theclaw wrote:Nothing you can do. The aspect ratio situation on Wii is a major **** to put it lightly.
There's five classes I can name off hand:
4:3 only games who ignore the Wii system option, and just stretch if the TV tells them to.
4:3 only games who pillarbox if the Wii is set widescreen
16:9 only games who letterbox if the Wii is set not widescreen
games that use only letterboxed 4:3, no widescreen option at all (GC version Resident Evil 4)
games with proper support for both
I've got to add to this with recent observations of my own. If anyone doesn't know the difference between pixel aspect ratios storage and display, google now. And that NTSC is defined as 720 dots of horizontal information.
I noticed right off the bat that my TV reports the WiiU running Wiimode to be outputting 720x480. Initially my Wii is set to 720p (implied widescreen). For the good Wii games, the image fills the screen correctly with only a very small black margin on all sides with my TV in "screen fit" (suggesting the WiiU is adding the black margin, not my TV). What I've found is that in addition to Claw's correct notes above, there are a few cheap Wii games that are ignoring or misinterpreting the 'widescreen' flag, and the only way to display them at the correct display aspect ratio is using a crop function on my TV that removes part of the top and bottom. Two examples are Pinball Williams Collection [edit: actually I think the Crave-published game I'm thinking of is not Pinball Williams but Mirra BMX Wii. I'll try to pull out the old Wii to compare it to the Wiiu Wii mode] and Phantom Brave. Both of these games display a horizontally squished image using "screen fit". It's like they are trying to display an anamorphic widescreen image, but the WiiU is insisting on adding pillar boxes to them. I'll call this class of game "badly behaved widescreen".
* (I'm well aware that the Phantom Brave port has a funny issue of either having correctly proportioned backgrounds with stretched sprites, or correctly proportioned sprites with squished backgrounds, depending on if you're set to 16:9 or 4:3, respectively. I've repeatedly compared the presentation between the WiiU set to 720p in Wii mode for the above example games - and a couple others - to an original Wii set in 16:9, and there is something off about their implementation/interaction with the WiiU in Wii mode)