New Widescreen [RESOLVED]

[Ksen]

Just yesterday I found a great deal that I couldn't pass up. $209 for a Gateway 19" Widescreen Monitor. Allright. Get it home, things seem to be working through normal processes. Explorer works fine, so does firefox. Disconnected my other monitor after played with dual-screen. I don't need two screens.

So it's connected through a DVI into my ATI Radeon X1600 Pro. I'm running an Asus A7V-8X-X. AMD 2000+ overclocked to 2600+ processor. Other irrelevant information like my Western Digital and Maxtor hard disks add up to 380 GB, and DVD-RW and CD-RW drives are installed. Creative Sound Blaster Live sound card also in there.

Well, to get to the point, I'm attempting to play games that should allow me to be on widescreen resolution, but are not. Some games just stretch things out, others show black screens.

Monitor went straight from the box, into the comp. Nothing installed, nothing changed on video settings other than the resolution (1440 x 900). Am I doing something wrong?

[TheMatt]

Some games just don't allow a widescreen resolution, while others do. They will give the standard resolutions (512 x 384, 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1400 x 1050, 1600 x 1200, etc.), but you will just have to deal with the stretched picture.

[Ksen]

Both games, World of Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, are reputed for supporting widescreen monitors.

Was I supposed to do anything besides just putting in the monitor and simple changing resolution? Was there a way to set my computer to recognize that it's a widescreen monitor?

[dai]

when you are in the properties setting the resolution look at the shape of the screen at the top it will change with the different resolution and you can see if it is set to widescreen

[Ksen]

Well yeah, everything is working just fine for my regular functions, but games are giving me a huge problem.

[dai]

then the game itself appears to be the problem,i will move you to gaming as they will have more knowledge on it

[Indoril Nerevar]

For Oblivion:
Go My Computer -> *your username*'s Documents -> My Games -> Oblivion, and open the "Oblivion" configuration settings file. Find the following settings in it:

iSize W=1280
iSize H=1024

Change the top one to 1440 and the bottom one to 900, then go File -> Save. Then run the game and see if it has worked.

Let us know how you go with that, and then we'll see what we can do with the other games.

[Ksen]

I have confirmed Steam's Source products working on my widescreen. It's basically WoW and Oblivion themselves. I run WoW in windowed fullscreen, anyway. I can just deselect fullscreen and play at optimum screen size for my resolution. That's no problem. Even if I select any options for Oblivion, I get a black screen and only menu's and status bars.

I think if the option you gave me still provides the same results, I'm going to hook up my second monitor (17" CRT Flatscreen) and switch off every time I wanna play Oblivion. I've beaten most of the campaigns, so it's probably not until I wait long enough to go back. We all know the TES series are one's you can't stop going back to.

Thanks for all your help guys. I'll let you know if that suggestion helped me or not.

[Ksen]

Thanks! I did check them out. I went through their procedures. That's where I found out that nothing was wrong with my display settings, but it was the games themselves. I'm still pretty mystified why WoW won't allow widescreen resolution on my computer, but it's not a big deal.

[Ksen]

Thank you all for your help. I've gotten Oblivion to work correctly now, and even if I don't figure out the widescreen WoW thing, it will all work out just fine. TSF is a great place so I'll be sure to continue to read about other problems to keep up to date about things.

[Indoril Nerevar]

Glad to hear you got Oblivion working. Enjoy your games.