Jet Force Gemini's Widescreen Mode Reportedly "Broken" On Switch

Not exactly surprising given most of the N64 games have gone up in not great states and a few of them (including Goldeneye) still haven't really been fixed.

Wasn't it always letterboxed? If it was full screen, wouldn't there be more picture above the door, and below the player character? Like a 2.35: 1 movie, with the 4:3 version being zoomed in.

Edit: thinking about it, it is wrong. It's letterboxed, but it should be letterboxed within a 4:3 image - it shouldn't stretch it to fit a 16:9 screen.

Yep, IIRC this game had a a different wide screen option than Goldeneye and the rest even if they were all made by Rare. Letterbox Widescreen instead of anamorphic, it was that way back then, so I wouldn't hope on a fix.

I'm actually kind of surprised that the NSO app even acknowledges the widescreen options at all. As far as I know, all of Rare's N64 games that support widescreen do it by kind of just squishing the image, and it's up to the player to figure out TV settings to make the squished image resemble widescreen.
I guess Nintendo did try to implement some hacks to make the in-game widescreen settings work for real? (and apparently did a poor job at it?)

Oh John Rairdin, Nintendo of America can do nothing to address nor influence this. NOA is a separate company from NCL Japan. One company makes games and hardware. The other company distributes these products and runs marketing in the U.S.

What is NOA going to do to fix this?

IIRC "widescreen" in c. 2000 parlance actually means "letterboxed 16:9" so i wouldnt have assumed it would just magically work on a 16:9 display.

also, "broken." 🙄 words mean things.

@EarthboundBenjy

it didnt "squish" the image per se, it reduced the vertical height in order to get the screen information to fit that would normally have been "cut off" by the full screen 4:3 mode.

but you probably knew that ✌️ and you are right, on a 16:9 display you can often use "zoom" settings to stretch the image vertically back to full height.

as the article says, no way to fix it in handheld mode. im not exactly heartbroken as i probably would have chosen full screen (4:3) anyway at the time.

one more note on this,

"widescreen" is not nearly so big of a deal with games at it was with movies, as games are generally non linear.

with movies, you actually do literally lose that % of the film to the formatting. games, you might just have to pan a little more to see, but since you generally keep the camera centered on what you want, all you really lose is a bit of your "periphery."

anyway, something ive thought about. i prefer gaming on a squarer display, mostly.

• obv there are caveats, like taito multi screen arcade games, that can benefit from wide screen. and all "cinematic" games are "more cinematic" in wide screen. if thats your thing.

I don't think anyone really cares to be honest. Also, broken?? Anything to get that 'Nintendo cutting corners again' engagement amirite.

@-wc- It sounds like you're describing letterbox widescreen, which a handful of games (apparently including JFG?) did. But there was also anamorphic widescreen, which was more common. This simply squashed more horizontal information into the 4:3 space, making everything look tall and thin. It was then up to the user to choose an aspect ratio that filled their widescreen TV. Many/most early widescreen games were anamorphic, including Goldeneye.

Honestly I don’t see what the big deal is. I dunno.
Can’t wait to play it in the US though, that’s for sure!

Nintendo, give me a reason to stow away my N64 once and for all: we still need both Castlevanias, shadows of the empire, San Francisco rush 2, beetle adventure racing, mystical ninja starring goemon, bomberman 64, and mischief makers. EDIT: including resident evil 2 (yes I’d love to play this on my N64 again, Capcom!) perfect dark, and Star Wars rogue squadron.
Am I missing any? Maybe one or two…
Once we have the above I will happily disconnect my N64 and store it away, replacing it with NSO.

@smoreon

yes, this was indeed a thing that i forgot existed. 👍

i actually think perfect dark might do both/either, but id have to do something to find out so ill stick to my reckon for now.

From what I've read and tested, Jet Force Gemini was designed for letterboxed 16:9 while Goldeneye used anamorphic 16:9.

I can replicate the Switch App output with my N64 connected to an OSSC. I set the 240p output to 3x mode which was set to Generic 16:9. This made JFG in widescreen mode have a stretched appearance.

In other words, the game's video output is preserved in its original state. What should be bigger news is the game's improved fps on the Switch. I'm no Digital Foundry, but the Switch JFG release has a noticeable perfomance boost over the N64.

Already spoiled with Rare Replay's improved controls on this so I wasn't planning on a replay on NSO. But hopefully any issues are ironed out, JFG is one of Rare's best and it deserves every chance to get new fans.

How can they mess up such an old game??

@Link-Hero
Exactly. After 20 years those games have been emulated in and out. I still argue how comes that even Genesis collections run poorly when a 20 years old pc runs them flawlessly. Lazy, just lazy.
N64 emulation on Switch is incredibly poor. Poor selection of games and poor performance. How is it possible that fzero runs with a choppy Framerate? No excuses…

It's pretty sad when you consider n64 games Run better on my series x via retroarch. That's why I'll never subscribe to nso, first, emulation of n64 is not great, (and they expect you to pay for expansion pack on top) second, nintendo don't want to sell me their games, they just want to hire them out to me. At least on game pass you can purchase games

@Link-Hero I don’t think I was harsh… it is objectively a poor job. Not asking to emulate 3DS on Steamdeck… asking to emulate well something that free emulators do already very well since what, 10 years? 15years?
Not emulating properly 16 consoles is just unacceptable in 2023. In this case it is a flipping n64… not even asking a programmer to create a perfect emulator which can be difficult given the number of games and things to consider. Here they specifically picked some games, and make the run poorly. Embarassing… free emulators do a better job already. That’s why I am pissed.
If you are not able to make a good job at least be smart and pick the games that run well with your software, like what Sega did with the mini console (it has a poor emulator, but all the games included run decently, so no embarrassment)

this game needs a full blown hd remaster/remake it would look and sound so good if this game was running on current switch power if they do it right.

Totally worth the $40+, lol

Oh Nintendo, when will you program a good N64 emulator?

These days, even ported retro games release in a broken state!

@Burning_Spear The game is completely playable.

Wow, like normal no game testing involved, just wait for the complaints and then fix it. Seems to be the norm nowadays

Serious question: if a game was made with 4:3 in kind, what's the harm in just...playing it in 4:3? I wouldn't try to change a movies aspect ratio from the one it was shot in, so why do so much work to fill your monitor?

Considering how NSO is generally here to be simple, ideally 1 to 1 ports of the actual games, this is an issue of the original game and thus is a non-issue in the context of what NSO is.

Whenever NSO messes up an issue with an N64 port, it deserves all the criticism and it at least always seems like Nintendo probably decided it would require a delay or hiring more people when something like that happens. But this isn't that.

@ChromaticDracula Conkers Bad Fur day

@RubyCarbuncle The game works the same as the original 64 version.

wow people really did expect this game's widescreen mode to work flawlessly with their modern 16:9 tv. 😂

it says more about you than it does about nintendo. think it through, y'all. ✌️

This is old news. This already existed with ExciteBike 64

A few overdramatic comments here, lol. More of a minor issue but carry on.

Definitely excited for JFG to come to NSO.

@-wc- Well, there was a tweet. And that's all that people need to make a fully educated judgment that determines their remaining days in the Universe.

@fabiop have you ever programmed an emulator? Do you know how it works? Have you any idea why it's tricky to make n64 emulators?

N64 is not an easy system to emulate correctly.
Just think about pj64 for example, I don't know how long it took before it was able to do proper frame buffer at higher resolutions, what 15-20 years?

There's the constant balance between making a fast emulator or making an accurate emulator.
Because if you make a cycle accurate n64 emulator it will definitely require a lot of horsepower to run well.
(More than the Switch has anyway)

Emulating the 3DS on SteamDeck is arguably easier than doing n64 on the Switch.

@DaniPooo There’s more to emulation than can be understood. N64 used I think R4300 CPU (code compatible with PlayStation’s R3500 CPU, but that’s about it for cross compatibility). ARM and SGI CPUs are different families and legacies.

The N64 emulator on Switch is an impressive feat. The N64 emulator on the 32-bit G3-based Wii CPU is a coded masterpiece.

I’m grateful to God that He influenced the right people to put this game on Switch, so I can play it again on the go.

Widescreen works on MiSTer!

I've been playing it on the Japanese 18+ NSO app and I think it looks fine. Just letterboxed a bit; no biggie. Still better than the 4:3 ratio IMO. Looks even better docked.

As others have said, Nintendo have just ported the game, when i saw 'widescreen' i was wonder how it would look, but basically this is just how widescreen worked in the 90's like an after thought you had to correct if you want to use your new 'fancy' not hd crt wide sreen... i do still have an old trinitron here..

Another day, another storm in a teacup article by Nintendo life, this is far from broken, as the headline screams.

Thank goodness I still have this game on my N64.

hey @Liam_Doolan:

I noticed something.

Your headline uses the word "broken" in quotation marks, but the only person to use that word is you. In your opening paragraph.🙄

in the US, there was a recent minor story of FOX NEWS doing the exact same thing on the national level (self quoting, in order to make news where there was none. if you were quoting someone else, please let it be known.)

This is obvious bad journalism, irresponsible click bait garbage.

If you, like the person that you re-tweeted here, personally dont understand how these settings worked in the n64 era, please educate yourself.
the fact is, the feature is not "broken," but instead our modern displays are not inherently compatible with the way "widescreen" was handled in this particular title.

you are spreading misinformation and sensationalizing nothing in an obvious way.
If this is what you have to offer, please kindly offer it somewhere else.

Yeah, im gonna say it.

Do better, Nintendo life.
✌️

Not trying to be malicious. But here we have poor emulation of something which has been flawlesy emulated for over a decade… just stating the facts. Seriously.
When you see how poor is the megadrive collection (the paid one, not the online)… makes you wonder what are they doing.
These are money grabber, done in economy and you see it from the final result.

@rotekps_aniger Yeah well that's pretty much my point as well.
And you are exactly right sir.

Back in the 90s there was a lot differences in how to build video game consoles compared to modern machines. We did not have all the standards in place and game companies got creative.
Just think about the SuperFX chip for Snes for a moment.

There was not only different CPU architectures than what we use today, but usually they had unique different approaches to a lot of things, For example the framerate and audio was often tied to the clockspeed.

Even with Ocarina of Time decompiled and the game ported to modern machines, we still don't have an unlocked frame rate in the game.

Because the animations are tied and made specifically to the frame rate.
Apparently it was easier to build a system to interpolate the objects positions in 3 dimensional space in real time rather than just making the animations work at different frame rates.

That's why I say that the 3DS is probably easier to emulate on the Steam Deck, because even if the Steam Deck use x86 and the 3DS use ARM both systems are "modern" enough to work on a lot of same principals.

But yeah there's a lot of things to consider.
And people seems to think that a system should be easy to emulate just because it's old and slow compared to todays computers.

This is not always the case

That being said fixing this issue in the emulator is possible if they are willing to put in the work I imagine.

@Damo

I appreciate the clarification.

still, laundering the bad clickbait headline isn't really good practice, but at least the quotes can be attributed to a 3rd party. 👍 its not the end of the world but the many people here accusing this article of being click/flamebait and so on in have a point. ✌️

@DaniPooo something I find fascinating is that some consoles have been perfectly emulated for decades… in the “pirate” world emulators are perfect for those consoles. Then you move to the big companies and emulation performance is crap… same games, same consoles, been emulated for decades, emulators are even open source in many cases.
I understand the difficulty. But in some cases really there no excuses when there are so many good examples in front of us and them (the programmers).
The worst example is the poor emulation of the ps1 classic. Totally crap. No excuses.

@fabiop Can you name one n64 emulator that works "perfectly" and that has not been in development for a many many years before it was considered accurate?

You have to understand that emulators such as Project64 and Mupen64 has been in active development since the early 2000s, and was for many years highly inaccurate.

And even so, these emulators are not perfect.

Take Mupen64 and try to use it on a hacked Switch you end'll up with a worse experience than using Nintendos own emulator.

You just try to play Pokemon Snap or Majoras Mask on the Mupen64 emulator for Switch.
You'll get slowdowns and broken features when using Mupen64 (An emulator that has been in active development since before 2001)

I think Nintendos N64 emulator for the Switch has got quite decent.
Yeah it left a lot to be desired when it was first released, but man they did a good job going back and fixing a lot of the bigger issues.

Correct, which is why the question is not about the emulator but the specific games. If they are smart… they pick the games that run well on their emulator. The megadrive mini runs beautifully but only with few games. And they were smart enough to put games which run well.
Fzero run perfectly since many years ago. How come they it has slowdowns on switch?? Unacceptable.
Majoras mask always had problems, very good example. Still, if a freeware open source emu run a game well, unacceptable that years later a paid official emu has problems. Do we agree on this?

On switch I appreciate that they run on a poor emulator but Nintendo improved it over the time. The experience got better.
I still don’t understand why you either choose American covers or the whole Europe and US together. Such a messy presentation for a paid emulator. This is basic.

@John_Deacon : 100%. Many people naively think that a game can simply be flagged to run at 16:9 without issue. I imagine that bleeding/camera issues would be quite common in a lot of classic games (not to mention stretched FMV), and I quite appreciate it when the aspect ratio is left alone if all we're essentially getting is an emulation of the original software.

@-wc- It is broken. The issue isn’t the way the rom handles widescreen, the issue is that the emulator steps in and applies an incorrect adjustment. If it just drew a letterbox on its 4:3 window then it would be working correctly. Even if the resulting tiny window isn’t really want anybody wants it would at least be functioning to spec.

But that isn’t what’s happening; the emulator is taking that 4:3 letterboxed display and stretching it into an aspect ratio that was never intended. This broken feature could be fixed by simply not stretching the window. Zooming in for a proper 16:9 experience would be cool, of course, but not strictly necessary to be able to call it not broken.

@chefgon

thank you. looks like I'm wrong again! haha it wont be the last time either.

thanks for deftly explaining it without talking down to me or treating me like the self rightous WRONG person that i was 🙄 apologies to nlife staff and everyone involved 😆

10/10 commenter ✌️