# Old Games On Widescreen Monitor?



## riven2000 (Oct 20, 2006)

Hi, all. I'm looking at buying a new LCD monitor, and have a question about how some old games would work on it. I've read that on most widescreen LCD monitors, older, "slideshow" games like Myst and Riven get stretched horizontally across the screen because of the monitor's aspect ratio. Is this always true? Are there any that don't cause this?

Any help would be _greatly_ appreciated!!


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## Mystic Gohan (Oct 20, 2006)

I have a 30" and it runs things like Warcraft III, SimCity 4, Neverwinter Nights just fine.


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## riven2000 (Oct 20, 2006)

It's mainly the slideshow style games I'm wondering about, since they're pre-rendered and weren't designed for 16:1 monitors.


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## Super Pollo (Oct 20, 2006)

I think that it will just make horizontal black borders along the edges to accomidate to the original settings for display.  When my brother runs Starcraft: Brood War on his iBook (no clue about the screen size right now) it makes the borders.


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## Morutea (Oct 21, 2006)

Hello all, 

It is my first post  

I want your thoughts on this: 
Do you feel that because your parents may have supported you when you were younger, that you "owe" it to them to support them now? 


(Pay the bills they run up etc, just because they did it for you when you were younger and unable to work) 


Thanks.


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## Lt Major Burns (Oct 21, 2006)

wow, that is quite inappropriate!

not only is it in the wrong thread, the wrong sub forum, or forum, but probably on the wrong site to start with.  this is a website dedicated, in quite a focussed way, to discussing mac technical issues.


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## Mario8672 (Nov 18, 2006)

Crash And Burn :lol:


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## Mikuro (Nov 18, 2006)

That digression made my day. Seriously.

And now that the thread's been revived, I feel compelled to respond...

As for the _actual_ topic at hand, I'm really not sure. I know that my LCD will stretch any signal it gets to the bounds of the display, aspect ratio be damned. And I also know that OS X is perfectly willing to send signals in aspect ratios that are not 5:4 like my monitor. I'm not sure if this would happen with ALL LCDs or just a few (perhaps only non-Apple?).

Back when I used CRTs, the system wouldn't even allow my to change the resolution to anything not specifically supported by the monitor. I think the problem here is that with LCDs, the system allows any resolution, even those that don't fit the ratio of the monitor. So apps can change the resolution to anything they want. 

Off the top of my head, I would recommend loading the game, then switching the resolution back to something sensible manually by command-tabbing to System Preferences. I haven't tested this a whole lot myself, though, and it might not work well (or at all) with some games.


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