Wide screen BETA test - for CD owners only

DefCon3 · #1 October 27th, 2010, 02:46 PM

I have been able to get your program to run in Windows mode under different resolutions on both my laptop and my PC. However, I've never been particularly fond of playing in a window that only fills part of the screen. That's why I was excited to hear that you had released a beta widescreen resolution. Lately, I've been playing WinSPMBT on an older PC I have that runs under Win XP. Your program runs perfectly in full screen mode under that OS. That said, I would really love to be able to play this game in full screen on a 24" monitor.

Task bars on both of my Win 7 machines are in their default location and are set at the default size. I'll try your idea of experimenting with other desktop themes to see if that makes a difference. I'll also try your sound-related suggestions. Will let you know if anything helps.

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestions Andy.

Larry

DefCon3 · #2 October 28th, 2010, 09:54 AM

I still haven't been able to get WinSPMBT to display my Samsung monitor's native 1920x1200 screen in desktop windowed mode. When I try that, I get a window that looks to be approximately 1920x600. This compresses the opening WinSPMBT screen as per my attachment. Once I get to this point, I can't run the game and I can't close WinSPMBT either unless I use Task Manager to end the process.

I've tried changing my desktop to Windows Classic with autohide turned off and it still didn't make any difference. The highest resolution I can get in windowed mode without distortion is 1280x1024. That's true for both my laptop and my PC. That resolution's ok on my laptop but it makes for a very small playable screen on my PC. For some reason, I also can't WinSPMBT's 1600x1280 mode to run in Windowed mode on my PC. It gives me the same compressed screen as desktop mode even if I change my screen resolution from 1920x1200 to 1600x1200 before running WinSPMBT. Hard to understand.

Mobhack · #3 October 28th, 2010, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DefCon3

I still haven't been able to get WinSPMBT to display my Samsung monitor's native 1920x1200 screen in desktop windowed mode. When I try that, I get a window that looks to be approximately 1920x600. This compresses the opening WinSPMBT screen as per my attachment. Once I get to this point, I can't run the game and I can't close WinSPMBT either unless I use Task Manager to end the process.

I've tried changing my desktop to Windows Classic with autohide turned off and it still didn't make any difference. The highest resolution I can get in windowed mode without distortion is 1280x1024. That's true for both my laptop and my PC. That resolution's ok on my laptop but it makes for a very small playable screen on my PC. For some reason, I also can't WinSPMBT's 1600x1280 mode to run in Windowed mode on my PC. It gives me the same compressed screen as desktop mode even if I change my screen resolution from 1920x1200 to 1600x1200 before running WinSPMBT. Hard to understand.

As you can see from reading the posts in the threads before this - others have run monitors at this resolution under windows 7.

Thoughts - do you have a real dedicated video card, or a 'graphics accelerator' using shared system memory?. If the latter - then perhaps you may need to allocate more system RAM to it?.

Other thought - are the graphics card's drivers up to date?.

Also - my wide screen monitor refused to allow play at the full monitor resolution. It would only display at 1366 by something. I eventually found a button in the card's control panel which 'forced' 1080i mode and it then played at the full resolution happily - but at only a 30hz screen refresh rate... yech!.

Cheers
Andy

DefCon3 · #4 October 28th, 2010, 03:48 PM

My apologies Andy and Don. I was certain I had turned autohide off on my PC yesterday when I was testing WinSPMBT at various resolutions. Don's email prompted me to look again however and, sure enough, it was turned on. As soon as I turned it off the program filled the screen in windows mode. WinSPMBT looks fantastic on a 24" monitor and plays very smoothly as well - what a great enhancement to the game. My thanks and, again, sorry for the misinformation.

Given my obvious mistake, I decided I'd better double check my 1366x768 laptop. It definitely does not fill the screen, even with autohide turned off. The best I can get from it is 1280x1024 but that just about fills the screen so I'm happy. I will, however, look at your system RAM and graphics suggestions Andy.

Thanks again for your support. Looking forward to seeing WinSPWW2 on the big screen.

Larry

PanzerBob · #5 January 25th, 2011, 12:04 AM

It works fine with my new system, I'm pleased Thanks a million!!

Mobhack · #6 February 2nd, 2011, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DefCon3

My apologies Andy and Don. I was certain I had turned autohide off on my PC yesterday when I was testing WinSPMBT at various resolutions. Don's email prompted me to look again however and, sure enough, it was turned on. As soon as I turned it off the program filled the screen in windows mode. WinSPMBT looks fantastic on a 24" monitor and plays very smoothly as well - what a great enhancement to the game. My thanks and, again, sorry for the misinformation.

Given my obvious mistake, I decided I'd better double check my 1366x768 laptop. It definitely does not fill the screen, even with autohide turned off. The best I can get from it is 1280x1024 but that just about fills the screen so I'm happy. I will, however, look at your system RAM and graphics suggestions Andy.

Thanks again for your support. Looking forward to seeing WinSPWW2 on the big screen.

Larry

My new windows 7 laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1545 with 1366x768 monitor.

In windowed mode it displays exactly the same behaviour as you describe.

In Full Screen mode it works fine.

It seems to be the width - Any of the 4:3 resolutions that are smaller in width than 1366 work, even though some are deeper in depth than 768. The deep part is cropped to fit the task-bar fine.

Setting the Dell to use 1024x768 desktop produces a reduced screen (it does not seem to stretch like others do - it simply postage stamps the screen!). That works with all modes just fine.

There are apparently some monitors that come with 1360x768 and I would be interested in hearing if any of our users run one of those in windowed mode and if it works. Maybe 6 pixels makes a difference?. In which case I may have to write a special bit of code for 1366 wides.

Andy