NES Borders?

[gameaddict4life]

Hey everybody, I recently acquired a NES again and I've noticed on my Sony Wega CRT that some of the NES games have a border on the left and or right of the screen. For example in SMB the left side of the screen has a blue strip. I guess this is the overscan area? The games were programmed this way but tvs back in the day didn't display the edges? I've tried my NES on different tvs and even one from the 70s or 80s and they all display this issue. I'm thinking of picking up Dragon Warrior and RC Pro Am. Do any of you know if these games have the border issue? I haven't noticed it on Smash TV or Metroid. Its really bad on SMB 3 because the right side of the screen has very noticeable pop up/in. I believe this is normal but I'm wondering if this is a game by game issue and if it was a developer decision type of thing. Also what games don't have this issue and is there anything I can do tv wise to reduce it or eliminate it? I've messed with my tv settings and the only option I have is a tilt function but that doesn't help. I'm also wondering if the new Retron 5 system will fix these issues because it looks like it will be an emulator in a box. Thanks for any answers!

[AppleQueso]

The NES actually has a PPU flag that will blank out the leftmost 8 pixels of the screen if a game sets it. The most common use of this is to help hide scrolling artifacts when certain mirroring settings are used.

In other words, it's a normal thing and intentional.

[gameaddict4life]

Ok, are there any tvs out there that don't show the borders? I swear as a kid I didn't see the borders. Maybe they've always been there but as kids we didn't notice/care? Its still not as bad as the SNES vertical line. I know that wasn't there back in the day!

[gameaddict4life]

Thanks for the quick response too. So by blank out do you mean the same background color? Why not just use a black border? Do you know how many games used this "feature"? Huh, the things we overlooked as kids before things got all fancy.

[Duane Dibbley]

They would have been mostly/all hidden by overscan on your childhood TV.

[AppleQueso]

Thanks for the quick response too. So by blank out do you mean the same background color? Why not just use a black border? Do you know how many games used this "feature"? Huh, the things we overlooked as kids before things got all fancy.

Yeah, background color. And the reason why black isn't just used always is because of the way the NES handles color palettes. As for how many games used it, honestly no clue there. All I can tell you is that lots of games did.

Overscan will vary tv to tv, even within the same model. You can adjust it, but you'll need to either open the TV up or get into the hidden service menu, and you can potentially mess the tv up pretty bad with either. Other than trying out a ton of different TVs until you find one you like, all I can suggest is to just learn to live with it.

Some of those scrolling artifacts on some games get pretty bad though, and I'm willing to wager that some of them probably were visible on your childhood TV, but as you guessed, you probably didn't notice it or care before.

[Zing]

If you adjust your overscan to a proper 5% or so, you won't see the problem area. I have used and adjusted many TVs, using SMB as my "gold standard". It is a great game to use to test if you don't have a crosshatch pattern on DVD handy. The scores along the top should just be inside the frame, and both left and right garbage graphics should not be visible. This is how it looks when I have the image squared to roughly 5% overscan.

You need to go into service mode to adjust. The Sony service mode is very easy to enable and use. Just google it.