Widescreen Gaming Forum

I'm not sure where the best place would be to post this question....

I have a 2:35.1 (actually technically it's 2:37.1) screen. I have an Optoma HD7100 projector (native 1280 x 720). When I watch a 2:35.1 Blu Ray movie, (via a standalone Sony Blu Ray player), it has the black bars on top and bottom. I use the Poor Man's Zoom Trick to zoom out the image to fill my 2:35.1 screen. The black bars are still there, but they've been zoomed out onto the black background that surrounds my screen. They are basically invisible to the naked eye (unless you're trying really hard to notice them). I love watching the widescreen movies this way.

When it comes to PC games, I've been instead playing those in a normal 16:9 type mode. 1280 x 720 (because the projector is only 1280 x 720). I've heard people talk about playing PC games in wider ratios, and across multi-monitors and all that, but really didn't know much about it. I'm running Windows 7, 64 bit, with a i5 2500k cpu and a GTX 560 Ti gpu.

I tried going into the Nvidia Control Panel and creating a custom resolution. I went into the "Change Resolution" area, and clicked on the button that said "Customize". I created a resolution of 1280 x 540. I tried it on some games, and it only seemed to "kinda" work on one game. Portal. When I went into Portal, I actually found 1280 x 540 in the list of available resolutions from within the game. The problem is, it didn't actually look like a 2:35.1 type of look, until I checked the box for "windowed mode". When I had it in "windowed mode", it seemed like it was actually a 2:35.1 look to it. Problem is, the background is my windows desktop. With all the icons and everything splashing onto the back blackground. Very noticeable and distracting.

I zoomed the image out to fill the full 2:35.1 area of my screen and it looked amazing, but again, the icons and windows start button and stuff was showing up faintly on the black background.

I tried games like Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Bulletstorm, Batman Arkham Asylum, Fallout 3 and a few other games, and none of them showed an option for a resolution like 1280 x 540.

Then, I went into the Nvidia Control Panel and went to " Adjust Desktop size and position". I check the box to have the GPU do the scaling. I checked the box that says to "override the scaling mode set by games and programs".

I tried the games again, and this time the projector would go into a 1280 x 540 resolution, but the dimensions were all wonky, and the video signal didn't seem to sync the right way. I'm going to try a resolution of 1920 x 816 now instead, and see if I have any success with that. If anybody has any suggestions on things I could try to get the games to have a letterboxed look like a 2:35.1 blu ray, and then I just zoom it out, to get the 2:35.1 wide look. Please point a noob in the right direction.

Update:

I got it to work !


Yes, this is so awesome. Playing games in 2:35.1 is a really, really cool experience. I feel like I've seen a whole new world tonite. I bought Half-Life 2 for $2.49 on the Steam sale and figured I would try that game out. First, I did the custom resolution at 1920 x 816. I also went into the timings,and changed it from automatic to manual. I left the timings at normal 1280 x 720, but still had the custom resolution. This seemed to do the trick.Nearly every single game I tried worked. Some of them with pretty spectacular results.

Here is a quick list of games I tried that worked:

Half-Life 2
Need for Speed:Hot Pursuit
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Batman Arkham Asylum
NBA 2K11
Bulletstorm
Dead Space
Fifa 12 (demo)
Crysis 1 (demo)
Assassin's Creed 2
Prince of Persia (2008)


The only game I tried that didn't work was Fallout 3.I'm sure there has to be some kind of 2:35.1 mod for Fallout 3, I just need to check Fallout Nexus. There is about 10 more games I need to try out, but so far,I'm loving this!