Is my resolution too big?

[farecoal]

So, I'm a complete newbie here, and I was wondering if my computer can run SH3 with GWX and Commander. I'm not worried about the framerate, I'm wondering if my screen is too big. My screen has a resolution of 1680x1050. I have an ATI Radeon HD 3800.

[frau kaleun]

My monitor's native resolution is the same, 1680x1050.

The game's native res is (IIRC) 1024x768 - a 4:3 aspect ratio, as it was not built to run in a widescreen format.

There are various "fixes" out there to specify a different resolution, including running the game in a widescreen format. Check the SH3 Mods Workshop Forum, there may be a stickied thread there for widescreen mods or you can search the forum for "widescreen" and see what comes up.

Personally I have not experimented with any of the widescreen mods, as the last time I checked none of them were designed to "fit" my monitor's native res and aspect ratio. It's been a while though, so things may have changed so have a look as noted above.

What I use is the Res_Fix mod, which (once installed) allows you to specify the resolution of your choice for the game when it runs.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=1092

You can specify 1680x1050, but without modifying the graphics to fit a widescreen format you will probably see some stretching of images in the 2D bits of the game (what would normally be a round dial will become an oval shape, for instance). Some users aren't bothered by this, for some the effects might not be as great - your mileage may vary.

I didn't like the stretching effect so I set the res at 1400x1050 and turned off auto-scaling on my gfx card, so the game runs fullscreen but without being stretched out to fill the available 1680 horizontal space - instead I get narrow black bands down each side, kind of like horizontal letterboxing. (I have an ATI Radeon HD4650, if you have the Catalyst Control Center for your gfx card, that's where I went to turn off auto-scaling.)

So in short (I know, too late for that) it is possible to run the game at 1680x1050 with the proper modifications. You'll just have to try some things out and see what works and what looks good to you.

[farecoal]

Alright, thank you very much. :salute:

[frau kaleun]

You're welcome. Sink 'em all (at the highest resolution possible)! :D

[farecoal]

Actually, where is the option for auto-scaling? I can't seem to find it.

Edit: Where is it in the control center, I mean.

[frau kaleun]

Oddly enough I can't seem to find an option for it in the latest version of CCC - which I just installed after an OS upgrade.

I'm pretty sure that's where I did it in the version I had, though.

Ah, now I think I found it.

Under Desktops & Displays, select your display (if you're only hooked up to one monitor, it will only show one) and right click on its icon below where it says "Please select a display." Click on Configure, and you'll get a box with options for Image Scaling. I think what you want is "maintain aspect ratio," this will prevent the display from automatically rescaling the game to fill the whole desktop when it runs fullscreen.

EDIT: Actually now that I look at the "help" info for those options, it may be "centered timing" that is needed... argh, I haven't reinstalled the game yet so now I'm not sure exactly which one works for that. And this is a new version of CCC for me, it may have said "turn off auto-scaling" in the old one I had. Anyway - look for Scaling options in the Desktop/Display part of CCC and see what's there. You may have to play with it a bit to figure it out, I know I did... looks like I'll have to do it again this time around, lol.

[farecoal]

Thanks again. I'll see if this works. :DL

[frau kaleun]

I played around with it a bit using my TV as a second display, because its native res is different than my monitor... both "maintain aspect ratio" and "centered timing" seem to have the same effect. Try one and then the other and see what happens. :DL

[Tessa]

I would recommend that you check out the MaGUI widescreen edition mod. They took the existing GUI and changed it so that GUI itself was changed and more items were added with the extra space. While there are a number of different widescreen mods out there, I believe all of them state that they are incompatible with any GUI mods, in my past experience trying those mods they merely streched the screen so everything was eliptical. Other's have reported the opposite, only way to know is to try it out.

The MaGUI widescreen was specifically altered in order to fit on 16:9 screens and use all their space. All the dials/scopes are perfect circles and there is a little more space in areas that were previously overloaded with too many controls on a single panel. However they did the MaGUI widescreen they really did it right, all ships and other objects are in their proper proportions and don't have any indications of streching.

[farecoal]

For some reason, when I click configure on my display in CCC, the box that comes up doesn't have any options for aspect ratio or centering. I guess I can just try to play the game stretched. Also, Tessa, is the MaGui mod compatible with GWX/SH4Commander?

[frau kaleun]

What version of CCC do you have? Are you in Basic or Advanced mode when you open it?

In mine, in Advanced mode, there's a "Graphics" dropdown menu in the top left corner. If I choose Desktops & Display, it shows me a window with the available desktops as numbered blue rectangles, one for each available display. (If only one monitor is hooked up, there's only a #1.) Below that is another area showing the hardware providing the display, an icon for each monitor/TV hooked up to the gfx card, also numbered. If I hold the cursor over one, the name of the device pops up. If I right click on one, I get a context menu with an option to Configure.

If I choose configure, I get a new dialog box for that device with several tabs up top, under the Attributes tab is where I can select options for Image Scaling.

[farecoal]

Well, great, now the game won't run at all. It says that the 3d engine failed to intialize. I already tried deleting the intro movies, but no dice.

Also, I could not find any scaling options, with the latest version and advanced mode.

[frau kaleun]

Sorry you're having problems. Maybe that card doesn't support it and so the option isn't there.

Not sure if you installed Res_Fix or one of the other resolution mods, if so I would advise undoing the last change(s) you made to see if that resolves the problem.

[farecoal]

I just reinstalled it, so it has no mods, and yet it still has that error. Sorry about this, by the way. :oops:

[frau kaleun]

If you are reinstalling the game itself, it's best to completely uninstall it first - not just run the Uninstall, but delete the folder it created in My Documents and do a registry clean to delete any entries there related to the game. Just in case you didn't do those things already. :DL

And don't be sorry, you're the one who can't play! But we'll get you sorted eventually. :yeah:

[farecoal]

How do you do a registry clean? And in case it helps, I have the Steam version, and Windows 7.

[frau kaleun]

You need a program to analyze your registry and delete/fix any problems, which would include cleaning out any entries related to programs you have uninstalled.

A good one is RegClean, which can be d/led here:

http://www.regclean.com/download.php

I think it's either freeware, or else a free trial version. Anyway it should do the trick.

So the procedure is, uninstall SH3 (either using the Uninstall shortcut the game created in your Start Menu, or by the Uninstall Programs feature in Windows Control Panel).

Then delete the game folder and its contents, if running the Uninstall didn't do that. Then delete the SH3 folder that was created in your Documents folder. Then run the registry cleaner to clear the registry of any SH3-related stuff.

That should leave your system ready for a fresh, new installation.

Also - in Win7 it's recommended that you do NOT let the game install itself in the default directory it wants to create in a Program Files folder. Apparently Win7 gets really unhappy if you try to fiddle with files in its Program Files directories, which makes modding the game a real headache.

So when you reinstall it, direct the installation to some other place on your hard drive - make a directory called Games or something, whatever. Just don't let it install itself in a Program Files folder.

[farecoal]

Unfortunately, Steam does not allow you to install to another directory, only program files, so I'm not sure what I can do about that.

Also, the regclean thing isn't letting me repair the errors it found without buying it.

[frau kaleun]

Oops, sorry - I think I pointed you to the wrong registry cleaner. :oops: I thought that was one of the recommended ones that had a free trial at least.

Try here instead - this one has a link for a free trial and has also been recommended by other Subsimmers:

http://www.regvac.com/fregvac.htm

[rik007]

So, I'm a complete newbie here, and I was wondering if my computer can run SH3 with GWX and Commander. I'm not worried about the framerate, I'm wondering if my screen is too big. My screen has a resolution of 1680x1050. I have an ATI Radeon HD 3800.

I use the widescreen mod combined with stretching. It works great on 1920 x 1080 as that is the same aspect ratio as 1368 x 768 for which it was designed. 1680 x 1050 differs so you shoult try if the widescreen mod is an improvement for you as well.

[frau kaleun]

@farecoal: I had to really play around with this issue when I just reinstalled the game. I'm not sure what changed but in the latest version of Catalyst Converter the options to enable GPU scaling and select "maintain aspect ratio" to make the game run in a 4:3 ratio (no stretching) are unavailable unless you set your desktop to display at some resolution other than your monitor's native res. Which I'm sure I was able to do on this monitor, running at its native res, before I upgraded to Win7 and installed the newest CCC and gfx card drivers.

However - after a combination of searching through the forums here, following the various leads I found, and tinkering on my end, I have been able to get the game to run at a res of 1400x1050 in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which takes advantage of the highest res possible on this monitor without stretching the game into a WS format (which others may not mind, but I find it very offputting).

First step was to install the Res Fix mod I linked to in my initial reply (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=1092) and follow the directions for that to make the game run at 1400x1050 by editing the d3d9.cfg file that is used with that mod.

The second step involved the fact that I have two display devices hooked up to the gfx card in my rig - one is my monitor here on the desk, the other is a TV a few feet away. So I have two desktop displays available. I had already set them to "duplicate" rather than "extended" because on the "extended" setting SH3 Commander will not display properly (by default it opens in the center of the available desktop "space" and cannot be moved - so in "extended" mode half of it would be on the monitor, and half on the TV screen, which I don't use except to watch movies).

Now since my monitor runs at 1680x1050, I have the display set to that res in Windows Control Panel (and CCC). When the two displays are configured as duplicates of each other, the 1680x1050 res applies to the TV as well - but that's not its native res. Consequently when I go into CCC and right-click on the TV's icon in Desktops & Displays to configure that display, all the options for scaling are available (even tho' they are greyed out if I do the same thing to configure the monitor display instead). So I configured the TV's display to Enable GPU Scaling and Use Centered Timings (which may have the same basic effect as Maintain Aspect Ratio, but to me it looks better for some reason - but either one worked as far as keeping the 4:3 aspect ratio for the game).

Now the really tricky part - when I would run the game and look at it on the monitor, it would still be stretched out to WS because the monitor is still running at its native res and the display configuration I set up for scaling didn't apply to it, only the TV. BUT - in one of the threads here I found a link to a program called Display Changer, which can be downloaded and installed as freeware for private use and which allows you to set up a command line in a shortcut to any application using various commands, one of which will force Windows to change your monitor resolution only when that app is running. Done properly, it changes the res before launching the app, and changes it back to whatever is set in Control Panel after the app closes.

So now when I launch SH3.exe, the resolution of my desktop is reset to 1400x1050 by the Display Changer command line - and voilà, since the monitor is no longer at its native res, the scaling options that I set up for the TV as a duplicate desktop now apply to it as well, and the game runs perfectly at 1400x1050 in a 4:3 aspect ratio with no stretching. When I exit the game, the desktop resolution is reset to 1680x1050, and everything goes back to just the way it looked before I launched the game.

And I've also found that this works even when I launch the game from Commander instead of just clicking on the shortcut to the SH3.exe file to open the game directly.

Now, I don't know how this will play out if you've only got one display - but it's something you might try. What I'm wondering is if you changed your resolution to something less than 1680x1050, it would open up the scaling options for your display in CCC. Then select Enable GPU Scaling and either Maintain Aspect Ratio or Used Centered Timings. Click OK to save the changes and get out of CCC. Then go back into Display Properties in Windows and change your desktop res back to 1680x1050. It's possible that the options you selected when you were at the lower res, will "stick" and go into effect again any time your res is reset to something other than 1680x1050. If so, you can use Display Changer to force the res change only when SH3 is running (along with the Res Fix as noted above) and see what happens.

Display Changer can be found here:

http://www.12noon.com/index.htm

Anyway - if you've already figured something out on your own, or opted for one of the WS mods and got it working for you, then disregard all of that. :D I just thought I would throw it out there since I ran into res issues of my own trying to get my reinstallation running the way I wanted it to and finally figured out a way to run the game in my preferred style without having to tinker with a bunch of stuff before every session. :yeah:

[Echolot]

Hello.

My last monitor was a 22 inch and i played SHIII with HiResFix in 1680x1050 without problems except the little stretching.
After i buy a new gfx card and a 24 inch monitor i edited the d3d9.cfg file to 1920x1200 and get the error message "can not initialize 3d engine". The monitor was connected via dvi cable. After buying a "Dual DVI Cable" no more problems. Some of my friends have less problems with gaming graphics after this tip (hint?) and changed their hdmi cable to a dual dvi cable. Now i am playing SHIII in 1920x1200 and enjoying it.

Maybe this helps and sry for the poor english.

Greets from Germany. Echol:sunny:t.

PS When i put the d3d9.dll and d3d9.ini from Widescreen MaGui into my SHIII directory and set the ini file to 1920x1200 i can't play the game but can make great screenshots (1920x1200).