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General discussion (archive)Netbook Resolution - scaling, failure to launch, cropping(3 posts)(3 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted June 27, 2011
Okay, so I know netbooks suck etc. but I do enjoy mine for travel, sitting on the couch, going to coffee shops, crapping, etc. And as I do enjoy it I like to play games and watch netflix on it.

What I'm running into, and I know a lot of others are too, is that the height of the screen is lower than 600 (like 1024 x 578) and this prevents certain older games from launching at all without messing with the .ini or the config or something. And then, even if it does launch it is either smaller than you want or part of the screen is cut off (alpha centauri is unplayable for me).

There has got to be some effort to fix this as it cannot be that hard to fix (although I am uncapable of figuring it out). Anyone have any ideas or is there a forum or something where we netbook losers can commiserate over this problem?
Posted June 27, 2011
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alans22: Okay, so I know netbooks suck etc. but I do enjoy mine for travel, sitting on the couch, going to coffee shops, crapping, etc. And as I do enjoy it I like to play games and watch netflix on it.

What I'm running into, and I know a lot of others are too, is that the height of the screen is lower than 600 (like 1024 x 578) and this prevents certain older games from launching at all without messing with the .ini or the config or something. And then, even if it does launch it is either smaller than you want or part of the screen is cut off (alpha centauri is unplayable for me).

There has got to be some effort to fix this as it cannot be that hard to fix (although I am uncapable of figuring it out). Anyone have any ideas or is there a forum or something where we netbook losers can commiserate over this problem?
Generally, the forums for individual games have a lot of advice on how to make their games work in resolutions like 1024x600, 1024x576, 1024x768 panned, 800x600 pillarboxed, etc.

Some games, SMAC in particular, have a fatally bad habit of assuming that because the screen width is 1024, the screen height must be 768. A solution for these is to pillarbox the game by forcing the width to 800; this makes them think the screen is 800x600.

Here's a thread on getting SMAC to work on a Netbook screen:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/sid_meier_s_alpha_centauri_/netbook_support_please_fix_this_small_bug
Post edited June 27, 2011 by cjrgreen
Posted June 27, 2011
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alans22: ...
I don't think you will see a solution for this. Using Divine Divinity as an example, you can manually use any res and the game itself will display at the res you input. The problem is it seems to have only two menu resolutions (1024 x 768 and 800 x 600). If your horizontal res is greater than 800 it will default to the larger 1024 x 768 menu res which causes menu clipping. Even though the game displays correctly you can't see / push the menu buttons with the 600 vertical netbook res. It will play at 800 x 600 if the netbook graphics card can handle the game which . . often . . . they can't.

I doubt that devs would ever go back and replace the menus in the old games . . . but it could happen I guess . . . =)

See the Netbook section at the bottom of this post for a better description and example image.
Post edited June 27, 2011 by Stuff
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussion (archive)Netbook Resolution - scaling, failure to launch, cropping(3 posts)(3 posts)
(3 posts)