Running 800 x 600 on widescreen

[RPatrick]

I am considering going to a widescreen monitor and am wondering how it will handle running an older game on it. If the game is running something like 800 x 600, when it is displayed on the widescreen, what happens ?

Is it scaled up disproportionately to make everything short and fat ? Does it automatically keep the correct aspect ratio ? Does it display black bars on the side ? Is there a place where I can direct it to use the correct aspect ratio with black bars ?

Thank you.

 

[roid450]

everything will look widened and fatter on a widescreen at 800x600

 

[Jest3r]

It doesn't look very good at all unfortunately. I was a huge Diablo 2 fan back when it came out in 2000, and it plays at 800 x 600. Well 8 years later I tried to play it full screen on a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor and it looked absolutely awful. I ended up playing the game in a windowed mode, which was more enjoyable.

 

[Goldfish4209]

In CCC you can set centered timings, which will keep everything at the same resolution in a box in the center, or you can blow it up at the same aspect ratio. I dunno what nvidia/intel graphics do.

 

[RPatrick]

Thanks for the comments.

So to run a game at it's intended screen size, either :

- run it in a window and manually size the window to make it look right

- go into a configuration manager and set it up to run the game at the correct aspect ratio, I assume leaving a black area around the image. That sounds best, but I am not familiar with what CCC is. I assume this is something loaded with the video card driver ? Is this sort of tweaking available with most setups or do I need to get a specific video card for this ?

 

[Piuc2020]

Catalyst Control Center.

It's basically the control panel of your card.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Jest3r
It doesn't look very good at all unfortunately. I was a huge Diablo 2 fan back when it came out in 2000, and it plays at 800 x 600. Well 8 years later I tried to play it full screen on a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor and it looked absolutely awful. I ended up playing the game in a windowed mode, which was more enjoyable.

That's odd. If you have an option to maintain aspect ratio, 800x600 should have perfect 1 to 4 pixel scaling. If its stretched to fill the whole panel horizontally as well, then yeah, that would look bad. The monitor's scaling usually looks bad when its forced to make guesses between pixels, but there is none of that going on in this case. Are you sure you just didn't remember how low of a resolution 8x6 really was? I know I get that all the time.

Anyway, a handful of monitors that few people own have options to control 1:1 or aspect ratio scaling within them. If you have one, well, then you're all set.

If you don't, you still have some options as long as you have DVI or another digital interface connecting your monitor.

If that is the case, both ATI and nvidia have options within the drivers.

For ATI, it took them forever to implement, but starting with catalyst 8.3? x1xxx cards and above can be told to use 1:1 centered or scale while maintaining aspect ratio. I've had good luck with this, its worked great for me.

For Nvidia, they have broken this feature multiple times. Last I heard, it was fixed for most people. For myself, whatever nvidia's implementation is just plain will not work with my viewsonic widescreen. It seems only some monitors work with their implementation, based on a good deal of testing and research on my part. I eventually just gave up and sidegraded to an ATI card. They may have fixed this by now, but at this point I no longer care personally!

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: PingSpike

Originally posted by: Jest3r
It doesn't look very good at all unfortunately. I was a huge Diablo 2 fan back when it came out in 2000, and it plays at 800 x 600. Well 8 years later I tried to play it full screen on a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor and it looked absolutely awful. I ended up playing the game in a windowed mode, which was more enjoyable.

That's odd. If you have an option to maintain aspect ratio, 800x600 should have perfect 1 to 4 pixel scaling. If its stretched to fill the whole panel horizontally as well, then yeah, that would look bad. The monitor's scaling usually looks bad when its forced to make guesses between pixels, but there is none of that going on in this case. Are you sure you just didn't remember how low of a resolution 8x6 really was? I know I get that all the time.

Anyway, a handful of monitors that few people own have options to control 1:1 or aspect ratio scaling within them. If you have one, well, then you're all set.

If you don't, you still have some options as long as you have DVI or another digital interface connecting your monitor.

If that is the case, both ATI and nvidia have options within the drivers.

For ATI, it took them forever to implement, but starting with catalyst 8.3? x1xxx cards and above can be told to use 1:1 centered or scale while maintaining aspect ratio. I've had good luck with this, its worked great for me.

For Nvidia, they have broken this feature multiple times. Last I heard, it was fixed for most people. For myself, whatever nvidia's implementation is just plain will not work with my viewsonic widescreen. It seems only some monitors work with their implementation, based on a good deal of testing and research on my part. I eventually just gave up and sidegraded to an ATI card. They may have fixed this by now, but at this point I no longer care personally!

sorry, but monitor will still try to scale it and it will look awful like every other non-native resolution.... been there, done that.

 

[apoppin]

if you run it with centered timings, you will get a perfect - and very tiny - 8x6 screen - surrounded by black bars


[imo] forget old games .. or buy an inexpensive CRT just for them [as well as set up a win98 box], if you are nostalgic and want no problems with running them