"Dungeon Keeper II (2) and Proper Aspect Ratio" by Troy H. Cheek on Oct 05, 2009
Bullfrog's Dungeon Keeper II is a great game but it is also an old game. I think it was released in 1999, which makes it ten years old as I write this. That's "ancient in gaming terms" according to one of my cow-orkers, who incidentally is so young that he thinks "Atari" is something his parents made up to scare him at Christmas time.
As I mentioned in Dungeon Keeper II (2) on
Windows XP and Vista last week, I got the game running on both my
Windows XP main system with an Nvidia-based 8600GT graphics card and
my Vista notebook with ATI Intel-based integrated video.
Once I got the game running without crashing, I started working on
making it look good.
Both my main monitor and the notebook's display are widescreen. The monitor is 16x9 and the notebook is 16x10. DKII was designed for resolutions like 640x480, 800x600, and (after the last patch and a registry tweak) 1024x768. All these are 4x3 and it's hard to find 4x3 monitors these days.
Now, while I can tweak registry settings and get DKII to run in widescreen mode, and look pretty darn good while doing it, some of the interface elements don't display properly. They display like they're still 4x3, so you have to click a little off to one side. The full screen pre-rendered video played at the beginning of the game and after each mission is stretched over the entire screen. Also, some text within the missions just doesn't display on the screen anymore. It's not a game breaker, but it is a little annoying.
What to do? What to do?
A little searching shows that some gamers with widescreen monitors are bemoaning the black bars (pillarboxing) when they try to play a 4x3 game on widescreen. Apparently, their monitors (or video cards or something) scale the video while maintaining the original aspect ratio. A 4x3 picture on a widescreen monitor means the picture doesn't fill the entire screen, hence the black bars on either side of the picture. "At least give us the option to stretch the video to cover the entire screen!" they cry.
This always confuses me, because every widescreen monitor on every computer I've ever seen has stretched the video to cover the entire screen. My problem is that 4x3 stretched out to widescreen makes everybody look short and fat, circles aren't round, squares aren't square, text looks squashed, etc. Whereas my Dad prefers this ("I paid for all those pixels so I expect to use them!"), I'd rather see things the way they were intended.
In computer parlance, I was looking for the "scale image while maintaining original aspect ratio" setting. I was able to find a setting like this for my notebook computer. DKII gameplay looked just fine. The opening video displayed properly as well. The "reward" videos that play after missions, however, covered only half the screen. Instead of 640x480, they were more like 320x480. The game itself played fine. I decided that I wanted my main computer to display this way as well.
Checking out the Nvidia control panel, I searched for aspect ratio settings. There didn't appear to be any. I did some research and it seems that there were supposed to be. Such options just didn't appear in my control panel for some reason. Reasons for this include the following:
I was able to find a few other people with the same missing aspect ration setting problem, but no answers. However, I was also able to find some people who did have the setting but couldn't get it to stick. They'd have to change the setting again whenever they rebooted. The solution was the command rundll32.exe NvCpl.dll,dtcfg setscaling 1 DA [mode #] where [mode #] is
I think mine was defaulting to the Default, or maybe Native or Scaling, but regardless it was always stretching the image to fill the entire screen, which is what all three of these were doing during testing. Centered was interesting, but not what I was looking for. While it did keep the aspect ratio, it also kept the original size. Some people call this 1:1 scaling, which isn't scaling at all, but I understand what they mean. Aspect turned out to be what I was looking for. This centers and scales the picture, but keeps the original aspect ratio. With this command, DKII ran just fine on my main system. I didn't even have the problem with cut scenes that I had on the notebook. In fact, it may just be my imagination, but I think the in-game graphics look a little better scaled this way, as the scaling fuzzes things up a bit (antialiasing or oversampling or something). All in all, I'm happy.
What I don't know is if this setting will stick. It might go away the next time I reboot. I've been afraid to try rebooting.
While doing all this Dungeon Keeper II research, I remembered a game trailer for it that I hadn't seen in a while. I finally remembered that this trailer was under "Coming Soon" on Populous 3 The Beginning. On a lark, I tried installing Populous 3 on my XP system, then applied the latest patch I could find. It played, though the graphics were a little messed up. Switching from D3D to software rendering mode fixed that. Unfortunately, while you can use a hack Populous 3 to run at resolutions higher than the in-game options of 640x480 or 800x600, it only works with the D3D version. Still, here's another 4x3 game that runs in the correct aspect ratio. I think I'm on a roll.
