Reply 40 of 75, by teleguy
In the vanilla game you can switch between 3 resolutions in the game's option menu but there are also 3 higher hidden resolutions (1152x864, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200) that are only selectable by editing a registry key and this will not update the game's menu. The devs probably didn't make these resolutions available because they can cause issues which are partially fixed by this patch.
The widescreen patch replaces the upper 4x3 resolutions with 16x9 or 16x10 ones. The Launcher's main purpose is to provide an easy way to adjust the appropriate registry key.