low resolution in OpenGL to mimic older games

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);