Why overscan on PSOne and PS2 games on PS3 via HDMI?

Kamiboy

Newcomer
When I heard that the PS3 was backwards compatible with PS2 and PSOne games via I was happy to finally be able to play games while avoiding all the hassles of an analogue video interface, such as overscan.

But PS2 and PSOne games on the PS3 still have black bars above, below, and to the sides of varying sizes even when using HDMI. Anyone know why that is?

Thinking about it I can think of a great deal many reasons. Maybe the RSX cannot digitally interface with the graphics chip of the PS2/PSOne, so they are converted to analogue and then routed via a analogue to digital converter into the RSX so it can scale and display them.

Maybe, because they were designed for old shitty analogue hardware PS2 and PSOne games just didn't fill the screen by intentionally leaving blank spots above below and to the sides of the rendering window to compensate for overscan on CRT televisions. This would have been done either by the creators or maybe automatically by the hardware. Lastly, maybe the resolution PS2/PSOne games were rendered in (16:9 or 4:3) just doesn't properly fit the resolutions of digital displays, which was not a problem in the days of analog CRT televisions.

I have a plasma and play 4:3 games with grey bars to the side, to avoid image retention, so it is annoying when games start to add black bars of their own on top of everything. Shedding some light on the reason for the black bars could settle if SONY can fix it in a future firmware or we are stuck with it forever.
 
I believe they fix it with FW 2.00, but many ppl are getting weird pixelation problem and they change it back to how it was with back bar on the side.
 
Maybe, because they were designed for old shitty analogue hardware PS2 and PSOne games just didn't fill the screen by intentionally leaving blank spots above below and to the sides of the rendering window to compensate for overscan on CRT televisions. This would have been done either by the creators or maybe automatically by the hardware.
I think that's exactly what it is. No sense wasting system power rendering something that most players will never see.
 
I think that's exactly what it is. No sense wasting system power rendering something that most players will never see.

I am not sure about this, but I think they could also have rendered full frame and configured the graphics DAC to automatically insert overscan in the outgoing video signal.

Didn't knew they had removed black bars in FW 2.0, what the shame that they had to back.
 
Overscan is where the image is scaled beyoned the area of the dsiplay, with part of the image being cropped off. On the other hand, windowboxing content so nothing is cut off like previous generation PS games do is underscan.

Maybe, because they were designed for old shitty analogue hardware PS2 and PSOne games just didn't fill the screen by intentionally leaving blank spots above below and to the sides of the rendering window to compensate for overscan on CRT televisions.
Yep, they render the content to a slightly smaller area than that of the output resolution, to aviod wasting processing power on drawing in an area most users TVs would never show them anyway.
 
Crap.... do you know if the size of this so called underscan window was a standard set by the console manufacturer or if developers had to decide it themselves?
Because if it was a constant standard size then the PS3 scaler could be configured to automatically crop them away but in the case of latter this could not be done because the size of underscan would differ from game to game.
 
Crap.... do you know if the size of this so called underscan window was a standard set by the console manufacturer or if developers had to decide it themselves?

Developers developers developers developers developers...
 
Well, a crap flurry with cherry on top. Looks like I will never be rid of my arch nemesis the black bar.

Curse you Black Bar and your sidekick shitty legacy analogue technology boy, I'll be rid of you one day.
 
Well, a crap flurry with cherry on top. Looks like I will never be rid of my arch nemesis the black bar.

Curse you Black Bar and your sidekick shitty legacy analogue technology boy, I'll be rid of you one day.

I used to have a widescreen CRT TV that recognised black bars and if you wanted, scaled the image to full screen always and automatically. I don't think my current LCD has that feature, ironically, but I'm sure there are others that do. It worked absolutely great.
 
If anything SONY should include a overscan option in the menu you get when you press the PlayStation button during a PS2 or PSOne game on the PS3. Then you could manually scale and move the picture window pixel by pixel, vertically or horizontally. Then the PS3 scaler would make sure the area you designated will be scaled to fill out the entire display area, no more black bars.

That way one could do all the work of figuring out how much each game underscans oneself. I would be awesome, specially with all the PS2 and PSOne games I am still going to play on my PS3.
 
Kamiboy said:
Then you could manually scale and move the picture window pixel by pixel, vertically or horizontally.
I agree - that would be nice to have - more so on PSP then PS3 though, scaling the game to fill out the screen just right on portable is all the more important. There's also some PS1 games that leave parts of screen border unused&static (not necesserily black) and being able to crop those out gives a much better fit for 16:9 screen.
 
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