AGS Games Scaling Problem

[PhantomNorik]

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, but it didn't seem to fit in the tech section.
In every AGS game I try to play full screen, the picture is shifted slightly in a southeast direction. The game is cut off slightly on the right and bottom of the picture. Graphic filtering works but not all games support this. Some non-AGS freeware games do this too. Basically, I am unable to play most games properly. The games say 320x240 resolution is unsupported. The problem with that is my old Windows XP, with the same graphics card, said the same thing but I used a certain Nvidia driver that supported a scaling fix. This fix is not the flat panel scaling fix, by the way. I have a different computer with Windows 7 64x now and the old driver is unsupported. I just want to be able to play these games. I sone a lot of searching, but no luck. Any ideas? Thanks.

[Wyz]

You could play them in a window. I play most games windowed with 3x nearest pixel filter. I don't mind the pixels.

[Khris]

Regarding 320x2X0 AGS games, you should be able to set the scaling to 2x in winsetup. Fullscreen@640x4X0 should be supported by all graphics cards / OSs and look fine.
If you use a driver fix, this will probably result in a blurry picture since it's going to use bilinear and not nearest neighbor filtering.

Regarding the shift, monitors usually store settings like offsets or width and height on a per-resolution basis so moving the lowres picture up and to the right using the buttons on your monitor won't affect the position of your highres windows desktop.
If you play the games @ 640 this might fix the issue though.

[tzachs]

Yes, I'm having a similar problem (in two computers I'm using) with some of the games.
For me, the offset keeps changing in "full screen", and if I restart the game long enough (3-4 times usually does it) it ends up being ok...

[PhantomNorik]

I think changing the offsets on the monitor after starting the game will work. The picture is centered nicely. The filtering only works for the newer games that have it, not the older games without any filtering. I was hoping for a way to make my computer support 320x200, like my old one, but since the drivers that enabled the old Nvidia control panel with the nvidia scaling option isn't supported on Windows 7, I guess this will work pretty well. Thanks, I appreciate it. Still, if anyone knows of a way to enable support for 320x200 or a total scaling fix, I'd like to hear it. In the past, such a solution fixed all my problem on my old computer.

[Khris]

You could try the Omega drivers.
I didn't check if they support 320 though.

As an alternative, as long as the AGS game isn't too old, you can try running it with a newer version of the engine.
You need to rename the main game exe to "ac2game.dat", then copy "acwin.exe" from e.g. AGS 2.72 into the game dir. To run setup, run "acwin.exe --setup" from the command line.

[PhantomNorik]

The Omega Drivers are intriguing. I'll give them a try. The resolution stuff sounds good.
I had no idea about the setup thing, as I'm only somewhat familiar with the engine itself. It sounds cool, so I'll try that too.
For the most part, the monitor adjustment thing works nicely for the 640 resolution and higher.
I'll look into the Omega drivers and see about the 320 support, which I'd still like to have.
Thanks Khris.

[Layabout]

Really? I have the latest nVidia drivers for my card 8600m gt and the NV control panel has the option under the 'Adjust desktop size and position'. The best option is 'Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio'

Personally I just run all my games in a window anyway.

In any case, using 640 resolution changes nothing to the look of the game, except with scaling sprites (which is a minor thing) and text afaik.

[PhantomNorik]

Layabout: what operating system and monitor do you have? The settings are different depending on if you have an HD monitor or on an older operating system that supports the old Nvidia control panel, which had a Nvidia scaling option.

Khris: I've tried to run a game with the new engine but I'm having trouble figuring out the command line stuff. Could you explain it more?