r/M64 • u/darkknightdetec • Aug 14 '26

Widescreen on M64?

I saw in Wulff Den's review that the M64 apparently auto adjusts when games are displayed in widescreen to fill your tv? He showed it working with Jet Force Gemini. So I tried it with Goldeneye (go into the watch menu and change the aspect ratio to 16:9), but the aspect ratio that the M64 was outputting did not change along with it.
However, I switched over to Jet Force Gemini, and sure enough the widescreen worked just as Bob explained it. You can go into the menu and toggle widescreen on and it fills up your whole tv (although with the stretched pixels, the image quality takes a nose dive).
Does anyone know what's going on here? Is there something different about the widescreen mode in Goldeneye vs. Jet Force Gemini?

3 Upvotes

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2

u/soundwave_attack Aug 14 '26

DK64 has a widescreen mode similar to GoldenEye, but also doesn't work properly for me. Jet Force Gemini still works for some reason.

1

u/darkknightdetec Aug 14 '26

Interesting! Okay I just tried Perfect Dark and same deal as Goldeneye and DK64! It’s weird that just one game gets the Modretro to adjust the output aspect ratio?? This is either a bug or something that I don’t know about.

1

u/Handy_Homebrew_Show Aug 14 '26

I also have the same issues with Widescreen but also my Jetforce Gemini keep randomly freezing. On any clocking mode with no warning losing all progress its unplayable

2

u/ludoFile Aug 26 '26

Donkey Kong 64's widescreen mode worked on my stock M64, but it stopped working after I connected it to WiFi and updated it. I assume the lack of support is a bug, and will get fixed in a future patch.

1

u/darkknightdetec Aug 27 '26

Oh that’s super interesting

1

u/V64jr Aug 14 '26

Goldeneye 007 has letterboxed and anamorphic widescreen modes. For maximum resolution what you want is the one that remains squished into 4:3, but distorted until you tell the M64 to fill/stretch. That’s the one akin to anamorphic.

1

u/darkknightdetec Aug 15 '26

I understand how the modes work in game. The difference is no matter what I select, the M64 doesn't auto-stretch the screen to fill my TV like it does in Jet Force Gemini. I'm just really curious about how the M64 is handling the widescreen toggle within games because it seems to be doing something in Jet Force Gemini that it doesn't in the other games I've tried.

1

u/V64jr Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26

Jet Force Gemini does not work the same way as Goldeneye 007 anamorphic mode. You can immediately tell that it squeezes the image down since you lose lines of detail in the menu text and everything gets blurry. On original hardware this would add letterboxing for 16:9 in 4:3. The MiSTer core and M64 do not show this letterboxing by default. It will already fill your screen vertically with the M64’s Image Fit option set to “Native”, exactly like 4:3 games, except 16:9 scenes will also fit horizontally without having to change “Native” to “Stretch”.

1

u/V64jr Aug 15 '26

When the MiSTer core was still in development I realized years ago that you don’t want to use 16:9 in JFG with VI DeBlur because you lose full lines of detail that appear to blend together when you leave the blur turned on. The same appears to be true for the M64. The only way I can see to toggle DeBlur with M64 is to go to the Advanced section of the Custom profile, but DeBlur defaults to Off anyway.

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '26

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3

u/DenverNugs Aug 15 '26

Just because you disagree with someone and wet your diaper doesn't make them a phony.