Play your old games in true widescreen

Widescreen monitor sales have rocketed in the last few years; a widescreen monitor better resembles the ratio of human sight, enables working with multiple documents at once and offers a better experience in games. One of the main advantages for gamers is the increased field of view in first person shooters such as Counter Strike. Seeing further to the left and right means you’re more likely to spot the enemy than if you were using a standard monitor.

This process doesn’t happen automatically; games developers have to manually write the game code that detects the monitor’s wide resolution and adapts the field of view to compensate. This means that many older games don’t support widescreen resolutions, and need to be hacked to display correctly without the monitor simply stretching the square image widthways, making your enemies look like they’ve eaten a few too many doughnuts.

With its Games For Windows certification program, Microsoft has made sure that new games deal with widescreen properly; one of the requirements is that “the game must not stretch pixels or center a 4:3 render window to support widescreen aspect ratios.” Newer games generally cope with these resolutions properly anyway, though a glance over at Bioshock developer 2K’s forums will show you what happens when a new game is released that doesn’t correctly deal with widescreen; 2K chose to simply crop the top and bottom of the square (4:3) image and expand the resultant ‘widescreen’ (16:10) image to fill a widescreen monitor. This means that not only does the field of view remain the same for widescreen gamers, but they’re actually seeing less of the surroundings. This has lead to an unprecedented level of malice towards 2K, with over-zealous bloggers proclaiming Bioshock’s insti-failure and forums full of angsty teenagers cancelling their pre-orders in misguided disgust. While I’m inclined to agree that I didn’t invest in a 24” widescreen in order to see less than I would have on my old CRT, it hasn’t stopped me enjoying BioShock immensely as it is – and the imminent official widescreen patch will only give me an excuse to play it through again once I’m done.

Bioshock might not implement widescreen in the way that some would have liked, but at least it’s compatible with widescreen resolutions. Older games simply won’t offer widescreen resolutions in their graphics options, and you often need to hack or tweak the game in some way before it’ll display correctly. This is helped by the fact that the majority of big game titles share the same ‘engine’ – the code which dictates everything you see on your screen. The two main players in this field are the Quake and Unreal engines, and once you know how to tweak both, you can apply this to the majority of games in need of a widescreen injection.

 
Games using the Unreal engine

Now in its third incarnation, the Unreal engine has formed the backbone for many great games. Deus Ex 1 and 2, Unreal Tournament, Thief: Deadly Shadows and the Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six series all use versions of the Unreal engine and most of these can be tweaked in the same way to fully support widescreen.

Each game will have its own .ini configuration file, and the first thing to do is locate this. With Windows Vista, you can do this automatically; click Start > Computer, then in the Search box type ‘fullscreenviewport’. In the search window that appears, click ‘Search in File Contents’ and then ‘Advanced Search’, then tick the ‘Include non-indexed, hidden and system files’ tickbox. It’ll take a while, as Windows Vista has to look inside every file on your computer – but if the file’s there, it’ll find it. It’ll be a .ini file, which by default will open in Notepad. Once you’ve found it, double click it and scroll down until you find the lines:

FullscreenViewportX=xxxx

FullscreenViewportY=xxx

Change these to your screen’s default resolution – you can find this by right-clicking on your Windows Vista desktop and clicking Personalise > Display Settings. The first number is X, the second is Y. With the majority of 22” widescreen monitors, you’ll end up with:

FullscreenViewportX=1680

FullscreenViewportY=1050

That’s the widescreen bit done, but the field of view will still be narrow and look odd. To correct this, open the folder that contains the .ini file you found earlier and you should see another file called user.ini. Open this in notepad and find the lines:

DesiredFOV=75.000000

DefaultFOV=75.000000

The field of view you choose is really down to you, and could involve a little experimentation – anything from 85 to 100 is worth a shot. Save both files and then launch the game.

The exception to all this is Thief: Deadly Shadows – the fix for this game makes no sense, but works well. Locate the file ‘options.ini’ in ‘C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\Thief - Deadly Shadows\SaveGames\User Options’, find the line ‘resolution = 1’ and change it to ‘resolution = -1’. This’ll force the game to use your monitor’s native resolution.

Games using the Quake III engine

The Quake III engine powered countless great games in its time, including Jedi Knight 1 & 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, Quake 3 Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and Soldier of Fortune 2, and most – if not all – of these games can be tweaked to support widescreen resolutions with the correct field of view.

Again, you’ll need to edit a few lines in the program’s settings – and to do this, you’ll need to have run the game at least once to create the relevant config files. Open the game’s .cfg file in notepad – you’ll find this in the game’s directory. If you can’t find it manually, follow the guide in the Unreal engine section to use Windows Vista to find the relevant file, using the search term “r_screenheight”.

Once you’ve found the .cfg file, locate the lines:

set r_screenheight "XXXX"

set r_screenwidth "XXXX"

and, as with the Unreal engine, enter your current screen resolution. Now find the line:

seta r_mode “X”

and change it to -1. Finally, add the line:

set cg_fov "115"

to set the field of view. 115 looks about right to me in most Quake engine-based games, but again, it’s all down to personal preference.

If you’re struggling to get your favourite old shooter working, let me know in the comment box below and I’ll look into it - alternatively, head on over to the Widescreen Gaming Forum at www.widescreengamingforum.com for comprehensive guides to many old and new games.