Comments on: Widescreen Gaming Woes

By: Neal

Neal — Wed, 16 May 2007 01:50:34 +0000

About the DVI connection:

I have a Dell 2407WFP, and I can run games at many resolutions on a dvi connection, and better image quality than vga. I have had no problems running games at resolution lower than native.

By: HopeSeekr of xMule

HopeSeekr of xMule — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:33:31 +0000

I just bought NFSMW and god … it wouldn’t even start on my monitor.

I have a Westinghouse LTV-32w6 (32″ wide… 3.5 square feet . So I’m returning NFS saying it isn’t compatible with my computer for unspecified compatibility reasons.

Really, they should say “does not support widescreen” on the box!

By: John

John — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 06:01:14 +0000

I have built a Media Center pc that I am using for games, tv, dvd, and music. This platform destroys everything else that is out there without breaking a sweat. Widescreen games at 1080i resolution, HDTV, including PVR, and all my DVD’s upcoverted to 1080i (regular DVD only runs at 420p).

My setup is as follows….
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
AMD64
2gb ram
4×150gb SATA in a striped set.
ATI X800 Pro
ATI TV550 Pro
ATI HDTV Wonder

All fed into a Philips widescreen HD CRT via component input.

Needless to say the “immersion” value of games and movies in this resolution cannot really be put into words. My only wish to fullfill is an HDDVD drive as soon as I am able to get one.

As for the widescreen gaming, this is the only place that gives me fits. I have a ton of games, and many of them running at 1920×1080 resolution. Unfortunately I have a ton that I am unable to play on this system. Some games I have been able to change simply using reg, ini, and cfg hacks. The rest are games where the actuall exe files need to be modified in order to create custom resolutions. This I am unable to do with any success as I am not a programmer and working in a hex editor is tedious to put it lightly. This leads me to the point of my post. I work for a hosting company, and as such I have server space available if anyone here is interested in creating a place for us to share our successes and offer files to others in order to help them out.

Anyone interested?

By: JD

JD — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 19:42:22 +0000

Great article. I’ve been debating between a 19″ widescreen and 19″ full screen and your article helped a ton. I do web design and gaming on thesame machine.

My question is rather dumb but I’ll ask anyway:
Would I get the widescreen effect if I end up with two 19″ full screen LCDs?
Thanks.

By: Stretch

Stretch — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 23:15:07 +0000

Hey Brett! It’s Stretch from the Widescreen Gaming Forum. I’m glad to see the site resources were able to help you solve a lot of those pesky widescreen issues. I agree – there is still a looong way to go before widescreen gaming becomes a simple install and play affair, but it looks like things are slowly but surely headed into that direction.

Even now I still have to recommend 17-19″ regular 4:3 aspects monitors for clients whom I absolutely know are not inclined to do any tweaking on their own.

If you have a chance, you might want to stop by the forum and check out the next step in widescreen gaming: the Matrox Triplehead2Go will allow you to use three monitors to run your games.

By the way – how does your particular Gateway model scale the 1280×800 resolution? Does it look pretty good? I know there’s always a bit of step down in quality when you can’t run the game in the monitor’s resolution, but from your comments above you seem pretty happy at with it. On that subject – I took a look at the picture of you monitor on flckr, and my eyes might be decieving me but the casing looks grey/silver’ish! Is it just the angle the picture was taken at? I was under the assumption that the casing was black – at least that is the way it looks on the official webpage.

Happy gaming – peace!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:33:09 +0000

@Kevin: That’s rad dude. Precisely the reason I wrote this article.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:32:44 +0000

Thanks for the 411 matt, after I bought my dell 20.1 inch monitor, i was plagued with the ws problems in gaming, your site gave me the knowledge i needed to correct them man.

By: FLUX

FLUX — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 18:45:29 +0000

Nice work. I just figured out my Dell 2405FPW which oddly enuf needed rebooted before it started working perfectly with my Radeon X1300 at native 1920X1200. Which is nothing but sweet. The price dropped on those LCDs to 799. Worth every cent. Only down side is the lack of HDCP compliance, oh well. HL2 COD2 are all the initials i give a crap about. Well Thanks for the info, and happy fraggin.

Anybody using thier FP for HDTV viewing? Thinking of giving that a try via comcast DVR.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:28:23 +0000

@DaCheetah: 5:3, that’s madness! I think you’d be pleasantly surprised though. I’ve seen 1280×768 pop-up in quite a few games. More so in the ones that don’t give you the option of simply enabling widescreen resolutions. Instead, giving you a ridiculously long list of resolutions and refresh rates.

And yes, as you stated, you shouldn’t have any problems with games where you can edit the config manually.

By: DaCheetah

DaCheetah — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 08:48:06 +0000

Good article. Answered quite a few of my questions, although I still have more. For a start my Widescreen Laptop has a resolution of 1280×768, which is an aspect ratio of 5:3!?!? (Between 16:9 and 16:10) and I havn’t seen ANYTHING else with that ratio.

But custom configs should help with some games.