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(OT) OOC: Full screen is stretched out?

Laura_Gold

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OOC: My previous computer died of losing power at exactly the wrong time.

So I bought a new computer. The problem is that when I go full screen 640x480 classic client, it gets stretched horizontally and looks awful. My old computer compensated for this by putting vertical black bars to left and right.
Win8 is using the generic pnp monitor driver for "mobile PC display."
Do you know any tricks to get 640x480 to look right?
 

WildStar

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I suspected you were having computer issues. Glad to see they are resolved.
 

SuperKen

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Full Screen has always looked kinda awful...I'm surprised anyone plays like that.

How about taking the windowed client, and then just maximizing the window? You'll end up with a play window and then a lot of blackness, and you can click and drag the play window to wherever you want with the black background usable as areas to put your backpack, paperdoll, spell/macro gumps, etc.?

Or were you looking to play in full screen because you want your play window as large as possible?
 

Laura_Gold

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OOC: Habit. Full screen since 1997. The real answer to this problem would be to use the new client and not the classic client.
The new computer can be made to work with classic client if I plug in an external monitor (which I did on Saturday). I get a crick in my neck doing that, 'cause I don't have a good place to put the external monitor.

I've spent some time and energy instead trying to fix my old computer.
At first it would stay on a short period of time then reboot.
I mounted the hard drive into an external enclosure and messed with it using another computer.
After that, the rebooting problem was gone. Unfortunately, it went to a black screen with a mouse pointer on it (even if I wanted to boot to Safe Mode Command Prompt). Ctrl Alt Delete did not do anything, so this was messed up. I could move the mouse, and that was it.

After manually switching the registry files, cleaning out the event log directory, running chkdsk, and setting the file security permissions to Everyone able to do everything, the computer seems to be working again, sort of. I'll consider the problem resolved if I can set the security to something more secure than Everyone Everything. It's probably going to continue to complain about the recycle bin being corrupt, "limited users" not being able to log in, and not be able to make a restore point.

==
This has been an adventure. I got to play with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. These do plenty of things faster and better than previous Windowses, but there are also drawbacks [should be configurable whether you go to Start or Desktop first; Classic Mode is missing, and you can't customize every theme unless you use the registry editor]. I hate the full screen apps thing which might work great on a cellphone screen but is a giant step backward for a personal computer (catch the irony: I play games and do retrocomputing full screen; everything else shouldn't be).
 

SuperKen

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I do think Windows 8 has gotten a bit of a bad rap. Some things are configurable or through programs like Classic Shell.

There probably is another way for you to mess with the resolution/window placement settings, but unfortunately we're not allowed to discuss such programs on these forums. I'll just put it out there like this: Google "ultima online resolution change".

I hope that's delicate enough for these forums.

It's a shame that the Classic Client has never been updated to allow for more configurable resolution changes to accommodate modern 1080p screens.
 

Laura_Gold

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29 May 2014
o Plug in external NEC monitor.
o Try again to get Ultima Online to run full screen properly.
PARTIAL SUCCESS.
* Use Regedit.
* Find HideDFPAspectRatio and set it (from True) to False
* Find HideLCDAspectRatio and set it (from True) to False
* on the same page as those two mentioned above, remove 640x480; and 800x600; from HideModeList
* Find KMD_DisableAspectRatioSupport and change from 1 to 0 (first one and first under amdkmdag)
* Use AMD Catalyst Control Center to set to each resolution, and GPU scaling, and Aspect Ratio
* NOTE: At the end of each UO session, you MUST use Alt Enter to exit full screen mode before quitting.
* ----: Otherwise the client will just plain crash (I suspect this has to do with Permissions on one of the folders; will investigate further later).
 
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