded me of some MS-DOS shoot'em up I played on PC somewhere in early 90s I think. I don't think it was Truxton though as according to mobygames.com, Truxton was never released for PC/MS-DOS, and from my recollection that MS-DOS shooter had jerkier graphics than Truxton in these videos (which are obviously from the arcade version).

That shooter had "Japanese feel" to it with flashy graphics and over the top weapons, like I recall it had some weapon that shot very big blue diamond-shaped bullets all over the screen etc.

Damn it that one game has been bugging me so long, I've tried to go through mobygames.com for all PC 2D vertical shooters between e.g. 1990-1995, but unable to locate the game... Not sure if it was a Japanese game, but I am sure it was MS-DOS and not emulated.

EDIT: It wasn't e.g. Raiden:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6HT-Xfjl-U

It was more in the space, and not quite as fluid graphics as that, as I remember. I recall there may have been something japanese or "oriental" either in the game's name, or its developer/publisher.

If they're "black bars", then you shouldn't be able to notice them, as it would basically be dark pixels.
I don't understand this weird mentality of seeing things where there's nothing to see, just like with movies. They're not "black bars", there's just nothing there! There's no additional content!

The dude with that hot take about image stretching to fit widescreen, borders, pillarboxes and whatnot never got back after dropping the stinky because:

1. It was a troll post.
2. He eventually thought about what he wrote and possibly abandoned his wicked ways of image stretching.
3. And/or it was a bot.


I dunno which one it could be, but 95 was famous for a very influential doujin shmup and a freeware at that. Cho-ren-sha (initially for Sharp 68k) influenced many other shmups down the line. There is the windows version too, though I don't remember whether there ever was a dos version or not. The only thing is you have to press/mash the button to shoot, unless you have some autofire. Still very well worth to check out if you are into the genre.

Even knowing this was there? I STILL had a hard time finding it! If you go to the middle-bottom of the page, you'll see screenshots of the 4 games. Just above the first game, is a display that says "Buy series (4)" but that's not the link! Now follow an imaginary straight line... as far to the RIGHT as you can go, and you'll see a real link that says "BUY SERIES FOR "$XX.XX" or something like that. As soon as you click that link, it adds the 4 discounted games to your Cart, and the text changes to "CHECK OUT NOW".

Thx to GOGer for finding it.

That quoted post seems to be referring to me and my post, and all of those quoted statements are untrue. I'm neither a bot nor a troll, and nor have I changed my position as stated in my first post in this thread as a result of subsequent replies to it.

And I never said anything about "stretching to fit widescreen," rather, I just want the games to fit normal (meaning, non-widescreen screens) properly, just as all other modern games do when they are developed properly. That is not an unreasonable expectation.

The reason why I never replied again into this thread was because I didn't want to cause this thread to turn into a discussion solely about the issues I've described whilst those issues are starting to become detached from the games themselves which this thread is about, which seemed to be what would have happened if I were to reply again...hence that is exactly the reason why I didn't do so (in other words, I didn't reply again in hopes that by not doing so, this thread would stay on-topic to the games released in the OP).

Although that thing that I wanted not to happen now seems to have happened anyway, without me having replied further (before this post now, that is).

My original complaint post in this thread is perfectly reasonable, and none of the counter-arguments against it have defeated my point IMO.

Regardless of what the excuses are, the facts remain that:

Black bars and/or newly-created cartoon borders in these ports, which were not present in the original version of these games, are inherently immersion-breaking and therefore greatly reduce the enjoyment of playing the games.

The counter-argument that I should "play on the original hardware then" is inherently ridiculous, as it is not at all reasonable to expect an average consumer to have arcade cabinet games strewn about their household. Those are very rare and very expensive commodities and not at all readily accessible nor easy to acquire nor easy to accommodate in terms of how much physical space they occupy.

The counter argument of "the original arcade games had painted physical bezels, so therefore these ports are exactly the same as original" is also not convincing, since there is no immersion-breaking black bars on the original arcade version, and the equally immersion-breaking and newly-drawn cartoon borders also did not exist on those versions either, and, one can very easily naturally & automatically and without even thinking about it, through subconscious cognitive function, ignore & pay zero attention to the physical structure of the arcade cabinets whilst playing the games whilst watching the screen (and solely the screen) that is in the cabinet.

In contrast, there is no way to automatically & subconsciously to ignore giant black bars and/or newly-drawn & totally out-of-place cartoon borders that occupy massive amounts of the screen space itself, screen space which the game itself should be occupying but isn't, but which the original versions' screens did occupy.

And that inability to ignore this problem is especially so since ~99.9% of games do not have this problem, which means that due to a gamer's experience of almost always gaming without having this problem, the gamer is therefore very cognitively acclimated to notice very substantially, during the rare occasions when this problem does occur, that it is indeed happening, and it is sticking out as would a totally un-ignorable sore thumb.

And that stuff I just said all also speaks to the counter-argument of "you can't notice black pixels because they are just pixels that are off" --- No, that is totally incorrect. I certainly do notice black pixels in games like these, because I have countless hours spent gaming on games which take up the whole screen, as games should do. Therefore, when a game fails in its duty to take up the whole screen, that failure, as delivered through inappropriate bars of black pixels, is always, invariably, and very severely, noticeable and immersion-breaking.

I'd argue that those black bars are no more immersion breaking than the edges of the screen,

Again: these games are vertical shooters.
OLD vertical shooters.
They're bigger in height (y-axis) than in width (x-axis).

Not a bot? Alright I believe you. They are getting sneaky nowadays, dropping their weird piece and leaving. As for trolling, I can't help but see it as a bait, esp with others outright calling out your bs. Maybe in the future care to include an alternative solution from your pov right away, instead of just dropping some weird hot take without a thought. Perhaps you think it's edgy, but more than anything it's rather silly and hardly any better than base trolling. Mixing impressions for facts won't help things either.

With that out of the way, please tell how would you implement the display output? Can you provide an example? And do you even shmup bro?! I'm asking because those 99.9% of games you play might just not happen to be arcade vert shmups with their native ~3:4 aspect.

Btw what is a normal screen for you, if it isn't widescreen? Normal screen nowadays is widescreen (or multiple widescreens). If you meant 4:3 aspect, then less than 1% of steam users contributing to the hw survey use it as their primary display, so what is normal to you might not be normal to almost anyone else nowadays. Maybe the current implementation targets ~99% of the userbase out of the box with default settings, which would seem reasonable.
If you are so hung up on borders / pillarboxes that were not there back then, do you expect the game to come packed with a cabinet CRT instead? Didn't you say yourself that one can't be expected to play on original hardware anyway?

Maybe try tate mode and knock your screen sideways 90°ccw. Having options is great after all and these releases support screen rotations natively. Borders should be gone in tate if you use 4:3 display (it would make sense that way at least), though I can't verify it myself as of now.

Hi, I play the Touhou series of shmups, and like the games in this package, it's also a bunch of vertical shooters. There's no way to play the games without the cartoon borders, at least not without modding them for a vertical/90 degree display, and even then, the borders actually do contain useful info.

Yeah, some of the HUD is on the game screen itself, but others are on the border. In the attached screenshot you can find an "ENEMY" blip at the bottom which is useful for telling where the boss is without looking up and away from the bullets you're dodging, so you can wiggle to some spot under her so your bullets reach her. There's also the other stuff on the right border like the highscore, lives and bombs, power level, graze counter, FPS counter, and depending on the game's gimmick there might be even more stuff displayed.

Shmups also depend heavily on the size of the screen for difficulty balancing. If the game area was expanded to cover the right border, you will have a bigger area which necessitates a complete overhaul of how the game works. It's not as simple as expand game area and boom, job complete.

TL;DR borders for vertical shmups (or rather the size of the game) are absolutely necessary, and changing them requires massive changes to the game's design.