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16/9 on old video cards

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First post, by iulianv

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Does anyone know what's the oldest video card that supports, say, 1680 x 1050?

I guess another way of not completely ruining the retro experience on wide monitors would be the monitor having the possibility not to stretch a 4/3 input on the entire screen, but instead center it... is that a common option? I've never owned a wide monitor, so I'm not very familiar with what they can do...

Reply 2 of 10, by Chewhacca

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My 24-inch Samsung has an option to auto-detect the aspect ratio and set it accordingly. It's a few years old now, newer monitors should have this option too.

Reply 3 of 10, by jwt27

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Any old VGA card supports 16:10 aspect ratios.

(320x200 😉)

Reply 4 of 10, by akula65

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I was also concerned about this issue when my CRT monitors started to fail on my old Pentium III systems running Win98 SE a few years ago. I discovered that an 18.5 inch Samsung SyncMaster 943swx (1366x768 max.) had the ability to preserve the aspect ratio and center the image for both Voodoo5 and GeForce4 Ti-4200 cards. The monitor also allows the GeForce4 to function properly in widescreen mode for newer games that support wide aspect ratios if a more recent GeForce driver is used. I lost about 1/2 inch vertically and horizontally compared to the 17 inch CRT monitors I had been using, but the improvement in color and sharpness makes up for the slightly smaller size.

If you look at similar posts on this site, you will find that some (but not all) monitors will allow you to preserve the aspect ratio, and even some that supposedly will detect and preserve the aspect ratio fail to do so in particular circumstances.

Good luck in your search.

Reply 5 of 10, by swaaye

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I've been running a Win98SE box on my Dell 2405FPW (1920x1200) and the Voodoo5, ATI and NV cards do get the widescreen resolutions.

I have had problems with the VGA input not liking every video card though. Some cards give the monitor problems with image fit and sync at some resolutions. DVI would be ideal, but then old video cards often had buggy DVI output too. Radeon 9800 and older, and GeForce FX and older, for example have some DVI compliance issues. There was an article on Toms Hardware about this.

'90s video cards however usually have drivers which only give the usual 4:3 and 5:4 resolutions. You should be able to use Powerstrip to create custom resolutions.

Reply 6 of 10, by elfuego

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This is the first time I hear that V5 supports widescreen. What drivers are you using?

Reply 7 of 10, by leileilol

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Toastytech had a "Sick windows trick" showing wide ratio resolutions in Windows 95 with a Voodoo5 thanks to a modified .inf. That's probably where.

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Reply 8 of 10, by swaaye

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elfuego wrote:

This is the first time I hear that V5 supports widescreen. What drivers are you using?

The last 98SE WHQL pack actually. It detects 1920x1200 at least. I haven't looked for lower widescreen resolutions.

3dfx Voodoo4/5 V1.04.00 Latest Final Version, WHQL Certified
http://falconfly.de/vsa100.htm

Reply 9 of 10, by mr_bigmouth_502

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PROTIP: resolutions like 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 are actually 16:10.

Reply 10 of 10, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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leileilol wrote:

Toastytech had a "Sick windows trick" showing wide ratio resolutions in Windows 95 with a Voodoo5 thanks to a modified .inf. That's probably where.

Just to point to it:

http://www.toastytech.com/guis/miscb.html

As long as your card as enough video memory to do 1680x1050 this should work on Win9x, though I'm not sure if toasty's method works for NT-based Windozes. Getting all the proper sync/timing values would be kind of a hassle too, although here's a start:

http://www.epanorama.net/faq/vga2rgb/calc.html

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