Widescreen mod

[_Zac_]

I don't know how to do it or if it's even possible and that's what I'm here to find out.

I'm thinking of making (requesting someone else to make) a widescreen mod so Touhou looks good fullscreen on widescreen moniters.

I think it would be easy to do by keeping the ratio of the playing area the same but making the border where the score and stats are bigger to keep with the ratio of the moniter.

[Drake]

No, you would have to alter a hell of a lot in the code to be able to stretch the sides.

[hyperbolic colin]

I don't know how to do it or if it's even possible and that's what I'm here to find out.

I'm thinking of making (requesting someone else to make) a widescreen mod so Touhou looks good fullscreen on widescreen moniters.

I think it would be easy to do by keeping the ratio of the playing area the same but making the border where the score and stats are bigger to keep with the ratio of the moniter.

Do you not have fixed aspect-ratio scaling? Or are you just trying to put more of your screen area to use?

[_Zac_]

No, you would have to alter a hell of a lot in the code to be able to stretch the sides.

How about altering the main ratio to 16:9 and redrawing the sides to fit that without changing the playing area? Like instead of 640x480 make the game 853x480 without changing the playing area and redrawing the other area.

So the screen will be drawn like this: http://s958.photobucket.com/albums/ae68/z121231211/?action=view&current=th853x480.jpg

Or is that still too much work?

@chowell
Since my screen is a different aspect ratio than the game, it wouldn't look as good.

[Drake]

It's the fact that you actually have to edit the window in so it's always there. Changing the graphic and plopping it back in is easy, but the game is still constantly stuck on the same window.

[DarkslimeZ]

Fixed-aspect ratio scaling is what's needed; I use a widescreen, too, and wouldn't mind at all if there were black bars down the sides, rather than a lame extension of the background. Is there a way to have it scale properly?

[Drake]

Oh, do any of you care whether or not you can see your desktop or whatever? You can use either Sizer or the VSync patch to scale the window. Just take the height of your resolution and multiply by 1.333etc for the width.

[G_gglypuff]

It would be interesting if we could change the screen in widescreen monitors. When games are fullscreen only, I'm stuck with stretched graphics, and they might look bad sometimes (like in Kioh Gyoku) while for some other games the problem is minimal.

[hyperbolic colin]

The reason I asked about fixed aspect-ratio scaling is because it's the best solution to running fullscreen apps designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a widescreen display, assuming you don't mind the black bars on the screen edges.

Unfortunately, a lot of widescreen displays are stupid and won't do this sort of scaling; they'll just blindly stretch the image to cover the whole screen.  However, your graphics driver may have an option to do this scaling itself; check the display section of its control panel.  For example, I know NVIDIA drivers have this ability, since I use it with my laptop's 1280x800 display. The driver simply uses the GPU's scaling hardware to do this, so there's little or no performance cost.

[_Zac_]

The reason I asked about fixed aspect-ratio scaling is because it's the best solution to running fullscreen apps designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a widescreen display, assuming you don't mind the black bars on the screen edges.

Unfortunately, a lot of widescreen displays are stupid and won't do this sort of scaling; they'll just blindly stretch the image to cover the whole screen.  However, your graphics driver may have an option to do this scaling itself; check the display section of its control panel.  For example, I know NVIDIA drivers have this ability, since I use it with my laptop's 1280x800 display. The driver simply uses the GPU's scaling hardware to do this, so there's little or no performance cost.

I'm using an ATI card and can't find the option to do that.

[hyperbolic colin]

However, your graphics driver may have an option to do this scaling itself; check the display section of its control panel.  For example, I know NVIDIA drivers have this ability, since I use it with my laptop's 1280x800 display.

I'm using an ATI card and can't find the option to do that.

Hmm, doing a Google search on the issue reveals that ATI has been somewhat slower to support this ability, which I hadn't realized, and that many users have complained about this.  However, from a cursory glance, it looks like they've fixed this in their newest desktop drivers, and that their laptop drivers have supported it for quite a while.  Maybe a driver update will work for you.

[_Zac_]

It's the fact that you actually have to edit the window in so it's always there. Changing the graphic and plopping it back in is easy, but the game is still constantly stuck on the same window.

I still don't understand how that's harder than create_window(857,480) [psuedocode, btw, don't know what it's programmed in] but I know next to nothing (I created a game in Java before, so I think that counts as something) so can you please elaborate? Not trying to call you out on anything, I just want to know.