How to scale up without stretching pixels?

[Gunnar]

Hi!

I am making a retro-style game and it has the resolution 320*240. Is there any easy way to scale it up automatically to fill the screen as much as possible without stretching or blurring the pixels? I want to see the pixels in all of their beauty!

Thanks in advance!!

[Paul_Boland]

If you stretch 320 x 240 across 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1440 x 900, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, or any such resolution, the pixels will be stretched along with the window. The best way to achieve this is create your game at a higher resolution and then use Change Resolution Mode. So for example, if you created your game at 1024 x 768 and then used Change Resolution Mode, when your game is launched it will set the monitor resolution to 1024 x 768 and this will stop any stretching and show your game as it was developed. But there is no 320 x 240 resolution so all you can do is stretch that to fill the window size and that will result in your pixels being stretched, blocky and blurry.

[LB]

If you use Clone Application you can have MMF2 do all the graphic stretching for you. You can also force objects to larger pixel positions by dividing by the size of a pixel then multiplying again, eg if your pixels are 2 by 2, you could set the position by diving by 2 and then multiplying by 2, but not the other way around.

[Nobuyuki]

you can use "Change Resolution Mode", combined with "Keep Screen Ratio" in application properties. Set the ratio tolerance to 0, which will force the correct aspect ratio (you may get letterboxing).



(click for full size)

Here is what my screen looked like with these settings. The letterboxing is due to the fact that my monitor can't scale down below 640x480. You can also use "Resize Display to fit Window Size" to scale up on this, but without HWA it will be slow. (Don't use anti-aliasing if you want sharp pixels)

[UltimateWalrus]

I made an extension that does this automatically without changing resolution mode, and maintains the aspect ratio, with options for largest-possible and pixel-perfect modes. I'll hopefully be releasing it sometime soon on ultimatewalrus.com.