Something I always wondered at was why NES games appear in fullscreen on a TV but always in a rectangle on an emulator. When I use the fullscreen option of any emulator, the result is always horrible looking and pixels are not evenly spaced out. Thick "F"s and thin "T"s I see. Scrolling is extremely ugly in full screen mode. But in a TV, the scroling is smooth and the picture does not look distored. After comparisons, I determined that the TV did stretch the images. How does the NES put a full screen image on a TV? I think it relies on the TV's imprecision at plotting precise pixels, so everything just sort of blends together nicely. Also, since the NES PPU is directly driving the TV circuitry, it can tell the beam exactly how long to draw each pixel for, creating an even stretch. Is it possible to do such a stretch on a computer monitor? Probably not. Emulators are run through Windows and other OSes, increasingly taking advantage of Direct X. In the old days, they would use VGA and VESA modes. These OSes control the video hardware and do not allow the programmer to hit the hardware to manipulaste the monitor's scanning beam. Accurate CRTs and LCDs do not help this problem one bit. (A digital RGB monitor would do wonders here.) So, unless the API allows the programmer to set the full-screen resolution to something out of the ordinary, like 1024x896, then the gamer is out of luck.