General Category > General Discussion
Genesis Help
mariocaseman:
I am playing my sega Genesis and Sega Master system consoles on my tv, but for some reason they are both displaying the same problem: Borders!!! Very annoying. The screen is surrounded by a border that covers all 4 section of the tv. Anybody know how to fix this? My screen options on the tv are cinema, full screen, side bar, and wide. None of them remove these awful borders. Any thoughts?
djshok:
I assume you're playing on an HDTV? That's normal, Sega games had a little border of blank pixels around the screen to compensate for TV overscan. With oldschool tube tvs you'd always lose a few pixels around the edges, thus most games included this border to compensate for that and prevent you from losing a valuable part of the game screen like the HUD.
mariocaseman:
Yes, HDTV. But my NES, SNES, N64 look fine. Can I fix this problem?
djshok:
As far as I know only Sega did that because the Genesis had a slightly higher resolution than the NES and SNES. Genesis games are typically 320x224 vs SNES 256x224 thought much of those extra pixels are that border. I don't think there's really any way to "fix" this issue since it's not something that's actually wrong, it's just the way the games were programmed to ensure the best display on TVs in their time. I guess it wasn't a big enough issue so Nintendo never bothered with it, though I suppose Sega was trying to play it safe. The only thing I can suggest is set your TV's display ratio to 4:3 instead of the default 16:9 that HDTVs use. It'll make the old school games look better and make that border less noticeable.
mariocaseman:
I've been trying to find that setting to change the display! I swear I cannot find it! Is it possible some HDTV's don't have that option?
Also, when playing Sonic the Hedgehog, I get the borders in Green Hill Zone, Marble Zone, the 3rd zone, but NOT in Labyrinth and Star light zone... wtf is up with that?