Unfortunately the "mid-XP era" is mostly StarForce-inundated. Good luck!

A few obvious examples that fit your criteria: Republic Commando, Just Cause, Project Snowblind, Supreme Commander, F.E.A.R., Serious Sam 2

tldr: games from ~8-10 years ago.

Considering that:

- XP became available in late 2001
- officialy ended in mid 2014
- Lost its predominant status in market share to Windows 7 in 2011

I assume you mean around 2006-2007 by mid XP?

I'm by no mean acknowledgeable on anything video game-related past year 2003, when my honeymoon with video games was suddenly aborted by Doom 3, but I do remember watching gameplay footage for BioShock (2007) and I tell you that was quite a thing. Maybe you should give it a go.

philscomputerlab wrote:

- Without widescreen hacks / tweaks (so you can only play them at 1024 x 768 and other retro resolution) / or tweaks are just stretched

Hum, I would think that in the mid-XP era, widescreen support was pretty much standard?
Games like Doom3, BioShock, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 etc work fine in 16:9 or such. And I would classify those as early XP-era (XP being from 2002, these games from 2003-2004ish).

I would say mid-XP era is more like Crysis-territory.

Etherlords II. 1024x768 hardcoded into the interface. Works well in Windows 7.

Hmm. It seems early XP games would be more suitable. Far Cry or FEAR are definitely too new.

EDIT: Hitman 47 and Daikatana work well so far.

Those two games are late Win98SE/earlyWinME/Win2000 3dfxdeathknell era, one of my favorite eras with lots of amazing games 😀

I would put earlyXP in 2001-2003 (Dell Dimension hell), midXP in 2004-2007 (Service packs, gratuitous copy protection and the last non-DX10 cards), and lateXP in 2007-2010 (Vista/7 upgrade reluctancy considering)

Don't forget there ARE some games before XP that have native widescreen horizontal expansion out-of-the-box without patches, like Battlezone II and Giants: Citizen Kabuto. it's far few though. so i find the "no i dont want no widescreens" bit unneccessarily excluding

In light of what's been said, maybe it would be a better idea to have a "last 9x games" thread instead.

Have no idea on what games from mid-XP-era would be.
Whenever I am thinking of 2005'ish games, I kind of thinking on Halflife2, Doom3 and the Battlefield franchise.
Possible some of the Medal of honor games. Or call of duty. (funny they all are FPS games)

A few others I tried are POP sands of time, Splinter Cell and Serious Sam SE. Medal of honour also works great!

All of these games only support 4:3 resolutions out of the box, and work fine in Windows 10. Enough games for my project 😀

And yes, I'm surprised how many can be modified to work on widescreen, but this is not what this project is about.

I didn't say they would need modification. I said there's some pre-XP games that do support proper widescreen without anything needed to do by the user and how it's unneccessary to write them off if they're from the era and meet the other criteria you want and they do happen to support it.

Wasn't answering you. Anyway, for this (video) project I can't use games that have selectable wide screen resolutions. Just 1024x768, 1600x1200, the usual.

"Will Rock" (2003) comes to mind. Not sure if it can be tweaked to allow for widescreen modes like the multitude of Q3-based games from back in the day.

KOTOR

Thanks!

saturn wrote:

KOTOR

Works great, so does the sequel.

What about 2D / pixelled games? A lot of those have hardcoded resolution for obvious reasons. I'm thinking of stuff like Cave Story (2004), La-Mulana (original, 2007), etc. Not sure if they scale or not.

You could also try Tecno: the Base (an FPS, 2008ish). I vaguely remember playing it pillarboxed on my 16:10 laptop.

Hard-coded is not good for my project, it should have selectable resolutions, but old-school resolutions only.

I have a lot of games already now, plenty for this project 😀

Phil, I'm now playing Serious Sam FE and it actually has a widescreen option. I wonder if that works (haven't got a widescreen monitor 🤣 )

RacoonRider wrote:

Phil, I'm now playing Serious Sam FE and it actually has a widescreen option. I wonder if that works (haven't got a widescreen monitor 🤣 )

I went with SE and the game is quite easy to run. 1600 x 1200 no problem on a 6600GT. It also has timedemo recordings and benchmark facilities built in!