Black Border while playing gba games on ds lite?

[Sanosuke Sagara]

Well the title pretty much says it. Is there any way to expand it so it goes full screen?

 

[Ziv]

I think the DS screens are a little bigger than the GBA screen. That's why you get the border. There's not a way to expand it like the way the GBA did the old GB games.

Okay here it is:

DS: 256 x 192 pixels
GBA: 240 x 160 pixels

 

[Sanosuke Sagara]

Pisses me off that they can't expand it, b/c it's the screen is definitely bigger on the original gba.

 

[monkeygod]

It is because the screen's native resolution is 256 x 192 and DS has no way of upconverting it.

 

[eldad9]

I'm guessing many games would look terrible rescaled.

Try it yourself. Find screenshots of GBA games, convert them to the new resolution using a graphics package, and post the results here.

 

[espy605]

Actually they look okay. The resolution difference is negligible, especially on such a tiny screen. It's not like playing GBA games on a TV.

If you think about it, GBC games are rescalable when you play them on a GBA SP and they look just fine.

 

[Puffa469]

that border kinda annoyed me at first, but since each pixel of the ds screen is a little smaller than it is on the gba, the gba games actually look sharper on the ds screen than they do on the gba. Just like they look sharper on the gb micro.

 

[epobirs]

The GBA screen res was chosen as a compromise between ease of porting SNES software and supporting GBC games.

When it came to the DS the primary concern was getting enough resolution to make 3D look decent while keeping the price down. Since it wasn't going to be that much higher than the GBA, upscaling wsn't very practical. Even at that scale the results can be pretty ugly. It's more difficult than scaling GBC graphics because the GBC stuff starts out pretty ugly.