OpenFodder - Cannon Fodder opensource

[drnovice]

Yes, but we also should remember in 90s the 640x480 streached mode was almost the only way to display Dos games.
Nowadays we have much more choice and different formats to display on monitors, so a current Windows/Linux porting of an old Dos game should consider these things and get the intended format and display in the best way it.

Even without knowing the story of the game, we could noticed the sight-shaped mouse cursor is streached with aspect correction (cut-out taken by your daum screenshot):

respect original correct size (cut-out taken by OpenFodder):

So sometimes (as C&C example) aspect correction is really corrective when displaying game, sometimes not (Cannon Fodder, Monkey Island 2, etc) looking at mouse cursors...

(Monkey Island 2 screenshots by YouTube PC Longplay vs Amiga Longplay):

Amiga

PC

[MrFlibble]

Yeah, the cursor thing, I do remember the C&C one is round when not corrected to 4:3. Come to think of it, there's plenty of inconsistency in some games, probably due to different ways in which some of the assets were created. Artists might have worked in programmes running in high resolution, and some stuff might have been scanned from drawings as discussed here. There's a couple of threads at VOGONS with discussions about such inconsistencies.

Anyway, I suppose that it would be useful, as a rule of thumb, to think of the original release of a game as its proper presentation. Whatever Cannon Fodder looked on a real Amiga must be the "right" way because it was released and tested for that platform (surely if the developers or testers noticed something wrong with how the graphics looked they'd fix it before release). But then again this does not always work too, like the same release might be inconsistent internally, e.g. Abuse apparently had its graphics designed for a stretched 4:3 version (as suggested by the health counter on the bottom left that gets round when stretched), yet the built-in high-res mode simply re-uses the same non-stretched graphics to fill a 640x480 screen (as shown here). AFAIK this mode was later used as default for the Macintosh port and possibly some others. The protagonist's sprite seems to have been drawn with the 4:3 stretch in mind as well, at least, it appears "hunched" when uncorrected and seems to have "normal" proportions (for a humanoid figure) in corrected images (example 1, example 2).

It's very easy to get used to the wrong ratio, I played C&C and Red Alert (Windows versions) most of the time in the built-in 640x480 mode (which is just the same 640x400 image with a letterboxed presentation), even though if you look closer it's quite noticeable that the sprites have a distorted perspective when not corrected, and infantry all look "hunched" too (not very noticeable because they're all so small, especially in C&C95).