Question

I’m interested in know how is the right way to mimic the low resolution of the older games (like Atari 2600) in OpenGL to do a fps game. I imagine the best way to do it is writing the buffer into a texture, put onto a quad and display it to the screen resolution.

Take a look of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ELRv06sa-c, for example (great game!)

Any advice, help or sample-code will be welcome.

Answer 1

I think the best way to do it would be like you said, render everything into a low-res texture (best done using FBOs) and then just display the texture by drawing a sceen-sized quad (of course using GL_NEAREST as magnification filter for the texture). Maybe you can also use glBlitFramebuffer for copying directly from the low-res FBO into the high-res framebuffer, although I don’t know if you can copy directly into the default framebuffer (the displayed one) this way.

EDIT: After looking up the specification for framebuffer_blit it seems you can just copy from the low-res FBO into the high-res default framebuffer using glBlitFramebuffer(EXT/ARB). This might be faster than using a texture mapped quad as it completely bypasses the vertex-fragment-pipeline (although this would have been a simple one). And another advantage is that you also get the low-res depth and stencil buffers if needed and can this way render high-res content on top of the low-res background which might be an interesting effect. So it would happen somehow like this:

generate FBO with low-res renderbuffers for color and depth (and stencil)
...
glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, lowFBO);
render_scene();
glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
glBlitFramebuffer(0, 0, 640, 480, 0, 0, 1024, 768, 
    GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT [| GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT], GL_NEAREST);