Spectrum Computing

For analog PAL, you have WSS signaling that could be used to indicate 4:3 aspect ratio or a "zoom the middle" mode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen_signaling

But from a practical point of view, an interesting option would be to stretch JUST the border area.
An example with an image featuring border effects:

(original here https://zxart.ee/eng/authors/d/diver/me ... -defender/)

Emulators could do this, eventually as some sort of filter.
You get proper proportions and a filled screen with no cropping.

1024MAK wrote: ↑Thu Dec 20, 2018 7:16 pm It would be fun if a suitable FPGA device could be configured to use two normal ZX Spectrum screen areas side by side. So say the default “normal” screen on the left side of a widescreen video display and say, the 128k machines second screen area on the right hand side of the widescreen video display...

A two-screen display is actually achieveable with current hardware. The SPECTRA device can be set to display the shadow screen, whilst the Spectrum it's attached to continues to show its ordinary screen. ZX-HD could do it with a fairly simple software mod.

What I keep asking for is an emulator that could do this, or an emulator that could expose its memory to another process (e.g. be able to connect on a debug socket and periodically request 6912 bytes from address 16384) and that process could then render the other screen. This would be to allow development of a game that uses two display screens.

Although I guess what you're asking for is to align the two screens without a border in between on one monitor; I'd like to see the two screens go to separate monitors.

As for 16:9, why not just expand the normal screen, scrap the top and bottom borders, and leave the side ones?