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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.
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!!
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
Actually, forget Freecycle, you probably already have an old CRT laying around somewhere that you just don't want to use because it takes up so much space.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I love how everyone posting in this thread disregards the question asked and poses a solution that doesn't actually solve the problem.
I don't want a fucking CRT taking up desk space, and I'm sure the person posing the question doesn't either - or he wouldn't have asked. Hm! Food for thought.
I don't like how they presume everyone had crap TVs or poor Ataris.
Take the Enduro image - it never looked that bad on my real set. The playfields were a solid color (no noise), and the sunset was a rainbow of distinct colors, not a blurry orangish mess. In fact most Atari games look quite crisp, with visible pixels, on my original unit and original CRT.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
That would be a step up from insurance industry panels in private health care systems that hold meetings to decide if they can interpret some small print in the contract to exclude your medical procedure, or dump your coverage because you didn't disclose ache that you had as a teenager. I mean, when there is a finite pool of money, rationing is inevitable. Giving record bonuses to CEOs while letting patients die on the other hand is pretty sleazy.