Was there ever any solution found for this?
After digging out this almost 10 year old game for a bit of nostalgic space-simming and to test out my new 22" monitor, I've just looked all over the web for a total solution and not found anything more than is described here.
(Homeworld is nearly 10 years old? Can you believe that? It's still frickin' awesome and highly playable too!)
However, I've sussed out a simple compromise...
It seems that any screen mode above the 1600x1200 resolution, when forced using Ibrin's Homeworld registry edit solution, causes problems. I've tried my monitors native resolution of 1680x1050 and the menus are all flickery and glitchy, the in-game text is distorted and mostly unreadable, and there's a black border on the right hand side equivalent to the number of pixels above 1600.
My solution is to force the game to run in window mode by adding the
/window command to the 'Target' box on my Homeworld menu shortcut, and then set the resolution using the registry edit to a suitable size, with the width being 1600 or less. Because you are running in a window you do not need to stick to 'standard' monitor resolutions, so I've set the width to 1600 and height to 985.
This creates a window that fills most of my screen without any distortion of graphics or text, and the game runs a treat with my new Radeon HD 3850 :)
Okay, so it's not fullscreen widescreen, and you can still see some of your desktop on the right hand side and your taskbar at the bottom, but it works!
If you want you could also add the
/noborder command to your game shortcut to remove the window border and elements. You could then make your taskbar autohide, or move it to the right of your desktop. Then just edit the game window height in the registry to fill the space, up to 1050 in my case.
Obviously if you are using a 1920x1200 rez monitor you'll still have a big border down the right hand side, but this way you can at least play it with uncorrupted graphics and text. You could fill the extra 320 pixels with a nice Homeworld style graphic on your desktop background, or a pic of your favourite movie star / pop idol / semi-naked model / presidential candidate.
Hope you like this semi-solution... if there is anybody out there still playing Homeworld that is (I just heard the THQ got the rights to the series last year, so maybe something new in the Homeworld universe will be along soon)
Now, I just need to find out why I can't get antialiasing working with it, and I'll be happy.