Hello boyz, I bought a new (EDIT: 17" /EDIT)LCD screen and tried out some game i worked on, I was making this game on resolution 320 x 200.. It looks very vague and overzoomed.. Heres a screenshot.. how can I change this back to sharp pixelated like it was. Im using resolution 1280 by 1024 right now on my screen and this is how my game works out:




Any ideas how to solve this problem, cause it's nasty!

1280x1024 is the native resolution for 17" and 19" lcd monitors. Anything lower than that will look cruddy. I don't know why it would look like that though, if you're already using said resolution. That is, unless you have like a 24" monitor or something. I've only come into aspect ratio problems with AGS games, not anything like this.

Hey Ildu, long time no seen, seems u know something about this tho.. its a 17" screen i have..

That's because, to be honest, LCD screens are far inferior to CRTs when set to resolution that's not native to the screens.

It just stretches the 320x200 screen to its 1280x1024 native pixel matrix. Maybe you can try messing with the LCD's controls and see if there're at least some settings to changing the filtering used to maybe give you a "better" image.

I don't suppose setting the res to 640x400 and playing in a window is an option?

i had a similar problem, ever thing i'd worked on looked washed out on the new monitor, i was sure it was down to the monitor but on check other peoples work it wasn't the case
the old monitor could only handle 800x600 screen res

You get so used to the old monitor, my old one was wayout on the red scale and contrast,
anything grey looked brown but i just got so used to it i never noticed till we upgraded lol

if you look at this thread theres some pics of my bike and i've mimiced the before and after between the monitors
http://lassie.10.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=287

Quote from: DonB (via pm)my message was directly onto AGS, since I have this problem with no other programs/games, only with AGS, so apparently it got something to do with AGS options..

Are you sure? What other programs do you have that use actual 320x200 resolution?

As the others have said, your LCD has a fixed number of pixels that determines its native, physical resolution. With your 17" it's probably 1280x1024 pixels. If you run any other resolution, the image has to be stretched/resized to this format, resulting in blurryness most of the time.

Here's another explanation: http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2004/09/16/whats-native-resolution/

Unless I've misunderstood your original problem (blurryness), this is an issue inherent in flat panel displays and as such not directly related to AGS.

Yes it is about the bluriness indeed..

I understand it a bit more then, I also tried out some other low res AGS games and they all look shitty.. so it is about my LCD monitor.
My desire for a fullscreen pixelated 90's game is not doable anymore?. since most of the people will ave LCD screens in the near future.

this sucks! /cries
dilemma..

New edit: Or wait.. I just tried 640 x 480 and it all sharpenes up of.. might be a solution..

It's all due to the upscaling.  It can't display 320x240, so it has to resize the image to the native resolution. 

One other thing you can try is adjusting how it does this.  I haven't got an ATI card, but nVidia's control panel lets you choose whether the monitor or card does the upscaling (though I don't see a lot of difference). 

Best solution's probably to either run a game as close as possible to the native (like your trying 640x480), or running in a window (though it'll be really tiny compared to the whole monitor res). 

It's definitely one of the downsides to LCDs... that and ghosting for those of us with POS ones.

Yo to you as well, Don .

Well, running a 320x200 or 320x240 game should work perfectly with 1280x1024, if you can only get the scaling to scale without any filters. 320 x 4 = 1280, so you should be able to just use a nearest neighbor method which would just quadruple every pixel in size. I don't know how this would work in practice, but I'm guessing someone here is resourceful enough to make it work in ags (unless it already works due to the extended list of filters available).

Whenever I play AGS games (which is pretty rarely), I use a double-sized window for 320x240/320x200 games, unless being pixel perfect is required, in which case I use the original sized window. It doesn't look too nice when you're playing a 320p game as 640p and the text and other dynamically loaded content is pixel perfect while everything else is doubled. I don't play AGS games in full screen, unless they're 800x600 painted games.

Quote from: ildu on Mon 05/03/2007 12:32:47Well, running a 320x200 or 320x240 game should work perfectly with 1280x1024

Yes, 1280 is a multiple of 320 so it can scale cleanly horizontally, but 200/240 doesn't fit vertically so the image still looks blurry.

Are there LCDs out there that have the option to cleanly scale up, simply leaving a small border of unused pixels around the image, but retaining the image's sharpness?

Dunno..

Older laptops had that - that you could set in the BIOS whether it would scale to fit or just retain the original pixel size, resulting in a tiny window on your big screen with the game in it.

Just get used to it (what?!), because I had the same on my macbook, which has a widescreen, so not only is it blurry, it's stretched, but I hardly even notice it anymore.

All LCD's have this problem, as it's a problem inherent to the technology. If resolution = 1280x1024, then resolution != 320x200, and therefore it has to either leave it intact, causing a tiny viewport, or it scales it.

One solution might be the graphical filters that were recently added to AGS. Though they're terribly slow, it's either that or simply accept the blurriness.

Which really isn't that annoying after a while.

The pixel-doubling filters are actually really fast, and will improve the quality of the scaling. On older games that don't support the graphics filters, you'll have to try running them in twice the resolution, even if this means they run slower. Other than that, it's less to do with the monitor than with the video card. If you have an ATI or nVidia card, you probably have settings for how to fit smaller images to the screen. You can scale in your monitor (bad), or in the card (somewhat better), or leave a border around the edges (will probably look tiny). You might even have an option for what kind of scaling to use. If you have a setting for "maintain aspect ratio", you should normally use that (the exception is some 320x200 games that have been designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio and stretched pixels).

In theory, it IS possible to scale a lower resolution onto a higher-resolution screen and have it appear sharp, or only a tiny bit soft. It's just that the necessary settings are rarely provided.

Shame about the res problem, and it's also a shame your GIP thread got locked because of me, this post was the first I ever heard of it ><

I never knew there was a "don't show an interest in old games" rule

GIP thread what??

So.. in other words.. I could use the recently added graphical filters for AGS? How do I activate them?
Tbh.. the annoyness stays.. especially when i try it out on small screen again and get confronted with the major difference again..

It's possible that you don't need any filters.

From game setup, set game to 640x400 and make sure that "force alternate letterbox resolution" is also ON.

While 320x240 games are extremely blurry on my 17" LCD, in 640x480 it's fixed somehow. In 640x400 it's bad and blurry again. So, try some modes, it might just solve the problem.

Quote from: DonB on Mon 05/03/2007 23:10:40
So.. in other words.. I could use the recently added graphical filters for AGS? How do I activate them?

In the latest versions of AGS, it's an option in winsetup.exe (or you can edit the cfg file). Using the 2X or 3X filters is better than setting the game resolution to 640x400 or 640x480 because it's faster and the graphics are exactly the same (unlike using a higher resolution, where scaled sprites and outlined fonts look different).

QuoteGIP thread what??

You have a link in your signiature that links to a "games in production" thread you started for Roxy Fox. However, because you haven't updated it in a long while, and I hadn't realised this, the fact I replied to it yesterday got it locked. So I was apologising for that

That sucks, DonB. I specifically didn't buy an LCD monitor for years for fear of this. I only bought one earlier this year after making absolutely sure that low resolution games would look good on it. I'm afraid cheaper LCD monitors suck at low res games, and not even the expensive ones are as good as the good old CRT monitors. They take up less space on your desk at least.

However, this looks worse than what I've seen on even the cheapest of LCD monitors. The image in the first post, is that a screenshot, or did you create that image to illustrate the problem? If the problem is in the way the LCD monitor presents the image, it shouldn't be possible to take a screenshot of the blurriness, since the upscaling woud happen inside the monitor after the image is sent to it. If you really were able to take a screenshot of the problem I think you should investigate if it is the driver of your graphics card that is helpfully upscaling the image to the monitor's native resolution. If this is the case, it should hopefully be possible to change how it does that. Can you tell us what graphics card you have?

If you created that image in photoshop to illustrate the problem, disregard the above.