Tachyon: The Fringe

[Malatar]

I would love to be able to put the resolution for this game higher than 1024x768... Anyone know a way to push this old but still amusing game into 2560x1600 or any other higher res?

Thanks in advance...

Malatar

[Arnkell]

Megabump! Hello, new user, I'm a great enthusiast of "Tachyon: The Fringe" and I'm planning to reinstall it and play it through again as soon as the boys and girls over at http://fringespace.org/ has finished upgrading a few more of the Bora-ships' textures and models.

Is there a way to trick the "Tachyon"-game into using 16:10 widescreen 1680x1050 resolution in Vista? Perhaps with ATI Tray Tools? Anyone?

I saw someone on this forum mentioning Tachyon having resolutions "hardcoded" into the game, what does that mean? The post didn't give more exposition than that.

Grateful for response...

/Arnkell

[whismerhill]

Megabump! Hello, new user, I'm a great enthusiast of "Tachyon: The Fringe" and I'm planning to reinstall it and play it through again as soon as the boys and girls over at http://fringespace.org/ has finished upgrading a few more of the Bora-ships' textures and models.

Is there a way to trick the "Tachyon"-game into using 16:10 widescreen 1680x1050 resolution in Vista? Perhaps with ATI Tray Tools? Anyone?

I saw someone on this forum mentioning Tachyon having resolutions "hardcoded" into the game, what does that mean? The post didn't give more exposition than that.

Grateful for response...

/Arnkell

a quick search on google with the following words :

Code: Select all

define:hardcoded

will result in this link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcoded

which I'll quote because I'm in a good mood ;) :

Hard coding (also, hard-coding or hardcoding) refers to the software development practice of embedding input or configuration data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, or fixed formatting of the data, instead of obtaining that data from external sources or generating data or formatting in the program itself with the given input.

what this means is that modifying the executable data (in hexadecimal)
would be needed in order to achieve higher resolution.
also I took a look at screenshots and there seems to be a lot of 2D HUD elements so whether or not those would not be screwed by any such modification remains to be seen!

[Bet]

Tachyon at high res would be really impressive. It's hard enough to get my joystick set up the way I like in the game, but besides that, it was as great as Freespace. Though Freespace has a far better engine and joystick configuration. Just overall technically better. If only all games were like that.

[JGZinv]

Well not to necro a thread 3 years... but it's so convenient to keep it all together.

I'm head of that FringeSpace Project mentioned earlier, and while we're still working
on that Freespace 2 mod, a couple of people (me included) have brought up seeing if it
would be possible to force Tach into a different resolution.

I've released mods for Tachyon and have about 99% of the files decrypted from the old
modders when the game was in it's golden years. I thumbed through a bunch of files and
located the config and description files for the launcher. I've got the hud and menu config files
too if someone "really really" wanted to edit them post resolution change.

Oh and we still play Tach on sundays @ 2 PM EST. :)


= Edit =

I have managed to change the resolution via hex edits. Have some interesting problems though.
Location was the 00148730 ~ 60 block of space.exe Front.cfg and Front.bin control what resolution
"names" you can pick from. A straight edit of the space.exe and launching from that works fine though
after initial setup. Except where noted Tach seems to scale the menus fine, it's in-game that's a problem.

640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 are standard resolutions.

On a 1280x1024 screen, tried:
1152x864 - worked fine.

1280x960 - Mouse prevented from moving right or down, keyboard only is fine.
Mouse always causing craft to spin in one direction slowly.

1280x1024 - Mouse prevented from moving right or down, keyboard only works, HUD elements are
out of place. Mouse always causing craft to spin in one direction quickly. Black bar on bottom of screen
in some menus.

On a 1366x768 screen:
1280x768 - worked fine, except that copy and paste into photoshop reports the image
size as 8x6... weird.

1366x768 - cuts off the screen bottom by a large amount as though it's vertically super stretched.
Can't access menus, so can't test anything else.

[JGZinv]

So um... any ideas on the mouse problem above?

It's pretty much the only thing from keeping this from working.

[WalMartCartPusher]

This is an old thread but I found the fix for Tachyon: The Fringe

Use a glide wrapper called nGlide (found here: http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide) and set the video settings in the Tachyon.cfg file to the following:

[VIDEO]
WINDOWED=0
USE_HARDWARE=1
NO_VSYNC=0
RES=2
HW_TYPE=1
DEVICE=0
DEF_GAMMA=100
DEF_BRIGHT=70

With the nGLide configureator you can use custom desktop resolutions by creating a custom desktop resolution with your video card settings.

The "Hw_3dfx.dll" file in the game directory has messed up alpha blending so just make a backup of that and replace it with this one here (http://www.zeus-software.com/files/ngli ... _patch.zip)

BOOM!!! Glorious High Def Gameplay!!!

As far as custom resolutions are concerned, try using a 3:2 aspect ratio. 1620x1080 is a good start.

[johnney351]

the game works at 1920x1080, tested, using Glide wrapper from fringespace.org with the visualenhancement mod.

I can force 8x Ant-Aliasing with my graphics card drivers Cat. control centre (AMD Radeon 7870 )

game looks so much better !

cheers
johnney