Some of you insist SMB3 didn't have garbage on sides on a real NES. You're wrong. Old TVs simply didn't draw as much of the screen.
They call it "overscan." ALL of the older TVs did it. This allowed game programmers to take efficiency shortcuts that caused garbage in the overscan area. No TV at the time would show it anyway. Newer TVs (especially HDTVs) display much more of the original picture...so you see the mess you were never expected to see. It's authentic and it wouldn't be correctly emulated if that stuff wasn't there. Programming shortcuts and hardware tricks caused garbage to appear in the overscan area, but these also made SMB3 possible!
Why don't all games behave the same way? Well, the NES alone couldn't scroll an entire screen. Early games (Pinball, Donkey Kong, etc) were single-screen. Balloon Fight used a trick to make it seem like the screen was scrolling (actually, dots were moving across the screen). Super Mario Bros (1) was one of the earliest games to have a special memory mapper chip inside the cartridge to allow basic scrolling (you can't even go backward). There were lots and lots of different mapper chips and Super Mario Bros. 3 had one of the most advanced.
This discussion has been going on for a looong time and no one ever mentioned "overscan."
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Re: Super Mario Bros. 3
Some of you insist SMB3 didn't have garbage on sides on a real NES. You're wrong. Old TVs simply didn't draw as much of the screen.
They call it "overscan." ALL of the older TVs did it. This allowed game programmers to take efficiency shortcuts that caused garbage in the overscan area. No TV at the time would show it anyway. Newer TVs (especially HDTVs) display much more of the original picture...so you see the mess you were never expected to see. It's authentic and it wouldn't be correctly emulated if that stuff wasn't there. Programming shortcuts and hardware tricks caused garbage to appear in the overscan area, but these also made SMB3 possible!
Why don't all games behave the same way? Well, the NES alone couldn't scroll an entire screen. Early games (Pinball, Donkey Kong, etc) were single-screen. Balloon Fight used a trick to make it seem like the screen was scrolling (actually, dots were moving across the screen). Super Mario Bros (1) was one of the earliest games to have a special memory mapper chip inside the cartridge to allow basic scrolling (you can't even go backward). There were lots and lots of different mapper chips and Super Mario Bros. 3 had one of the most advanced.
This discussion has been going on for a looong time and no one ever mentioned "overscan."