I installed Age of Wonders, never played it before but I'm testing games out so I decided to give it a whirl. The default resolution is at a nostalgic 640x480 however which leaves a lot to be desired. :) I remember back in the day when we would see screenshots of games at 640x480 and go "Wow, that game looks amazing in high resolution!". My how times have changed. LOL

Anyhow, I dug into the game's option menu and shockingly this old game actually supports my native monitor resolution of 2560x1600. That is so dramatically huge that where the game's normal default display area is at 640x480 covers only a small fraction of the game map, with the map in the upper right corner, however - at 2560x1600 the pixel real estate is so massive that the entire game map fits on-screen in the game play area making the map pretty much unnecessary. LOL

I've attached a screenshot of it as it's something to behold... 99.9% of you will likely have to scroll hit the scroll bars to see the whole image, but it's still pretty funny. :) First time I seen something like this occur in an old game. Closest to this was Baldur's Gate 1 with some of the mods installed that GOG points to on the game's store page.

i need to squint to read any of that

Now the only sad thing is that the physical size of the screen has not been increased too...

I remember that map! Be quick about securing the center island, or you'll run into problems later on

XD Well done skeltonbow. :P

While not this bad, this is a problem with most RTS games and I am amazed when I see posts about taking games like Star Wars Battleground, T.A., The Earth Games and increasing the resolution. HELLO! Those units are hard enough to see as is! XD

StarCraft at anything higher that the original offered settings makes individual soldiers scarcely any bigger than individual pixels. :P

If only newer games would support lower resolutions as well as AoW supports higher resolutions. Satellite Reign is a bit much for my system atm, but it runs really well on 800x600. Unfortunately it's not playable at that resolution because the text is unreadable:

No, that's the best part. :) Smaller pixels give greater detail, albeit not particularly in this game as it were hehe, but in say... The Witcher 3 - big different story. Any game that has scalable 3D or 2D graphics anyway. For old non-scalable games it is a matter of finding the tradeoff between more space on screen for stuff, and visible/usable UI elements/fonts etc. :) I lowered the game resolution down to 1680x1050 which is much more playable, but it looked crazy at the high res so I had to post a screenie. :oP I wasn't aware that Starcraft's resolution could be changed at all unless you mean Starcraft II, which I play at 1920x1200 but only because 15 player multiplayer games grind the GPU into the ground otherwise, but it looks sharp at 2560x1600 and everything scales. :)

Maybe it can't. :P It's been so ling since I played it.

I think there might have been some unofficial hack/mod on WSGF for it that broke after Blizzard updated the game in recent years and nobody ever fixed it or something like that. Never tried it though.

For old games fixed resolution is somewhat forgiveable for various reasons, so Starcraft gets a pass on that. :) But... for newer games in the last 10 years or so, or for new games coming out right now I personally consider it unforgivable if a game is hard coded to work at a given screen resolution and/or aspect ratio and/or DPI and/or orientation. The days where everyone uses the same res/DPI/aspect are long long gone now and every game or piece of software being written should be written with responsive design techniques as are used on the web. Say goodbye to specifying the size of icons, widget geometry, font sizes etc. in terms of pixels, and say hello to relative %, ems and other methods relative to the display.

Sadly, there are still games coming out that for example only support 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio, or that cap themselves at low resolutions etc. Very annoying! A related irritation is HUD objects and mouse pointers that do not get DPI scaled. Try playing an RTS or ARPG on 2560x1600 or 4k and get in an epic battle with many dozens of combatants all firing dozens of spells, arrows and other effects-generating eye noise, then try to find your 1/8" mouse pointer in the mess. ARGH! :)

It's quite a coincidence that almost the same thing happened to me yesterday. I got AoW thanks to the Community Giveaway, tried it at 1920x1200, and went straight to check the game subforum and look for hi-resolution mods (and didn't find any). In the end I think I'll go with a low resolution, which is probably how I would have played the game back in the day. At most 1024x768, which was the nuts then.

In any case, seeing more of the game map on screen gives you any advantage in this game? (I'm asking because I haven't played it. I just launched it to see it worked). If yes, I'll definitely stick to a low resolution, which is probably how the game was meant to be played at the time.

It's really impressive that the game scales so well with increasing resolution. Big kudos to the developers.

Bah, go for the 5760x1080, 180° field of view FPS, and then go out for a walk ;)

Yeah I've seen that video before, it's pretty amazing. :) I do actually have 3 monitors hooked up though so in theory I could do triple-head however an old game like that most likely wont work in triple-head or would barf miserably. :) Usually I do 1920x1200 x3 for a total of 5760x1200 with Eyefinity, however I can also do 6400x1200 with Eyefinity, albeit with a wider central monitor that only uses 3/4 of the vertical real estate and fills the rest with black bar(s) oriented to my choosing. Fun stuff to play with but doesn't work with the majority of games hehe. WSGF rocks though for figuring that stuff out. :)

Yeah, sadly Age of Wonders 2 maxes out at 1440x900 as I just discovered. :) It looks nice and is quite playable, and they scaled everything appropriately in that one, but not up to 2560 sadly. Sure, the developers could claim "such high res monitors didn't exist when we wrote this game", but their first game works albeit not the best on it, and well... Blood, from the late 90s supports 2560x1600 so... no excuses! hehe

I tried to make a GOG mix for games that support 2560x1600 a while back but could never find it when I wanted to add another game to the mix as GOG apparently doesn't have any user interface on the Website that I've been able to find to take you to your own list of GOG-mixes, so if you didn't bookmark it, oh well. Lately during game testing I decided to make a new spreadsheet to keep track of such details instead, and am now tracking the highest and lowest resolution reported by a game within the confines of my display+GPU configuration (so it may vary on other systems). Once it's got enough beefy data in it I'll probably post it somewhere. I'm real curious what percentage of my games support 2560x1600 and/or up to 4k and how well they might work. :)

Lol, that's why I always try to use common resolutions for the time (I opted for 800x600 for AoW1).