So I’m thinking of moving my computer into the early 2000s with one o’ them fancy new LCD monitors. Everybody seems to be selling mostly or only widescreen ones these days.
The thing is, I’m old school, and run Windows 2000, and play some games that are hard-coded for 800x600 or other resolutions (in addition to Firefox, OpenOffice and a few other things that I assume will display at whatever Windows tells them to).
Anyone know if I might have problems with a widescreen monitor, and how to overcome them? Does it depend on my video card?
(For bonus points, if I ever invest in learning Linux, do most versions handle wide-screen monitors gracefully?)
OK one bump. Anyone? Bueller? C’mon people, throw me a bone here!
I don’t see why playing 800x600 games would be a problem. The original Delta Force runs just fine on my system under XP.
Hmm, interesting question. Never tried this under Win2K.
It’s controlled by the video card. Don’t know if monitor drivers control the aspect ratio as well, as I never use them. You might want to shoot that question to the merry folks who are in line for taking your monitor money.
The monitor should handle 800x600 fine. However, a widescreen monitor will result in the display’s looking “squashed” vertically under Windows-- everthing looks too wide. In the higher resolutions XP gives several choices (1280x600, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280*960) to correct this. My cheapo video card allows only 800x600, however.
Under DOS mode-- if that’s how you’re running your games-- you might get lucky and the display will use only a portion of the available width to show 800x600: you’d get black bands on the side, in other words.
Under Windows, if you get a squashed 800x600 display, you could use the monitor adjustment to squash horizontally and return some semblance of normalcy.
Can you borrow a monitor to try?
Post a reply when or if you get the new monitor: I still have a few W2K (and ME and 98 users) left.
I run W2K Pro with a 22" widescreen with an older GeForce 4 card and have no problems. If there is a non-widescreen app it letterboxes the right and left sides of the panel. I could probably set it to stretch or squash, but I’m fine with not using all available pixels when I run an app designed to use less than I have.
Enjoy,
Steven