Making Old Games Look Good On Modern LCDs? 367
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.
Buy a cheap CRT (Score:2, Insightful)
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Forget ebay, check Craigslist. Chances are somebody in your neighborhood has an old CRT in their basement they want to sell for $15.
Forget eBay, Craigslist - Freecycle :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, there are people out there who'd be happy to just have you take the clunky thing.
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Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:5, Funny)
I have two you can have for free. They're here in Germany though... shipping might be a bit expensive ;)
Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:5, Interesting)
I advertised a 17" CRT on Freecycle (London). I didn't expect any replies, but had several! One was from a woman who said she was disabled and would send a taxi round to collect it, but as it was only 10 minutes walk I carried it to her house. She turned out to be a research scientist who'd got an unusual disease (and couldn't walk). She wanted to research it but couldn't get any funding. So, she'd given up her job and was doing her research from home.
This was 2 years ago, maybe now it'd need to be an LCD.
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But but, how could she afford healthcare then?
According to top Fox News scientists everyone part of a public health care system is technically already dead.
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which is so much worse than insurance industry panels in private health care systems that hold meetings to decide if you're worth rationing money to address your illness.
Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;)
Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: It's either that are buy an expensive... (Score:2, Interesting)
...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.
Re: It's either that are buy an expensive... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Not true. With proper scaling, you can take a small image with a 640 width and scale it up to HD resolutions with good results. Their called scalers, and chances are, if you've bought a DVD or Bluray player in the last few years, it has one built in.
Good software scalers, are Lanczos, and Bicubic (with Lanczos giving a sharper result in my opinion).
If you use something like Dosbox, or one of the old emulators, you can often choose a decent scaler option which helps to alleviate your graphical woes. As with
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>>>scale it up to HD resolutions with good results
I guess? I've seen the former but never the latter. To date I've never seen an SD game or SD-DVD that looked as good on LCD as it looks on my CRT.
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Depends on the LCD you're buying. Some of the higher end LCD's you can buy have hardware-based scaling built into the device, and upscale the image quite nicely when provided with a lower resolution. Sometimes, these LCD's can be configured to keep the aspect ratio of the original source, too... so if you're running a 1680x1050 display and feed it a 640x480 source, it'll display at 1400x1050 with black bands on the left and right of the image.
I've been able to play old games on LCD's without having issues w
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Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, forget Freecycle, since.. eh, what are we talking about?
Re:Buy a cheap CRT (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually, forget about John Titor and going back in time. I would recommend asking Slashdot what they think to do. Much easier than going back in time.
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Well, that will solve the problem for the next few years. But those old CRTs will die eventually, and then what?
Also, having a second monitor just to play old games is a pain, especially when that second monitor is a space hog.
Possible Starcraft Solutions (Score:4, Informative)
One way might be to play Starcraft in windowed mode:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=72621 [teamliquid.net]
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 [teamliquid.net]
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16643 [widescreen...gforum.com]
http://freenet-homepage.de/ToiletGame/download.html [freenet-homepage.de]
http://www.gamethreat.net/forums/user-downloads/38147-resolution-hack-release-4-0-a.html [gamethreat.net]
Re:Possible Starcraft Solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
I once wrote a tool called "StarPatch" that lets you run StarCraft in a window. It works by 1) patching a calls to CreateWindow and some DirectDraw initialization functions, 2) patching calls to DirectDraw's Lock and Unlock to return a fake video memory pointer, and 3) periodically copying the fake video memory to the real video memory.
The source code is almost ten years old at this point, but I've made it available again at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/supersat/starpatch.c [washington.edu]. You'll need to tweak it to work with anything other than StarCraft 1.10, but you can modify it to scale up pixels, etc.
- Karl
Windowed Mode: VM (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Starcraft plays fine in a VirtualBox which creates a custom tailored windowed mode without much hacking. Also there is a high likelihood that you have an old Windows Key for 98 or XP to run it on.
If you don't install support for the virtual mouse drivers you can keep it locked in the VM.
If you run VM on Linux you can run Compiz and turn on ADD Helper to black out the rest of the screen.
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virtualization (Score:2, Insightful)
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The problem doesn't appear to be the size of the windows, but the size of the pixels. Virtualization wouldn't help here.
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DOSBox makes it easy. scaler=normal2x forced in the .conf file will pixel-double in all video modes. It should pixel double anyway on the lowest ones, I think... the default is scaler=normal2x.
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You'll get much better results using scaler=super2xsai or hq2x
Further info on available options and results here [dosbox.com].
Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...
Amazing how you never have to worry about turn-based games playing too fast, isn't it?
Re:Old Games on Faster Computers can be tough (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...
Amazing how you never have to worry about turn-based games playing too fast, isn't it?
Or ascii-based games running into problems with tiny pixels or miss-matched resolutions.
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Even so, imagine the issues involved in playing a non-ascii game over your SSH client.
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Rogue level is displayed in IBMgraphics using CP437. It's probably not SSH that's the issue but your terminal.
http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/IBMgraphics#Rogue_level [wikia.com]
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:/ I wish that were the case, most of the time UFO Defense/XCom runs "too fast" on my newer hardware making it impossible to navigate the field.
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Remember the "Turbo" button? (Score:2)
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 hav
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PS: When did the turbo buttons disappear?
When you changed your case ? :)
I had one on my 286/16 with a pizzabox case, not on my 486DX50 tower. I *think* some 386 SX (not sure about the DX) still had them.
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Uh, they haven't. My latest MSI motherboard has two of them to change the speeds... (they're just not externally accessable).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130233 [newegg.com]
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I built computers back then for a smalish computer company. The 8/16 display you speak of was set by jumpers on the back side of the display and had a 3 wire connector that went to the motherboard. Pin 1 plus Pin 2 was high, with pin 3 plus pin 2 being low.
We also had a preloaded dos menu system which, I forget what it was called, that started from the autoexec.bat which would allow you to load either dos, some sha
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedStep [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerNow! [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool'n'Quiet [wikipedia.org]
No Turbo button necessary!
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That's the problem with using hardware to clock your game cycles, we just don't know what the future will bring.
I've read good things about Mo'Slow [hpaa.com] and Bremze [ansis.lv]. Mo'Slow was at least updated through 2006 and says it works with XP, but Bremze development appears to have stalled in 2002.
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Perhaps it would have been different if I was trying to run windows programs, but I find DOSBox much better for running old dos games than Mo'Slow and cmd on modern hardware. DOSBox is also capable of scaling graphics through a number of different filters to solve the posters original problem... if only he wanted to play Warcraft 2 instead of Starcraft.
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It's not about the size of the window, but the size of the pixels. I think I once managed to get dosbox or something similar to run Elite 2: Frontier using pixels that were 2x2 times as big. Worked very well.
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The problem isn't just the scaling - it's that the games were designed to be viewed on CRT. Exactly 2x2 pixels does *not* acheive this - on a CRT even at low res, the CRT is more condusive to the eye interpolating detail. Crystal-clear pixels are not how older games are intended to be viewed. I've found some laptop LCDs (i.e. not huge resolution) actually allow you to play old games (e.g. on DOSBox) looking fairly similar to how they should, as the basic scaling to some extent achieves a similar effect to o
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DOSBox.
The problem isn't the size of the pixels, it's the funny shading and fuzziness that the LCD does when it tries to operate in a mode that it isn't able to natively display. Straight doubling with no shading looks just fine.
The .conf line you're looking for is:
scaler=normal2x forced
RealMYST (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Great and shitty at once (Score:2)
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 technolo
Try dos games. (Score:5, Informative)
your problem is you are not looking old enough, try runing DOS games in Dosbox [dosbox.com], nice scaling options there.
Re:Try dos games. (Score:5, Informative)
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Amen.. I'm just working my way through the Monkey island series on my aspire netbook and ScummVM, and ran through DoTT and Sam'n'Max before that. All look great when re-rendered into full 1024x600, their upscalers are excellent! There are very few aliasing artifacts etc..
Vavoom [vavoom-engine.com] (+the texture packs) also does a good job on Doom at the same resolution too.
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I find that those old 1970s and 80s games run better on Atari 800, Commodore=64, and Amiga emulators. For one thing these computers have fixed specs, so they are as easy to use as a console (plug and play). No need to mess with annoying DOS, sound, or graphic card settings.
For another the Atari, Commodore and Amiga were typically the best versions of the games with more colors and better sound than the PC DOS versions.
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The article poster lists several favorite games of his that he wants to play, and your suggestion is to find older, different games?
For DOS games. (Score:5, Insightful)
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DOSbox is indispensable for playing old DOS games anyway. It emulates old platforms, including old hardware, extremely well. And it's a lot less hassle than booting a physical machine into DOS.
A solution for some old RPGs (Ps:T, BG, IwD) (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [gibberlings3.net].
Nice example screenshots for Planescape: Torment here [rockpapershotgun.com].
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Having just played Neverwinter Nights 2 tonight, I have to say that the visuals in Ps:T kick ass. Not kicked, kick. I don't know why they ever moved away from the 2d style, except for ease of mod-making.
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They want to appeal to a younger audience... Remember when you were growing up (if it was recently enough) and you used to refuse to watch old movies in Black & White, because B&W automatically sucked, and colour was better? Then as you grew up, you started watching movies like Casablanca, Rope, The Maltese Falcon, Psycho, Citizen Kane, and Dr. Strangelove, and realised that there were a huge number of really, *really* good movies that were made in B&W? And that the number of quality films being
Re:A solution for some old RPGs (Ps:T, BG, IwD) (Score:4, Informative)
I used this process for Planescape Torment
http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html [blogspot.com]
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/ [usoutpost31.com]
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/ [terra-arcanum.com]
they are both under "Arcanum" -> "Unofficial"
2xSal or hqx in a gpu driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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?
Re:2xSal or hqx in a gpu driver? (Score:4, Interesting)
And then I notice that DosBox already has this implemented: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler [dosbox.com]
It should be fairly straightforward for Wine to implement a similar feature.
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Actually, Wine is more of an abstraction than an emulator.
In any case, it could be possible to intercept DirectX calls and change the behavior they cause, but it'd be considerably slower.
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Wine is an emulator(yes I know that it claims not to be, but it is). It emulates Windows(or at least a part of windows) on Linux. Yes it emulates system calls instead of emulating an OS, but that's really neither here nor there.
Uhuh. So, what, glibc just emulates the POSIX standard? Mono emulates .NET? OpenJVM emulates Java? Because these are all precise analogous to Wine (which is an independent, portable implementation of a wide variety of Windows APIs).
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In theory, you should be able to modify the open source drivers to implement any scaling algorithm that can be implemented as a pixel shader, though it'd probably be a pain to do. (The normal scaling is implemented in fixed function hardware, and is also therefore rather faster.)
hqx (Score:3, Interesting)
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See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs" (Score:5, Informative)
From Slashdot story Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs [slashdot.org].
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I wonder if they do Artifacting well enough.
8-bit Atari had this neat mode, Graphics 8, which was a very high resolution monochrome mode. With the fun exception that 2 neighboring lit pixels were white, but a single pixel with no horizontal neighbors was reddish or greenish depending on position. Some games exploited it cleverly, for example Amaroute was mostly normal monochrome but the fence around the game area was red.
XScreenSaver has this (Score:2)
Re:See "Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Actually a lot of software written back then was designed for crap TVs. You run these programs say a PC program now you see that it is in 640x200 b&w images. While at the time it had a bunch of colors, at a lower resolution. They took into account that the old TVs couldn't handle 640 width however it will still send the signal so only a few phosphors will get hit in a pixel thus creating color. Or even when we get further along where we got actual computer monitors the old systems had such a low DPI
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>>>They took into account that the old TVs couldn't handle 640 width however it will still send the signal so only a few phosphors will get hit in a pixel thus creating color.
Bzzz.
Your explanation is wrong. NTSC televisions can easily handle 640-or-more pixels per line, per the original 1930s design spec. The problem is the addition of color (NTSC-II). Chroma resolution is only 150-160 pixels across due to the color signal beng bandwidth-limited to 2 megahertz. So while a television can display
software scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
Isometric 2D RPGs (Score:2, Interesting)
Concerning Myst (Score:2)
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.
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many (not all) modern LCDs don't scale ... (Score:2)
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 d
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Try this (Score:2, Informative)
http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art_scaling_algorithms [wikipedia.org]
Blocky scaleup (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm the author of Chocolate Doom [chocolate-doom.org], 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 [chocolate-doom.org] 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 [chocolate-doom.org]. I don't know if this is useful to the developers of programs like DOSBox, but the code's there [sourceforge.net] if anyone wants it.
My comments on the issue... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Cheap solution... (Score:5, Funny)
Try squinting?
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Older games (Score:2)
Right now I'm playing Fallout 2 with a high rez patch [nma-fallout.com] on a 22" LCD. I've also got a widescreen mod [gibberlings3.net] installed for Torment, but it works with any Infinity Engine game.
Hack your monitor (Score:2)
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.
Remote Desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
After reading all of this, it occurs to me (Score:2)
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
A pixel is not a little square (Score:3, Interesting)
Repeat after me: A pixel is not a little square [alvyray.com]. CRT monitors reconstruct an image using something closer to a gaussian distribution, rather than a crisp rectangular one [google.com] 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.
Re:get some sun (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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These games are usually running full screen.
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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,