4:3 monitor @ 80Hz

[Max Is Back]

Just to clarify, there's no way I'm going to get this game to run fullscreen (without horrendous letterboxing) on a monitor with 4:3 aspect ratio (80Hz refresh rate), is there?

NB: You may remember 4:3, it was the PC standard for about, oh, maybe 20 years or so.

Thanks.

[The Chaos Engine]

So far I know this game was developed purely for widescreen so I don't think there is a way to display it without black bars on a 4:3 monitor. Anyway I'm still using a 4:3 CRT monitor myself. It's a 21" DELL P1130. It has way to good parameters to switch it for a generic overpriced FullHD LED monitor. ^_^

[Max Is Back]

Originally posted by The Chaos Engine:

So far I know this game was developes purely for widescreen so I don't think there is a way to display it without black bars on a 4:3 monitor. Anyway I'm still using a 4:3 CRT monitor myself. It's a 21" DELL P1130. It has way to good parameters to switch it to a generic overpriced LED monitor. ^_^

Thanks, I thought that would be the case. And I agree 100% with your position on CRT monitors, it's refreshing to hear some sense in the CRT vs LED debate! LEDs became the norm for one entirely practical reason - size. But to this day, CRTs are superior in almost every way - except for the fact that they're the size of a small car...! But that's not the point, I'm not going to fork out a significant wedge of cash on an inferior technology, it just doesn't make sense.

Coincidentally, I have a Dell P1230 - virtually identical to yours. A lot of gamers have simply never owned a CRT and don't understand the benefits - like being able to choose the most appropriate resolution instead of being forced to use the "native" resolution of an LED. Quite literally, I've been waiting for 10 years for a slimline monitor technology that can rival CRT - still waiting.

Thanks for you input, good gaming!

[Akumala]

Too bad, i have a 4:3 monitor as well, and my black bars fill half of the screen...
Such a professional game, and then such a lazyness...

[sethsez]

Originally posted by Blue_Lotus:

Too bad, i have a 4:3 monitor as well, and my black bars fill half of the screen...
Such a professional game, and then such a lazyness...

It's not laziness, it's just what happens when a game is designed entirely around the shape of the screen. You can alter the aspect ratio of a racing game or FPS or whatever because their gameplay isn't tied to that aspect ratio, but a fixed scrolling shooter is, and changing the aspect ratio would require either adjusting level layouts or zooming in and just accepting that bullets will be fired by enemies that are off screen.

The best you could hope for are wallpapers to fill that empty space, and it is admittedly a shame those aren't available.

[Max Is Back]

Originally posted by M4uZinh0:

I downloaded the demo and i have black bars on a 16:9 monitor, playing in 1920x1080, this is very weird, it's the game itself, it was suppose to see the entire screen.

This is why it's so annying at 4:3! What you're seeing is normal - even with a widesceen (16:9) monitor you'll get some letter-boxing. This is because the game's only supported aspect ratio is anamorphic (a cinema standard) which is 2.35:1 - or to provide a more direct comparison with 16:9, it would be equivalent to 21.15:9.

So you get letter-boxing on virtually all monitors, everything from 4:3 to 16:9 or 16:10, unless you just happen to have a fully anamorphic monitor with an aspect ratio equal to your average cinema screen (2.35:1). Obviously, very few people have anamorphic monitors so this just seems like a terrible design choice. Unless they were expecting people to play it at the cinema?!

I really don't know why they didn't target the absolutely stardard 16:9 aspect ratio. I can cope with the letter-boxing from playing a 16:9 game on a 4:3 monitor, but the letter-boxing required to fit an anamorphic ratio on a 4:3 display is just ridiculous - there's literally more space in the black border than there is in the actual game area!

I know it's weird as hell but that's how the developers designed it so letter-boxing, even on a 16:9 monitor, is actually "normal" (according to these devs, anyway).

Originally posted by M4uZinh0:

I'm an oldschool gamer, i started playing games on CRT monitors, except the 0ms response time on CRT's (same to say no response time at all, image is displayed immediately unlike LCD's) everything else is far superior with the current technology, advantages are tremendous, no way i could change, but if it's that problem you can buy the most expensive gaming monitor you can find in 2016 with 1ms response time, Asus and Benq are good, these gaming monitors are expensive but they are made specially for gaming with the best specs and response times and other things to make sure picture is smooth as possible without lag.Give it a try lol.

I've always had two main issues with LCDs - you already mentioned one, the response time. Effectively 0ms on a CRT, this is going to beat any LCD monitor now and far into the future. But I can't disagree, LCDs really have come around over the last few years, far more than I expected. I managed to play with a friend's ASUS gaming monitor - 144Hz refresh rate, 1ms GTG time and amazingly good colour representation (he said it was rubbish out the box and needed immediate calibration but that's not a big deal). I must admit, it blew me away - so much better than the panels I was seeing just a few years ago.

However, the other reason I've never been able to give up on CRTs completely is that they don't suffer from the problems of the fixed pixel grid common to all LCD monitors. For example, if you have a 1920x1080 LCD, it literally has 1920 "cells" along its width from which it can emit a single pixel and 1080 along it's height. That's its "native resolution" and the only resolution where everything looks perfect because it's a perfect mapping of one pixel per cell in the grid. Now change the resolution to anything non-native and you get those awful aliasing effects because it has to interpolate the pixels as best it can to fit the non-native resolution within a fixed grid of 1920x1080 cells. CRTs simply don't have that problem, they display all resolutions in crystal clarity because the proton gun can create any size pixels it likes - no fixed grid to fit into, it effectively defines the pixel grid itself (perfectly) based on the chosen resolution.

I think the ability change display resolution (and not suffer additional artifacts from the display device) is an extremely important one. Computers were never designed to display at a static resolution, otherwise we'd still be stuck on 320x240px. But monitor manufacturers determined that this wasn't such a big deal in consumer's eyes - and they were right, since CRTs are now a relic from a bygone era! I can't deny it though, I'm really liking those 144Hz / 1ms gaming monitors from ASUS - might just have to bite the bullet! Thanks for your feedback, it's been really useful.

Cheers, good gaming!