How did you guys manage playing RE4 at all until the 360/Steam versions? It was either black bars or the equivalent of a TV's zoom feature until then.
Edit: Or Beyond Good & Evil.
Yeah if you were only a GameCube owner that was. While the GameCube only had a 4:3 presentation with some of the most funky way of bordering the screen I've ever seen the PlayStation 2 version allowed for a 16:9 aspect ratio using the same internal rendering resolution just pushing the borders to the overscan area. Now on a CRT TV this doesn't matter so much as the image would be scaled properly and how the phosphors display the image is miles better than modern day backlighting on LCD/LED and even Plasma screens (although PenTile OLED is pretty damn close, the screen sizes are still a tad too small). Come the SourceNext PC release there was the ability to render at a true 16:9 aspect ratio, albeit hidden within the .ini files though this was give a front end option via the 1.1 patch.
When RE4 came to the Wii in '07 just slightly after the first PC release this maintained the GameCube's renderer with lighting effects and more complex geometry but also brought the extra from the PS2 release, along with the ability to frame the image at 16:9. Roughly about towards the end of 2010 the emulator Dolphin, after a period of being Open Source started to gain support for Wii titles and had quite a bit of momentum from contributors and soon DirectX functionality as well as booting commercial games was making blinding progress. Towards the end of '10 and the start of '11 Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition was playable from start to finish and due to having support for various internal rendering resolution could be played at a mind boggling 4 times at first and then 6 time the original resolution (GPU power permitting). This was all before the ports to PS3 and 360 came out later in 2011 which when they did still were not up to what could be achieved on Dolphin.
Now the main issue that persisted with every release thus far was they were all tied to a 30hz update for what I can assume is various reasons. There were some mods on the initial PC version to unlock this but due to how game logic and such were tied to this there was some funky side effects. (leonjetskiposespeedoff.jpg). Thankfully all has been resolved with the most recent release on PC which allows for a 60hz update (which after a few teething problems runs really nice now) and official support for arbitrary 16:9 resolutions and unofficial support for 16:10, 21:9 and even 48:9 aspect ratios. It's been a long road but it's steady improved one aspect or another with each subsequent release (although I wouldn't call the last gen versions progress as Dolphin did and still does a way better job that they do but hey it's not an official release).
Same thing with Metal Gear Solid 3 to be fair which I was a bit peeved about being a 30hz game and most of the time less than that. But Subsistence fixed some issues with the game whilst still having problems framerate due to hardware limitations. PCSX2 even in the early stages could run it better than a PS2 if you had a decent PC and offered 16:9 games resolutions via pnach files or hex editing the loader (though cutscenes and codec calls look really funky) but could render the game 4 times higher than the native PS2 output. Eventually when the HD Collection came out MGS3 was finally a 60hz game (still with some hideous drops in places) with a retooled 16:9 presentation alas at only 1280x720. Maybe one day MGS3 might make the shift to PC and go one up over the HD Collection on last gens consoles and really hopefully allow the game to sing then.
So in a rather long winded way what I'm trying to say is while a great game might still be great on the gameplay front despite what compromises there have been with technical or hardware limitations there is always room for improvement on the performance front (providing the game hasn't been locked down in silly ways on PC). And as long as it doesn't mess with how the game is played can only make the game a better experience.
