PC on widescreen HDTV cropping games

briancpest

New Member
Hello all,

I finally accomplished a personal dream I've had for quite some time recently.

I bought a set of cables to hook my PC to my widescreen HDTV. And, though an expensive project, it was so worth it.... except one little hitch....

I found out how to fit the XP desktop into my widescreen just fine. Perfectly matched up with no black area on either side.

However, when I play specific games, a LOT of the picture is cropped out.
Now, I'm not new to gaming and resolutions, so let me explain the situation and see if anyone has any suggestions.

Out of three games I've played since hooking my PC up to my HDTV, only one game has given me a problem.
Half Life 2 fits the screen perfectly, and I can play it at resolutions all the way up to 2560 X 1600... and my god does it look sweet.
Portal also works perfectly fine at 2560 X 1600....

Then, I pop in the new Enemy Territory Quake Wars game. And, even if I shrink the resolution down to something like 1280 X 800, and on any other resolution I try, the only side of the picture that is intact is the left. All other sides of the picture are cropped a good 3 or 4 inches. This sucks.
I'm forced to play the game in a windowed box, filling only the main center portion of the screen, with a good 6 inches of desktop showing around all sides.

Is there something wrong with this game, and something that will have to be fixed by the company through patches? Am I setting up the resolution incorrectly? I've done research, and other people have been playing it in widescreen just fine....

Any help would be appreciated. (I am already awaiting an answer from the game developers...)
 

briancpest

New Member
yeah, turns out my tv is capable of displaying pretty much any resolution under the sun.

digging into a little bit more research on the matter, turns out all HDTV's suffer the same problem. it's called overscanning, and the tvs come from the factory made to do it. They cut the edges off the screen to eliminate and blur or pixelationa round the corners and edges.

and, apparantly, there's really no fix to it.

So, I made my own fix. Crank the resolution as high as I can while leaving the games in a window mode opposed to full screen. I'm willing to suffer a constantly visible start bar under my amazingly gorgeous game quality. :)
 
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