https://ibb.co/f6Pra8
From Shadow Hearts to the Sonic CD remake to Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, developers cannot align a texel to the pixel grid to save their lives. So I get to go and waste my time trying to reverse engineer Sonic CD remake, chopping it down the the bare-bones in an attempt the unearth some hopeful innate goodness therein. Words. The plain-text shader programs contained within the executable were promising, until I realized that Christian Pimpleface (come on, as if you didn't think it) (that hair is probably not doing him any favors) is just mish-mashing some points which are floating. Mis-configuring DirectX. In any case, omitting a 1:1 PAR option with integer scaling at any resolution and zero filtering is a sin.
Everyone cares about anti-aliasing (does "aliasing" technically exist if the source isn't actually sampled? [The answer is "no."]), but no one cares about the more subtle thing: motion fidelity/resolution/clarity/image stability/whatever you want to call it.
In 3D games, it's the 2D menus that tend to suffer this non-identity scaling distortion. Problems that didn't exist in the good old days because developers didn't generally have the power to screw it up. "Spiderman."
Watch, next time they'll include the practically-zero-effort-for-huge-gain feature "black frame insertion." Nope, management won't understand.
Let me guess: Sonic Mania has the exact same problem, as do all Retro Engine games. I can't wait to be annoyed by this if I decide to discard money on the physical release.
By the way, I care about this remake for the steady 60 FPS, increased field of view (those damn stages), and looping and elongated music. Since no PAR, I won't play it.
By the way2, I used Cheat Engine as guide to eliminate the window stretching factor, in case you are curious. Selecting 640x480 gives you a content area height of 500 pixels. Shocking, I know. But is it really surprising at this point? So search for 500, not 480.
But you're right: I am the only person in the world who notices. I am also the only person in the world who cares.
Breath of the Wild suffers from this too, of course. It stares you in the face each time you scroll through your inventory, for example. The credits text exhibits the signature shimmer. It's an awful game in general, though (opinion), so I suggest you spend your life on more artistically valuable things. (I wasted my time so you don't have to. Look how virtuous I am.)