Issues with LCD screens and Quake resolutions?

[Ken B.]

Most LCD screens available today are widescreen and have native resolutions that higher than what plain vanilla Quake 1 supported. I read one a while back of people having issues running their Quake 1 on newer screens because it looked blurry or stretched or something.

Does Quake still run OK on newer screens, or do I have to look for certain features or settings for legacy games?

[dfsp_spirit]

If you use a modern engine you shouldn't have any problems. Try some of those listed on the bottom right of the main page here at quakeone.com.

For most engines you can change the shortcut to something like this:

<your_engine_of_choice>.exe -width 1280 -height 1024 -bpp 32

Replace 1280 and 1024 with your screen resolution of course. (bpp 32 means 32 bit colors, usually no need to mess with that.)

[foq]

Darkplaces is widescreen aware... it automatically tweaks the visuals to get it to look right.

[StatiC]

Darkplaces is widescreen aware... it automatically tweaks the visuals to get it to look right.

thats good to know, im tired of this f'n joequake square !

[MH]

So is DirectQ, and so will be RMQ.

[Ken B.]

What about just using the regular engine or GL Quake?

Is it necessary that I use a new engine in order to play the game?

[MH]

No, it's not necessary that you use a modified engine. You can use the original GLQuake if you wish, but be aware that you will most likely have serious problems on modern hardware and that the original GLQuake was written before widescreen resolutions were commonplace and so has poor support for them.

The most common problem with GLQuake is that it crashes. This is because the GL_EXTENSIONS string is too long for GLQuake's internal console print function, you get a buffer overflow, and down it goes. If your video card has an option to truncate the extension string you should use that, otherwise you're SoL and will need to use a modified engine.

Another - probably equally common - problem is that your textures appear all white. Run GLQuake with -no8bit to fix that. You may also want to run with -nomtex if your FPS drops below 20 when dynamic lights or animated light styles go off.

Other problems include GLQuake hard-locking on certain hardware/software, as well as a host of other problems that you might not notice at first.

For widescreen you should use an FOV of about 105 by default (increase or decrease until it looks right) and run with -conwidth and -conheight.

If all of this is too much work, or if you just can't get it to run, I made a "minimally fixed" version of GLQuake some time ago that just resolves these problems but has no other changes. You can download it from here: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/fi...FIX-Engine.zip