I see a lot of threads about a scaling problem especially evident in text. This has nothing to do with modern hardware, drivers, or operating systems. It's the way the game was made, and CRT fuzziness only marginally helped, if at all.

I bought this game within weeks of its initial release. It was ugly on my 19" CRT with Voodoo 3 running Windows 98SE. It was ugly on my 24" LCD with 6800 GT running Windows XP. It's ugly today on my 32" LCD with HD5850 running Windows 7. The UI elements and text are quite simply ugly, as though the designer in charge of the UI mistakenly thought the game was to have a practically unheard-of 14:9 aspect ratio and used extraordinarily primitive nearest neighbor interpolation to make the assets later conform to 4:3, stretching everything vertically.

I wish that was a joke, but look at the "circles" in the game. They're taller than they are wide. On the title screen, for example, the ornamental "spheres" are around 178x193 pixels at 1280x960 resolution.

The game is ugly. Get over it. Play it 4:3. You'll get used to the text, and believe it or not, in the end it's actually worth doing so.

I remember playing this game back in the day, though I don't know for sure how close to release date it was, but the only thing that truly bothered me about the graphics was the distance fog. In the back of the box, the screenshots don't feature distance fog, and I tried searching all the graphics settings and any ini file that would disable it, but nope, you're stuck not being able to see more than 2cm in front of you.

I remember not liking the text either, being hard to read quite often, but I guess over time I got used to it.

NOT true. The text is worsened by the scaling, because there is some kind of wrapper in between. That's why on software rendering it can be read (software mode actually resizes the screen).

I really don't understand you people that like to give false information.