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Making Old Games Look Good On Modern LCDs?
75th Trombone writes "I'm a fan of several old PC games — the Myst series, StarCraft, Diablo, etc — with 2D graphics that run at a low, fixed resolution. These games all look horrible on modern LCDs. If you run them at their original resolution, they're tiny, and if you upscale them they get all sorts of blurry, pixelly smoothing artifacts. My ideal goal is to run these games at exactly double their original resolution — running 640 x 480 games at 1280 x 960, for example — so that each original pixel takes up exactly a 2 x 2 block of screen pixels, yielding graphics that are perfectly crisp and decently big. I've tried arcane settings in graphics card drivers (new and old), I've tried forcing the OS to run at a given resolution, and I've tried PowerStrip, all to no avail. Short of writing a new, modern engine for my favorite games, is there a reasonable solution to this problem?"
There have been many community-supported graphical overhauls of classic games — feel free to share any you know to work well.
Problem solved. http://www.pricewatch.com/monitors/
A quick google search turned up the following for Starcraft. You probably want to do a bit of in-depth research before running these binaries... they may be buggy, fake, etc
One way might be to play Starcraft in windowed mode:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=72621
Or use a "high resolution" mod. There seem to be a lot of defunct mods like this that probably never worked too well, but the first link might be worth a shot:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=97122
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16643
http://freenet-homepage.de/ToiletGame/download.html
http://www.gamethreat.net/forums/user-downloads/38147-resolution-hack-release-4-0-a.html
I haven't tried it myself, but what about virtualization? VirtualBox has an addition that lets you run windows at any size you want (in windowed mode).
For Myst anyways, RealMyst impressed me. Actual 3d models of the puzzles, so you walk where you want. Totally playable in my opinion, and they managed to make it not distract much from the puzzles and art of the thing.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
your problem is you are not looking old enough, try runing DOS games in Dosbox, nice scaling options there.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Gaming_with_Blackbars_(Pillarboxing)
Well, for DOS games, DOSbox can do a number of different scaling modes. From the Wiki: normal: nearest-neighbour scaling (big square pixels) scan: like normal, but with horizontal black lines tv: like scan, but with darker versions of data instead of black lines advmame: smooths corners and removes jaggies from diagonal lines advinterp: identical to advmame rgb: simulates the phosphors on a dot trio CRT As for old windows games, I hope to hear something else. One last note, Myst was re-released as a "Masterpiece Edition" with higher resolution re-rendered graphics.
Bork Bork Bork!!
A mod was released for these games which pretty much handles higher resolution. It does that not by up-scaling but rather by showing you a larger section of the hand-drawn pixel-perfect game map, keeping the original crispness.
The mod can be found here.
Nice example screenshots for Planescape: Torment here.
^_^
A number of emulators already have good algorithms for scaling fixed-pixel images that preserve the sharpness while removing aliasing. Wikipedia of course has a page on Pixel art scaling algorithms. The 2 best ones out there are 2xSal and hqx.
The problem is that these only work within emulators that implement the algorithms. This clearly does not work for something like StarCraft. Graphics drivers (both ATI and NV) already have options to scale between virtual and physical resolutions. The ideal solution would be for them to offer different scaling algorithms that can be picked - standard bilinear or a modified one for classic games. Everything "just works" then and you get nice graphics.
I'm not going to hold my breath on ATI or NV ever officially implementing this in their release drivers. However I'm wondering how hard it would be to add an option like this to one of the open source linux X drivers, or maybe even to Wine/DosBox. Also for windows isn't there a way to intercept graphics calls (along the lines of what FRAPs does)? Would it be possible to create a wrapper program that intercepts all the graphics calls and adds a scaling algorithm after each frame is drawn?
TFA has examples exclusively involving line art and that's pretty much the worst case for standard upscaling techniques. The scaling technique you're been searching for is hqx. Too bad there isn't any way to get it.
If you use Linux, try a screen magnifier, like the "Enhanced Zoom Desktop" plugin for Compiz. I did this with a couple older games, and it did an admirable job, though it's not a perfect solution. Zoom in until the game fills as much of the monitor as possible, center it, and hit the zoom lock key combination.
This may look and/or work better than trying to run things full-screen, definitely works better if you're using a multi-monitor setup, and lets you scale up picky windowed games that won't resize.
"A group at Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a fun little open source program to emulate the CRT effects to make old Atari games look like they originally did when played on modern LCD's and digital displays. Things like color bleed, ghosting, noise, etc. are reproduced to give a more realistic appearance."
From Slashdot story Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs.
I dunno, on my 1920x1080 display old games look pretty good using Nvidia (driver) scaling (fixed aspect ratio, scale to fit vertically). Maybe just because its sufficiently high res, scaling artefacts are not particularly noticeable.
Did you try looking at Good Old Games?
I get all my "oldies" from there, they look good, well just as good as they looked on your old CRT.
Sylvain
Hey, there are people out there who'd be happy to just have you take the clunky thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are other problems with playing old games on newer computers - depending on how they handle timing, you'll find that the
Space Invaders zoom down and kick your ass
in ways that they just didn't at the original speeds.
Maybe virtualization can give you a way to slow them down?
Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I would also add Heroes of Might & Magic 3 to the list, one of my favorite games which runs at fixed 800x600 and that looks blurry on my Lenovo L220x. However there is no widescreen solution for that game that I'm aware of.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Your LCD must have horrible hardware scaling. 640x480 looks good on my 22" widescreen LCD.
There are CRT emulators for LCDs. They recreate those nice fuzzy round pixels.
For Infinity engine-based RPGs — the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, plus Planetscape Torment —, you can use the Gibberlings 3 widescreen mod. I have also been lucky with Arcanum, since Terra Arcanum hosts a high resolution patch that works perfectly.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Use a software video scaler.
Or a hardware scaler :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_scaler
If you're after Myst in particular, there are a number of redone, later editions that support better resolutions and modern operating systems. Check Amazon.
My favorite is RealMyst, which is a complete 3d recreation of the original game.
Have a look at this list of recreated game engines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine_recreation
I have a Samsung 191T that I bought for my wife many years ago. One of my test criteria was that it should display well at other-than-native (1280x1024) resolution. Star Craft looks quite good on it. I recently returned a 1920x1200 LCD because it couldn't even handle 800x600 (literally complaining in a big box, center screen, that the signal was out of range while displaying the image).
It looks as though LCDs have become like "winmodem"s or super cheap ink-jet printers, which rely on the host system to do anything useful with an image, in order to cut the price to a minimum.
Anyone know of an LCD (particularly 24" 1920x{1080,1200} that isn't junk at other than native resolution?
I've seen that some GPUs have scaling drivers; maybe that would work?
http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms
I remember seeing a program which was designed to mimic all the imperfections of CRT displays. This was a main slashdot article something this year.
Obviously I don't expect the questioner to have seen every slashdot article, but if someone remembers it that may be of help.
Simply set your desktop to that resolution then. Problem solved.
The games you are asking work well in Windows 98 so you can install Windows 98 on Dosbox just like any other dos application and then install Starcraft, Diablo, etc. on this "virtual Windows" and let Dosbox do the scaling for you. For Dosbox, it's just only another app so I don't expect any problems with the scaling. I am not sure about the performance but it's worth a try. (You can also try this with windows 95 for better performance.)
I don't think there are many games released for the Sun platform. And those that exist probably run just as well with Linux on a normal PC. No need for expensive hardware. :-)
And BTW, what's that "outside" you are speaking of?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm the author of Chocolate Doom, which deliberately maintains the low resolution of the original game, but has to run in modern, high resolution screen modes. One of the problems with Doom is that the graphics are designed for non-square pixel modes (the original game ran in 320x200, stretched to a 4:3 aspect ratio screen), so there's the double problem of having to scale everything up to work in a square pixel screen.
I developed a technique that does a blocky scale-up, interpolating the edges of the blocky "pixels" appropriately, so that you end up with a fairly decent looking result. I don't know if this is useful to the developers of programs like DOSBox, but the code's there if anyone wants it.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
To get old games into "Windowed Mode" I often run them in a VM
These games are old enough that a VM can handle their graphics card needs & the underlying CPU can run them through a VM at at least the original CPU speed.
I've heard that if you inhale some vespene, you won't care that the screen is a bit blurry.
Heh, this story could almost have written by me. It's the reason I held out so long on getting an LCD instead, and why I have my beloved Samsung CRT sitting still in the loft.
I was actually quite surprised that ZSNES at 640x480 fullscreen mode, whilst there is a small noticeable interpolation effect, looked quite good. Perfectly playable once you have the graphics being displayed... I almost forget I'm not on a CRT.
What has been a problem, though, is fast movement. This seems to be a problem inherent to LCDs. :-( Try emulating Sonic 1 (MegaDrive/Genesis) on a CRT vs an LCD. On the CRT, no problems. On the LCD, the rings in particular look fainter, and darker... well, everything seems to look a bit darker as you're running. I guess this is a small form of ghosting, and I don't think there's any way to get round it on an LCD. Any tips would be appreciated. But, I'd say that if you wanna play Sonic or the like, use a CRT.
By the way, I'm using an NEC MultiSync EA191M.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Here's a 3DFX Glide wrapper for Diablo 2: http://www.svenswrapper.de/english/index.html/
It has windowed mode, desktop resolution, aspect ratio correction, 32 bit rendering, bilinear filtering, super sampling, and shader gamma to name a few.
> My ideal goal is to run these games at exactly double their original resolution — running 640 x 480 games at 1280 x 960, for example — so that each original pixel takes up exactly a 2 x 2 block of screen pixels, yielding graphics that are perfectly crisp and decently big. I've tried arcane settings in graphics card drivers (new and old), I've tried forcing the OS to run at a given resolution, and I've tried PowerStrip, all to no avail. Short of writing a new, modern engine for my favorite games, is there a reasonable solution to this problem?"
Just use a proper modeline, It's as simple as this. That's the way I use to watch YT videos on my older PC. BTW, for a 1280x1024 monitor, using 640x512 probably will lead to a better image, since it's an exact (sub)multiple.
Well, easier if you use Linux, that is. Or a Mac (which I don't know).
YMMMV.
Just an aside, if you really want good quality on LCDs with lower resolutions, you might want to use an OpenGL-supporting card (like NVidia). Never tried, but there are settings (in the app "nvidia-settings", duh!) which control antialiasing and disable modification by applications. Someone more knowledgeable could lend a hand here and say whether this is viable.
This is an interesting thing to do later... ;-P
Changing the resolution that the game uses for rendering beats upscaling. This is sometimes possible using some clever hex-editing and disassembling. There are several things to look for; for one thing, find any occurrence of the screen resolution. Also, you will need to know whether the game is based on VESA, DirectX or whatever. For VESA, the INT 10h calls are what you seek.
Here are some notes of how I did it for MechWarrior 2:
http://www.mech2.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=213
The Wikipedia article on VESA BIOS has links to the various VESA APIs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions
Yes, you need to know about hex-editing and disassembling, but this nerd business. And you may want to consult your lawyer on whether this is legal in your part of the world.
Try squinting?
...IPS monitor. If gamers would quit lapping up all those fast, cheap TN crap monitors and start holding out for IPS or even high end PVA monitors those willing to invest in quality products would risk their dollars on advancing the tech. That's just how the market works, the more crap that gets bought the more crap that gets made.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
A bit off topic, but the nfgworld.com story was posted by someone whose avatar is a topless anime character, which is most likely not safe for work for the majority of slashdot's readers (whether you agree it should be or not).
Luckily I'm at home, but a warning would be nice.
Do you remember back in the days of 386 computers, when they had a "Turbo" button on the case? I can remember having to turn off Turbo mode to play some games that otherwise ran impossibly fast.
Many cases also had a two display that changed from "16" to "8" (or something similar) when the Turbo button was toggled. This was supposed to represent a change in the clock speed, but what really happened was that cache memory was disabled to make the system run slow.
My kids think it's hilarious that we used to have a button to make the computer run slow.
I've not used it myself, but if you were going for a VM solution, then D3D should enable 3D acceleration anyway.
http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
Scale2x seems to be a good approach
http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/
It's called xanalogtv, it's also used by the Pong and Apple2 hacks
Heh. IPS for games. Talk about slow.
See title, my monitor with native res 1280x1024. I was playing StarCraft right before I connected to Slashdot and it looks perfectly crisp and clear. The problem is probably that your monitor has a crappy firmware scaler, it's a bit late to say "buy a better monitor" but your best bet is probably some sort of software scaler like the one in the nVidia control panel (which looks crap compared to my monitor's firmware scaler IMHO but would probably be an improvement for you, ATi should have something similar).
Right now I'm playing Fallout 2 with a high rez patch on a 22" LCD. I've also got a widescreen mod installed for Torment, but it works with any Infinity Engine game.
There is a war going on for your mind.
because of the DRM. As a longtime fan of the Myst series of games (one of the type that played every one of them from beginning to end without spoilers) I ran out and got RealMyst the moment it came out. The interface was fantastic; it was twice as immersive as the original and just as transparent. But it took me a while to get there.
As your typical technojunk collector, I had about three optical drives connected to my main PC at the time and about another four or five or varying speeds and burning technologies laying around collecting dust. NONE of them worked with the RealMYST DRM (skips and blips or wouldn't run at all).
I finally had to go to Computer Gaming World or some such site and download a noCD crack to make it work, but only after I'd wasted a day popping my case and trying it out with every friggin' optical drive. That started the practice (almost forgotten now, I never play games any longer) of just getting the crack immediately for any game I bought, without even bothering to try to play the game uncracked, which lasted several years.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
face-to-face with an actual person ;)
Your idea sounds intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your news letter. What is this actual person you speak of?
got a dell s-ips that does 24bit colour, 22" for about $450 au. not a bad price. it would be cheaper at todays price (i would expect)
i strongly agree with the parent sentiment
It's all firmware controlled these days, anyway. So hack your monitor to teach it new tricks like displaying video in a subset of the actual LCD pixels available. Blog your results with code.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
[Hqx is] used in emulators such as Nestopia, bsnes, ZSNES, Snes9x, FCE Ultra and many more.
Nestopia - GLP
bsnes - GLP
ZSNES - GLP
FCE Ultra - GLP
Looks like lots of ways to get the code.
This is going to sound weird, but if your version of Windows supports it, Remote Desktop may solve the problem. You can specify the size of the RD window, and a full-screen application running on the server's remote session will treat that as the maximum display resolution (meaning your graphics card should be able to stretch StarCraft to a 1280x960 RD window happily enough).
Technically this even works for 3d-accelerated games (the DirectX commands are sent across the network and executed on the client's GPU) but for something as old as StarCraft that won't even matter.
The catch is that client (non-server) versions of Windows don't allow you to RD from computer X into computer X again, so you'd need to have another computer somewhere with StarCraft installed, preferably located on a LAN.
Virtualization should also work just fine, especially since there's no risk of 3D acceleration stuff being a problem with games that old. If you have Win7 (Business or higher), you don't even need to install a second copy of Windows yourself; just install Virtual XP mode, have it start in a window (rather than the rootless mode usually used) and set the window's size appropriately.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I don't know about the other games but D2 can handle higer resolutions and scaling with the wrapper at
http://www.svenswrapper.de/english/index.html
Play Zork, then you won't have that problem ;)
Two options:
Fix it at your video card:
Make sure your video card supports video scaling for your monitor. I know for a while, I could tell my nvidia card to handle the scaling to my display for out of scale screens so that it would either stretch, full, or not scale at all and still display using the best native resolution of the monitor by adding letterboxing (in most cases around the whole screen). The video card would thus override the scalar in the monitor as a result.
Fix it at your video:
Buy a screen that allows you to turn off the internal scalar. I know my current TV allows me to do this and at least one of my Dell's did it. I think it was my 2004 24" model.
In either scenario, you'll likely want to buy something that doesn't have a high resolution so you're not staring at a postage stamp on a 24" monitor. I find 17" screens at 1280x1024 are best for the older games.
Forget your vespene, WE NEED MORE MINERALS!
I fail to see how a different LCD technology, that suffers from the same limitations in non-native resolution scaling that all LCD monitors suffer, is the answer to the problem. The colors may look a bit better, but since at least 2 of the games discussed in the post used 8-bit color that doesn't seem to be the sticking point.
Alternately, why should gamers settle for an inferior experience using a slower technology, which is arguably premature for that market, and pay twice the price for the privilege? That's just how the market works, supply and demand, and gamers just don't seem to demand slow response times.
Some versions of VNC (UltraVNC?) do scaling. You could run over VNC at the desired resolution and just stretch the window.
does it look how you want if you turn the resolution on your own monitor down?
to make a 1x1 square become 2x2 you have to quadruple it's resolution...
Making your 640x480 a whooping 2560x1920
Much more than what most LCD screens offer...
I just loaded Windows 7 on my desktop, and I loaded up the old classics: Warcraft II BNE and Starcraft. I have a 22" widescreen LCD set to the native resolution at 1680x1050, but the games load up in the center of the screen in the regular aspect ratio without looking too grainy. Obviously, it's scaling the pixels so you can see each pixel without much effort, but both games run smooth and look great. My wife just got a new laptop as well (with Windows 7) and the games run the same on the laptop's widescreen, so I'm fairly confident that Windows 7 actually got something right!
The one thing that hasn't worked for me (but is not a bother) is the "BLIZZARD" logo at the beginning of the game has some funny colors mixed in, but who cares about that anyway?
//TODO: create a signature
Another World doesn't have these problems, because all of the art is vector based. It's too bad more things aren't future proofed by design.
I play many games on my IPS screen. Are you speaking from experience or just making it up?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
For Starcraft and Diablo 2 you can register your keys at us.battle.net to get access to the latest versions of those titles available for download for Mac and PC for free.
The best I've found is either... a) windowed mode or b) set your video card (maybe in the bios) to disable scaling, so that you play it at the original resolution. It's small, but crisp...
There's also the smearing effect created by the old analog glass tube monitors/TVs which have NEVER been "well" replicated on modern LCDs(any type). Many OLD games for OLD systems relied on that effect to create a "better" (maybe color effects, etc.) overall image. I'd also hazard that with video it also provided a free smoothing filter. (I never really looked at this, so I'm pulling this one out of my --- but it seems likely.)
Another problem with LCDs is that sometimes the response time of the monitor's "pixels" still aren't quite up to every task -> ghosting, of course that MAY be useful for video... but not games...
The problem that I have with dosbox and it scalers & filters is that half the time that they don't seem to work(at all -- usually with a message about falling back to one of the normalQWRx methods), and coupled with that, that dosbox is just poorly documented or at least in the small amount of time that I spent looking up info on games/settings/etc. I usually turn up more forum hits than anything, and the few FAQs/dox are mostly useless.
OTOH I still have a nice 19" CRT Trinitron monitor, but have been lately thinking how nice it would be to replace it with a 19" or so LCD and get all that space back. (No interest in running multiple monitors even if I really had the room for them.)
You must construct additional pylons.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
1. Get Dosbox
2. Adjust the config file for a 2xhq filter plugin, set resolution.
3. Run game.
Anyone that's used emulators can tell you the HUGE difference a good quality filter can make for LCD gaming at low-res. Super 2XSAI or Super Eagle, for example, are well-known and awesome filters.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A lot of LCD screens have an option to center the raster at a 1:1 scale in the middle of the screen, which does make the display look a lot nicer, though tiny.
The new idea would be for it to center the largest integer scale of the raster that fits on the screen instead. Then your game display would look nice but be larger.
I would suspect it is trivial for the LCD to do this, probably easier than the current "blurry" scaling. And it could be a worthwhile feature some would pay for, such as you.
Repeat after me: A pixel is not a little square. CRT monitors reconstruct an image using something closer to a gaussian distribution, rather than a crisp rectangular one as you'd get if you simply doubled pixels. The graphics of games made when CRTs were common were made on CRTs and thus take advantage of this. The video game console emulation crowd has faced a similar issue, only there it's more than just a CRT; there's also the distortions introduced by the various composite video encoding schemes (color bleed, fringing, artifacts). You might think that removing these distortions would improve the image, but you have to realize that the artists viewed things on the same systems, and thus tailored the art to look good in those circumstances. It's sort of like a web page designer getting a page to look just right in a buggy browser, even though it looks all wrong in one with proper rendering; here you want the buggy browser, at least if you want to see the page as it was intended.
The thing that gets me is that a high-resolution LCD could horizontally display exactly what a Trinitron CRT did, as the vertical stripe phosphor pattern matches that on most LCDs. The scaling algorithm would need to simulate the blurred-edge electron beam and mixing between pixels. There would be some sub-pixel action too, as on a CRT.
It's your monitor's fault it looks bad, get a better monitor.
I have a big library of old games like that; I've been playing a lot of Civilization II lately without trouble.
Maybe, in the interest of "research", I could get my StarCraft CDs out again...
I have a 17" LCD; maybe the problem this story discusses is more pronounced with 19"s or 24"s.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
wine explorer /desktop=GAMENAME,1280x960 path/to/GAME.exe
And it has been used for at least a decade, if not longer. It is quite simple to implement in either hardware or software, and does the job reasonably well. Unlike some of the other algorithms mentioned, it requires no analysis of the rendered image and runs in constant time. You can read about it here.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Don't know if this has been covered or not, but I find most dos based games can be displayed rather well on your LCD's optimal (desktop) resolution using DosBox. The key is to edit several variables in the dosbox.conf file. Set "fullresolution" to your LCD's optimal resolution, set the "scaler = none" and then set "ouput = openglnb" so the output device is using opengl without bilinear filtering. This way the scaling capabilities of the opengl libraries and your video card are used (which usually amounts to "big large pixels") In this way you can still get the blocky dos look of the games and yet retain the crispness of your LCD.
Agreed.
I have a nice shiny new 1920 x 1080 LCD panel at home (wide screen, of course). I love this monitor for non-gaming stuff. High resolution and a nice, sharp display. However, trying to game on it is another problem. I am currently playing "Knights of the Old Republic II", and it does not have a single resolution setting that works for a wide-screen monitor.
The other bad thing is that the monitor, which is a Dell, always stretches out the display to fill the entire display up, even when it know that it should not -- who actually wants 1024 x 768 to be 16:9?
I found that I when using the DVI interface, I can choose "centered timing" in my Radeon driver. When I set KOTOR2 to 1280x1024, that works well enough to keep me happy. Unfortunately, "centered timing" does not work on an analog output, so that rules out using that setting when I have my netbook hooked up to the monitor (so much for re-playing Fallout 2 on the big monitor).
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Pixel ratio duplication looks horrible, but have no fear! Fortunately, there are scaling algorithms designed to make pixel art look good. Scale2X, 2xSal, Eagle and HQ2X/3X/4X are some examples.
Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms
Simple, but not great fix, disable Scaling in your graphics properties (nvidia or ATI, intel is too chad to both with scaling options)
will then just do a black box around the actual in game resolution, meaning you'll lose some screen size, but hey, it's better than playing with pixels that are 4x3 times the size they're supposed to be!
My laptop is 1280x800, at 14" WXGA is pretty much perfect for my eyes. I think a 1080 display would seem too small at this screensize. That aside, the 9100M drivers I have from nvidia won't scale for some reason. So 640x480 is pretty much letterboxed and tiny. Of course just about every windows game under the sun at least does 1024x768, so that isn't an issue, but games (KOTOR) that use video at a fixed resolution display tiny little youtube like videos. Bummer. The older 178 drivers worked better overall, but were a lot slower. The newer 185 series is great performance wise but scaling is now broken. It just uses the built-in scaler on the screen, which doesn't scale in windows as well. nforce has given me lots of trouble under windows 7, especially with the desktop I use at work. Anything hard drive intensive seems to slow the system to a grinding halt, but it works after a few minutes of disk thrashing. (The drive keeps checking out ok too, so imminent failure seems ruled out) Bad firmware on the drive? Copying a file to a usb HDD immediately results in a BSOD, but flash works ok. Anyone else out there with nforce720 based boards with headaches and windows 7??
zosxavius photography
Agreed, this thread is full of illiterate fools.
I resolved this exact problem by carefully selecting an LCD that does 1:1 pixel mapping. This means that if you feed it a 640x480 image, it will display 640x480 pixels in the middle of the screen and leave the rest blank. Ok, not ideal - you now have a fairly tiny image. On the plus side it looks exactly as it should.
But then you use a software scaler to multiply your image resolution by a whole number factor which results in a resolution which is still smaller than your screen resolution. In my case, the screen is 1920x1200, so I can multiply 640 x 480 exactly twice to get to 1280 x 960 and still have it fit within the screen. With lower resolution inputs you can sometimes multiply by a factor of 3 or 4.
End result: no, you don't get to use all 1920x1200 pixels of your kick arse modern 16:10 LCD - but that's never going to happen for really old games. But you DO get a nice sharp, big, scaled version of your game. And if you cast your mind back to the heady days of 14" CRT monitors you will realise that the image you are looking at is, if anything, bigger than it used to be. Play for 5 minutes and you forget that there is any black space around the edges of the screen, too.
The other big advantage of 1:1 pixel mapping is that if you buy, say, Modern Warfare 2 and find that your graphic card isn't quite up to it, you can drop it down from 1920x1200 to (say) 1600x1200 and 'buy back' a bit of image size to improve performance. Again, play for 5 minutes and you forget those edges of the screen are even there. Because it's an LCD and not a plasma or CRT, burn in isn't as much of a problem so this is all around quite a nice solution.
I suggest you check out BenQ 24" (or bigger) LCDs - cheap, well made, very fast, and some do 1:1 pixel mapping.
Read Pynchon.
DOSBox has various integer multiple scalers at 2x and 3x...options are listed in dosbox.conf but unfortunately generate a filter error for junk characters if I try to include them here. On the other hand, I don't think DOSBox is quite up to running Windows 3.1 well enough to run Win32 games. Getting close though.
But I think the general idea of running old low-res games in an emulator/virtual machine is probably a good way to control the resolution scaling. Run the game inside a window that is at an integer multiple of the original resolution, and then your full-screen resolution just has to be big enough to fit the window without being so hi-res that the window is too small. So maybe use WINE for those old windows games?
Since no-one seems to have provided a link to DOSBox, here you go:
http://www.dosbox.com/ OR
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/
We are the 198 proof..
try this: http://www.dosbox.com/
Old games like this run fine inside a VMWare VM with DirectX support.
Install the VM, install Windows in it, set the Vm resolution to whatever the size is you want (you can set a Vm res to ANYTHING by resizing the window), then launch the game in "full screen" on the VM.
I think the window manager is the best place to do this, not the display drivers or the game engines.
Mac OS X has a whole-screen zooming function, and probably the new X.org stuff too. Smoothing is configurable. Just start the game in a window, and have a black background around it. Then zoom in at whole pixel intervals until the game is as large as it can be on your monitor.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
Because every unit of money is a measure of energy added to the economy by the work of an individual.
A finite number of those individuals implies a finite amount of energy. Some portion of that energy has been placed at your disposal with the command "Save Lives".
At some point on the margin you are faced with the choice of whether to apply that energy to one person that has a good chance of survival or two people with a low survival chance.
Since all three of these people have families, none of them 'deserve' to die, you are always going to regret that you couldn't save all three people, and worst of all you may know and *like* one of them, it is perfectly reasonable to have worked the numbers till they bleed so you can maximize the chance that you can apply that finite amount of energy to fulfill your command "Save Lives".
Because that energy was bought with the premiums of people that paid for insurance in an emergency, and using those funds without taking into account the most efficient way of doing so is profoundly disrespectful to the people that worked to pay for it.
Rationing is a term for "You can't do everything. What *Can* we do.". You are presumably an adult. Live with it.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Hello,
Best advice I could give is run the video games in fullscreen in their native resolution, say 640x480.
The trick comes in the LCD monitor itself, get a LCD monitor that is known to upscale well, the genius has been spent not in software but firmware and hardware upscaling. You can typically set the monitor to keep the aspect ratio as well to avoid widening it.
And while I am thinking about it just set up an old pc with an old lcd monitor I have a 15 inch philips lcd at 1024x768 works wonders for old games :) makes quake 3 look awesome, textures don't look blurry.
There is also a physical box upscaler you could buy, basically a black box, plug in vga output to hdmi or whatnot, flip it on when needed to turn 640x480 to 1280x960 or whatnot.
fun research :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_scaler
There are definitely differences in the ability to display non-native resolutions between LCDs. I'm not an LCD expert and am not sure if this is because of a better matrix technology like IPS or just because such panels will command a price premium so the manufacturers can afford to equip them with better scaling and interpolation hardware. Look at the Dell Ultrasharps for example. Google up some reviews, non-native gaming on them is quite good.
I didn't see this in any prior posts. If you are using nvidia hardware on windows, open the nvidia control panel. Go to Display->Adjust Desktop Size and Position->"2. When using a resolution lower than my display's native resolution..." You can choose between monitor native scaling (passes through video and lets the LCD do the scaling), fixed aspect ratio (gfx card scales it up but keeps the same aspect ratio, probably getting black borders), and fullscreen (gfx card scales it up to fullscreen, ignoring the native aspect ratio).
Don't do this unless you want to solve the problem... use an old pc system. I do. I have several, all different levels of modernization, back to the pc w/ 5 1/4 floppies, and the xt's, and the 186's, 286's, 386's. Each has its own particular strong points, and the games i happen to enjoy, the 2d's like commander keen, xargon, duke nukem etc, run just fine on those systems. Ya, not everyone has the room or the expertise to keep these babies running. I'm lucky, I guess... I have both. But it's worth it to me not to have to waste time reinventing the wheel. thanks fer lis'nin' seekertom
Dug rtcw back out of the cupboard 3 days ago, amazing how it looks on my system now...there's no way I could have had those textures on release... check out LoL Blog for some in game frag movies..