hudfreegamer: Armed and Dangerous is a fun game, but the PC version doesn't properly support widescreen. The game has artificial widescreen and creates black bars at the top and bottom of a 4x3 display.

If you try to play it on a 16x9 widescreen monitor, you end up with black bars all around on the top, bottom, and sides. If you set the game it to a widescreen resolution, you end up with a stretched display horizontally, but not vertically. So, you still end up with black bars at the top and bottom.

The Widescreen Gaming Forum has a widescreen patch here:
http://www.wsgf.org/dr/armed-and-dangerous/en

However, it is Hor+ only, which means it will remove the black bars from the sides, but not the top and bottom.

However, we can use part of that patch and edit the included resolution.ini file to play the game without any black borders. . . sort of.

First, run the game normally and set the resolution to 1600x1200 (or the highest 4x3 resolution your widescreen monitor can display). That is important, because if you don't, you won't be able to properly use the mouse in the menus. If you set it to a smaller resolution (for example 640x480), the game will still think that the resolution is 640x480 even after we use the widescreen patch and it will only let you move the mouse in a small corner of the screen.

Next, download that widescreen patch from the wsgf. We only need two files, the d3d9.dll and the resolution.ini file. Do NOT use the included game.exe files. We need to use the original game.exe file that comes with Armed and Dangerous.

Now, put the d3d9.dll and resolution.ini file into your Armed and Dangerous/GameData folder (where the game.exe file is).

Next, edit the resolution.ini file in a text editor like Notepad. Find the resolution line and set it to the 4x3 aspect ratio resolution that matches your horizontal resolution.

For example, the resolution of my monitor is 1920x1080. If it were a 4x3 monitor instead of 16x9, but still had the same horizontal resolution, the full resolution would be 1920x1440. If you know the horizontal resolution of your monitor, just divide it by 1.3333333333 to get the vertical resolution for a 4x3 aspect ratio, So, my resolution.ini file looks like this:
------------------------
[MAIN]
#Resolution
Width=1920
Height=1440

#Force windowed mode (may not work in all cases)
Windowed=0

#Enable this if the window appears clipped ( 0 or 1 )
ForceViewport=0

-------------------------

Now, run the game.exe that came with Armed and Dangerous and start or continue a game. When you get into the gameplay, you'll notice a black bar at the top of the screen, but not at the bottom of the screen. Press Escape to bring up the menu. Move your mouse down to the bottom of the screen and it will shift the display down. When you reach the bottom, go slow until you have shifted the display down enough to remove the black bars. If you go too fast, you'll see a black bar at the bottom of the screen instead of the top. You can fix it by just doing the opposite. Move the mouse to the top of the screen, again going slowly when you reach the edge.

There you go. You can now play Armed and Dangerous without black bars.

This may not work on all operating systems or video cards. I'm using an older Nvidia card with Windows XP.

Note: sometimes the display will shift down without explanation. I'm not sure why. Playing for half an hour it happened to me twice. Just press Escape to bring up the menu again and slowly move your mouse to the bottom of the screen to shift the display back down.

ddw1104: i know you said it may not work on all operating systems but just in case i did something wrong. the highest resolution in game i was able to set was 1600x900. my monitor is 1920x1080. and in the ini file i have it as 1920x1440 is that correct?