UCyborg, you have done a great job. Thank you! Half-Life was one of the first games I played and it is still one of my favorites. I played a lot of mods made for it and all of the games based on the GoldSource engine. I have a laptop with a bad integrated graphics card that handles OpenGL poorly. Due to this I can't run the current Steam version of Half-Life properly. Xash3D is great, but it still has some minor bugs and certain mods have issues with it or don't run at all. The original WON (retail) version doesn't have widescreen support (previously there was only a hack for OpenGL) and I didn't know about the MP3 soundtrack support, so I never considered going back to it until now.
I tested your patch (for version 1.1.1.0) with the expansion packs and official mods (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Deathmatch Classic, etc.). I managed to get the retail copy of Gunman Chronicles to run as a Half-Life mod as well by copying the "rewolf" folder from the game into the Half-Life folder.
I came across a bug that happens in all of the games with your patch. In multiplayer, the FOV adjuster stops working after a map change. This happens if you create a LAN server and then go back to the menu and create a new one. It also happens if you restart the server through the console or if the map changes due to map rotation. You can fix it by leaving the multiplayer portion of the game and going back to the beginning menu. If you enter multiplayer again and create a server, FOV adjustment works, but only until the next map change. FOV adjustment works fine in singleplayer.
One of the mods I tried was Day of Defeat. The retail version of DoD came in two variations: as a standalone boxed release and as a free mod for owners of Half-Life. I used the mod version which can be found on moddb.com (http://www.moddb.com/games/day-of-defeat/down … 10-won-hl1-only).
After installing and launching it I noticed that the FOV adjuster stopped working. In fact, it stopped working for all of the games. I checked the DoD installation files and it turns out that they contain updated engine dll files which seem to break the FOV adjuster, although widescreen support still works fine. DoD crashes if these files are replaced by the original ones. I reinstalled Half-Life afterwards and FOV adjustment worked again, but the multiplayer bug I previously described still remains.
These issues aren't big since the multiplayer for this version of Half-Life is dead, but I like to play with bots, and it is still possible to host a LAN game.
As far as the menus are concerned, I found a way to run them in any resolution without the background glitching. For example, if you want to run Counter-Strike with the menu at 1024x768 (it is 640x480 by default) you need to go into the "Half-Life\cstrike\gfx\shell" folder and resize the image "splash.bmp" to 1024x768 (I used Paint.NET, but you can use ordinary MS Paint as well, just remember to save the image as a 24-bit Bitmap). After that you need to launch the game with command line parameters: " -lw 1024 -lh 768 " (without quotes). The game menu will launch at that resolution and the background will render properly without artifacts.
The process is similar for the other games. For Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift it is a bit more complicated, because the splash.bmp file is packaged inside pak files (pak0.pak). You will need a special program to open the pak file and extract the image. I used PakScape (http://gamebanana.com/tools/2548). Extract the image to the right folder, resize and launch the game with correct parameters. For Half-Life the files are in the "valve" folder, for Opposing Force in "gearbox" and for Blue Shift in "bshift". (I can upload the images with correct folder structure if someone wants them).
This is still not perfect for Half-Life and other games that have animated elements in the menu background. The logo movies remain at the original resolution (640x480) and they are fixed at the top left corner of the screen. It's a minor issue, and you can disable the logo movies by deleting the "logo.avi" file in the "media" folder of each game or by replacing it with an empty movie file.
I encountered a bug when running the menus at the same resolution as the game. The brightness settings had no effect in-game and the game became very bright. This is however probably a hardware issue with my laptop, because I encountered problems with brightness in games before, and it has nothing to do with the splash.bmp file since it happens regardless of whether I use the original or modified version.
Once again, I want to thank you for the patches you made. You mentioned it yourself previously, but I will repeat it: you should probably upload your fixes to some modding website (such as moddb.com or gamebanana.com). It is easy for such things to get buried and forgotten in a forum and you would reach a greater number of people. I will report more bugs if I find any.