Atari Style Gamegirl Sprites

[Vipershark]

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I've always been interested in how the 2600 handles graphics.

In other words, the double-wide pixels. I've always wondered if it was possible to display things at their correct aspect ratio, rather than the 2x1 wide stretch thing that it does.

Would this be correct?


The 2600's screen resolution is locked to 160 for width, though the vertical screen resolution can technically be infinite. However, due to television sizes and how the hardware works, the "official" resolution is commonly noted as 160x192.
You'll notice that the screen is taller than it is wide, but the 2600 uses double-wide pixels.
Because of this, the screen resolution actually appears to be 320x192 when viewed on a tv.

But then I took a look at Sengir's Gamegirl sprite above. Each pixel is 5x3, rather than 1x1. Meaning that we're not necessarily working with double-wide pixels at all.
Since we're converting 1x1 to 5x3 rather than 2x1, the screen resolution instead appears to be 800x576.

I wanted to see if it was possible to display an SMB Mario sprite using the 2600. This is pretty much just guesswork (and as such, probably incorrect), but it makes sense to me.

Just displaying Mario at 1x1 scale won't work due to hardware limitations and the amount of colors in a certain area. But if you were to upscale it, it would work.

In order to make 1x1 images display correctly on the 2600 screen instead of stretched horizontally, each pixel needs to be upscaled to 15x15 (or in the 2600's terms, each 5x3 pixel needs to be arranged into a 3x5 rectangle to form a 15x15 square) to correct the aspect ratio and make the images appear to be 1x1. This obviously uses up A LOT of screen space.

Would this even be feasible on the hardware? I'm thinking in terms of converting a computer's 1x1 pixels to the atari's 5x3, rather than the hardware on the 2600 drawing the image. I'm probably completely wrong, but I'm not sure.