Have you been a proud owner of a Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980’s and enjoyed playing for example Super Mario Bros on your 4:3 CRT? Have you played SMB also on a current setup – like a 1080p HDTV – recently? It probably filled only half of the screen…. What about if these NES titles could be played in proper widescreen? That is exactly where wideNES is trying to fill the gap. Check out the following article:
wideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games
In the mid 1980s, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was the home console to have. Boasting the best sound, the best graphics, and the best games of any home-console to date, it pushed the envelope for what home-gaming could be. To this day, titles like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid are hailed as some of the best games of all time.
Well, it’s been over 30 years since the NES was released, and while those classic games have aged well, the same can’t be said for the hardware they ran on. With a screen-resolution of just 256×240, the NES didn’t give games all that much screen real-estate to work with. Nevertheless, intrepid game developers squeezed amazing, iconic worlds into NES games: the maze-like dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, the sprawling planet of Metroid, or the colorful levels of Super Mario Bros.. And yet, due to the NES’s hardware limitations, gamers only ever experienced these worlds a single 256×240 viewport at a time…
Until now.
Introducing: wideNES. A new way to experience NES classics.
wideNES is a novel technique to automatically and interactively map-out NES games, in real time.
As players move within a level, wideNES records the screen, gradually building-up a map of what’s been explored. On subsequent playthroughs of the level, wideNES syncs the action on-screen to the generated map, effectively letting players see more of the level by “peeking” past the edge of the NES’s screen! Best of all, wideNES’s approach to mapping games is totally generalized, enabling a wide range of NES games to work with wideNES right out of the box!
But how does it work?
Read the rest of the article here including a download link to try it out yourself.