Technical question re: FOA graphics and 640x300 game screens

[chapter11studios]

I've been playing around with doing a little game in the FoA style. I want, like FoA, for the game screens to be 640x300 (excluding the LucasArts GUI area). Anyway, I was looking at this tutorial over at the FoY website (http://www.barnettcollege.com/tutorial1.htm) and the author says he does all his screens at 320x150, even though (if I recall correctly) the game would run at twice that resolution.

So, my somewhat stupid question is... why do the screens at 320x150 and then enlarge them, rather than just doing them at 640x300 to begin with? What's the benefit?

Thanks!

[Gilbert]

Because FOA was not a 640x400 hi-res game, it only used 320x200.

If you really want to use that style, you may just make your game 320x200 (or 320x240 if you don't want to mess with non-square pixels) so there's no need to scale up the backgrounds.