So Ninty gave me a NES game

[kgcarini]

I decided to get the first final fantasy. I'm happy with it. I'm about 3 hours into it.

[MrPopo]

I decided to get the first final fantasy. I'm happy with it. I'm about 3 hours into it.

4 White Mage run?

[Gnashvar]

Lots of NES do the blank strip on the side of the screen. It's a programming thing. They trimmed a sliver of the resolution for more processing, if I understand it correctly. It's normal. Game on.

Yeah that's what I was wondering I just wanted someone with the original to confirm. Super Mario Bros. 3 has it in some stages too.

[Gnashvar]

Lots of NES do the blank strip on the side of the screen. It's a programming thing. They trimmed a sliver of the resolution for more processing, if I understand it correctly. It's normal. Game on.

Yeah that's what I was wondering I just wanted someone with the original to confirm. Super Mario Bros. 3 has it in some stages too.

Sorry for bringing back this post but after all this time I finally found out about that strip on the side and why it is not on the NES. So like RadarScope said it's a programming trick but it doesn't work on the Wii.

Well, I've found one other negative actually, and that's that a lot of the old games were designed based around overscan, so in SMB3 for example, on scrolling levels there's blue line or something like that on the scrolling stages that is entirely static, and that's because on the original game you didn't see that because of the overscan, so the problem there is that they're really emulating it too perfectly.

Source: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1119797

[MrPopo]

Yeah, you can also see the overscan phenomenom if you have an XRGB in B1 (linedoubling) mode. They even used the technique up through the PS2 era. The XRGB display is centered in the upper right instead of middle, so there's a strip on the left and bottom side that shows where the game isn't rendering anything because of the overscan. It's a very easy trick to squeeze some extra performance, as resolution is an area problem, so taking in a small amount of space on all four sides gives a fairly large savings on screen area.