Posted August 21, 2014
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 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.
Post edited August 22, 2014 by galneon