Widescreen Gaming Forum

When I go to play Starcraft on my 1680 x 1050 screen, it stretches to fill the screen.

Is there a way to get it to stop from stretching, and just display in the middle of the screen in in 4:3, with black lines either side of the screen or something?

Is there a program out there that can "squeeze" the resolution?

I really want to play Starcraft again, and just cannot play it while it's stretched.

Thanks fo any replies,

JeBuZac

Check your monitors user manual to see if it supports any kind of built in aspect scaling, if you can't find your manual, try having a look through the on screen display or the other buttons on the front to see if you can find it yourself.

If your monitor doesen't support this though, then your only other option is to use your video card to change the signal that's sent to the monitor. If you have an Nvidia card (anything but a 7900), open the control panel and switch to the LCD settings. Try using either the option that says "Fixed aspect ratio" or "Centered Timings". Fixed aspect seems to want to fill the screen until it reaches the maximum vertical, and then apply black bars to sides squaring it up without stretching everything.

Centered timing on the other hand blacks out the unused space on the left, right, top and bottom of the screen depending on what resolution you use. 1024 x 768 for example would have a rather small picture in the center of a 20" widescreen, but 1280 x 1024 would almost fill the vertical, with very small bars on the top and bottom.

Now anything that isn't set to a widescreen resolution should display at their normal 4:3 or 5:4 ratio in the center of your screen (giving you the square picture and black bars).

If you have an ATI card though, I hear there's an option in their control panel somewhere called "User Center Timings" that gives the same result as the nvidia method above. I don't own an ATI card though, so I can't test it myself to be certain.

Hopefully that helps, and welcome to the forums.

Thanks for your reply Blu.

I have an ATI card, and looked around the Catalyst control panel and found "User Center Timings", ticked it, applied changes, and started up Starcraft and it's still being stretched. :( I restarted just to make sure and, still, stretched.

Do you, or anyone here, know if there is any tools or programs that can alter screen size?

i have the same problem with a 7900gtx, is there any solutions?

The ATI "centered timings" are not the same as Nvidia's... I still haven't figured out what exactly they do, but I believe it's helps a monitor that already scales stuff.

Unfortantly for us ATI owners, there is no viable way (yet) to add black bars.



The 7900gtx should have the settings under digital flat settings.

the 7900 series from nvidia doesn't have the option for some reason :(