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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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I was gonna post that but yeah, also make sure to try glide wrappers with Star Craft too, also you should try running diablo2 on 1600 x 1200 it's Awesome
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.
These games are usually running full screen.
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/
It's called xanalogtv, it's also used by the Pong and Apple2 hacks
Simply set your desktop to that resolution then. Problem solved.
You must be new here (as in to PC gaming). Most Windoze-based games released from when DirectX was first launched up until about 7 or 8 years ago change the screen resolution to their own predefined resolution (which varies according to the age of the game, starting at 640x480 for the earliest ones and working up to 1024x768 for the later ones) when they start. Some have .ini file or command line settings to prevent this happening (e.g. civ3, one of my favourites of the era, can be made to do this), but quite a lot don't. Games that actually ask you what resolution to run in or that can be persuaded to run in a window rather than full screen are a fairly new innovation.
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
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
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...
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.
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.
It does? It looks horribly stretched out on mine (16:9).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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
I think you're thinking of area. When the resolution in two dimensions doubles, the area quadruples. 640x480 becomes 1280x960 - twice the resolution (measured in linear dots-per-inch in each dimension) but the area quadruples.
to make a 1x1 square become 2x2 you have to quadruple it's resolution...
Making your 640x480 a whooping 2560x1920
Um, no. Check your math. To go from 1x1 to 2x2 you are doubling in each dimension, making 4 times as many pixels.
Going from 640x480 to 2560x1920, you are quadrupling in each dimension, making 16 times as many pixels.
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...
640x480 becomes 1280x960
Yes. Unfortunately, my display is only 1600x900. /gripe
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
You must construct additional pylons.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I think you're making a mistake The total number of pixels will quadruple, but the height and width only double.
A 1x1 monitor has 1 pixel.
A 2x2 monitor has 4 pixels, but is twice as wide.
A 4x4 monitor has 16 pixels and is twice as wide as the 2x2.
To double the apparent resolution, you have to double the height and width while quadrupling the number of pixels.
coffee | nose > keyboard
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.
I've never had a problem with DOSBox's filters and scalers. Everything looks great on my 22" Acer LCD. (Got Tyrian playing on it right now)
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.
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.
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."
going from 1x1 to 2x2 is indeed quadruple the resolution, its still only 2x2, not 4x4, 1280x960 is quadruple the resolution of 640x480 and available on most lcd monitors, he just wants to double the width and hight.
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
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).
I'm right. Those algorithms look acceptable in screenshots but show obvious artifacts in motion.
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..