melonDS-emu
3DS resolution support: underscan, and seeing beyond normal camera edges and borderframes
So the idea is to allow more tiles, and 3d scene to be displayed since the framebuffer is something like 1024x512.
I came across this idea playing gba games on my 3ds, some games had glitches, and I think sprites wrapped around the screen wrongly, so eventually game patches might be needed. You would probably choose to add a condition to integer scaling.
It's important to note that there are 2 ways of doing this: add space around the screens, or attach the screens (Or somewhere in between, maybe depending on in-game camera/connect, but maybe a game could do this inconsistently)
For a borderframe this means that the middle piece would be cut out and added on the bottom-bottom/top-top.
The window layer could just stay in the middle. (I don't care about scaling it with or without aspect ratio, or even if the top screen won't get widescreen)
Also, make sure the camera/DSP won't get messed up.
this feels a lot more ambitious to patch into games than the existing 3ds widescreen patch - not sure how feasible it is tbh
This might be true, but MelonDS is not a 3DS emulator, so until proven otherwise, it's more feasible than on 3DS. But your point still stands.
the framebuffer is something like 1024x512.
it's also not quite this simple...
take sprite positions for example. you get 9 bits for a sprite's X position: if it goes past 255, it's considered negative. the Y position is even weirder: it's only 8 bits, and past 127 it seems to be considered BOTH positive and negative. or something like that.
you could have a small amount of underscan/border, but for technical reasons, it won't go very far here.
BG layers, too, it largely depends on what kind of layers are used. sometimes games just use a 256x256 layer and fit it within the screen area, so there's kind of "nothing" beyond it (that or it would just repeat).
Yeah, I was already afraid of the sprites (Altho wrapping glitches can be fixed). And it's unfortunate that for some games only a higher heigth is possible.
Edit: altho repeating or pitch black could theoretically somewhere not be undesirable (but ensuring that could be hard) That is if it goes anywhere in the first place.
at this point this is just a theoretical exercise with no practical applications
could it be done? maybe
but you'd be completely revamping the DS' graphics system, and modifying huge parts of the game's code. at this point just port the game to PC directly
That makese sense, but the last part, as the RTCOM and other patches are also done without source code. This is just a small fraction of the game. But indeed you do need to draw a line. (I fixed a spelling mistake in the title)