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.

Comments

Possible Starcraft Solutions

[slifox]

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

Try dos games.

[sjwt]

your problem is you are not looking old enough, try runing DOS games in Dosbox, nice scaling options there.

Re:Try dos games.

[naz404]

The ScummVM emulator for running classic Lucasarts games like Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series also has a nice set of scalers and graphics filters.

Re:Buy a cheap CRT

[denmarkw00t]

Actually, forget eBay, there are plenty of CRTs available at thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army), presumably on Craigslist, and one of the best gaming CRTs I ever got came from a yard sale.

I know we're nerds, but we too can purchase old televisions at low prices, face-to-face with an actual person ;)

See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs"

[fractalVisionz]

"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.

Windowed Mode: VM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My comments on the issue...

[jez9999]

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.

Re:A solution for some old RPGs (Ps:T, BG, IwD)

[sa1lnr]

I used this process for Planescape Torment

http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html

Worked a treat, though widescreen v2.1 is linked there it worked fine with v2.2.
I had to used the nVidia fixer near the end as I have an 8800GT.

For Baldur's Gate using the Baldur's Gate II engine I use easytutu

http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/

And for Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura I use drog black tooths unofficial patch, high resolution patch and high res town maps. iirc you have to install the official 1.0.7.4 patch before these two.

http://www.terra-arcanum.com/downloads/

they are both under "Arcanum" -> "Unofficial"