A still image drawn behind the game, filling whatever the letterbox or
pillarbox leaves over -- the trick vertical shmups use on horizontal displays,
where the dead space carries artwork so it reads as designed rather than as a
limitation. MAME calls the same idea bezel artwork.
Drawn across the whole drawable before the game quad, which is simpler and
safer than filling two margin strips: no margin arithmetic, it covers pillarbox
and letterbox alike, and the frame paints over the centre.
The reason this is the right shape and present_edge_fill was not: edge fill
stretches one edge COLUMN of the live frame across the margin. That suits a flat
menu backdrop and turns track geometry into horizontal smears, so it needs to
know whether the current frame is a menu -- a question it answers with
force_4_3, which is only ever set by the widescreen path. A still image has no
such question. It looks the same in a race and in a menu, which is the point.
Loaded after the GL context exists (the first attempt sat next to tex_pack_init,
which runs before the window, so g_gl_active was false and it silently never
loaded). Decoded with stb_image, already linked for the HD texture pack. A
relative path resolves against the disc directory, matching the pack convention,
so artwork can sit beside the disc.
Verified on a 7680-wide maximised window with 4:3 content: margins that were
pure black now carry the image on both sides, with the frame untouched in the
middle.
Known limits: the image is stretched to the drawable, so an aspect that does not
match the window will distort (cover-crop is a small follow-up), and this has
only been exercised in 4:3 pillarbox, not with the widescreen mod active.
For WipEout 3 the team wallpapers by MotorcycleEmptiness
(awesome-wipeout.github.io) suit this exactly; the shipped default is a
placeholder gradient used to verify the path, not final art.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tetrisgm
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