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Dittohead

Doom on 19 LCD Monitors

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I have a simple question, I think.

I have a 19 inch Samsung LCD monitor which works great. However, because its aspect ratio is 5:4 as opposed to 4:3 that most monitors have, Doom ends up looking a little stretched vertically. This happens a lot in Zdoom. Which port works best for correcting this imbalance?

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Dittohead said:

I have a simple question, I think.

I have a 19 inch Samsung LCD monitor which works great. However, because its aspect ratio is 5:4 as opposed to 4:3 that most monitors have, Doom ends up looking a little stretched vertically. This happens a lot in Zdoom. Which port works best for correcting this imbalance?



You can switch ZDoom to handle 5:4 resolutions in the menu.

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Assuming you want to make use of the full screen area without getting distortion, then it sounds like you might want a port that allows you to change the field of view (decrease it by one sixteenth). I know that Prboom-plus and Legacy both have this (in OpenGL mode) and presume that some others offer it too. This means that you see a bit less than you would normally, which might be a disadvantage in some situations, but you pays your money and you takes your choice.

(G)ZDoom has an option for a 5:4 aspect ratio - you could see how that looks on your monitor if you haven't already tried it.

Or are you looking for a port that will most happily leave a section of the screen blank while using the rest of it at your preferred and undistorted resolution?

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Ports may offer options for LCD monitor, but I've found that vanilla + LCD combination is hopeless. I tried this on various LCD's (15, 17 and 18 inch) and OSes (win98 and XP with nosound) and my experience was that the view was horrible and upon accessing the Options menu the game terminated for some reason on all computers. This was when I was going to get myself an LCD, so I just ended up getting myself another CRT instead.

So, if you play with ports, LCD is a good choice probably, but not with vanilla, according to my experience. I'd like to hear from others who played vanilla on LCD. Maybe I'm just missing something here.

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Works fine for me. Of course the view is going to be horrible on an lcd because 320x200 is well below any lcd's native resolution.

Anyway if you have an nvidia card there's an option in the display controls to set monitor scaling to 'fixed aspect ratio' that might help.

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I upgraded to the latest Zdoom, and I cannot find this option to switch to 5:4 ratio. It has 4:3, 16:9, and 16:20 but no 5:4 that I'm aware of.

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It's a seperate option in the Set Video Modes menu - it should be "Use 5:4 aspect ratio", and as far as I know it only works on 1280x1024.

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The 5:4 option is useless anyway. It will actually make your problem worse, instead of better.

Also of note, Doom's native resolution, 320x200, is 16:10 (or 8:5), not 4:3. Too bad Zdoom actually tries to "fix" it's 16:10 resolutions by warping the game world to how it looks in a 4:3 format.

The highest resolution you can get in ZDoom, while leaving Doom in a correct aspect ratio, is 640*400.


EDIT: Hmmm, interesting. The 5:4 option actually does warp the game world to how it looks in a 4:3 aspect ratio in ZDoom. It's just GZDoom's OpenGL mode that does it wrong. Instead of squashing it horizontally, like software mode/ZDoom does, it will squash it vertically. I'll report it tomorrow at the GZDoom forums if Graf doesn't see this by then.

None the less, 4:3 isn't right anyway. :p

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Nuxius said:

None the less, 4:3 isn't right anyway. :p



Nonsense!

4:3 is the ratio even 320x200 is displayed in. Don't get too caught up in the pixel ratio. As long as the engine handles it properly (and AFAIK most Doom engines do) the view won't be distorted.

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udderdude said:

Wtf? A 5:4 ratio LCD? What's the model number?


Mine's 5:4 (1280x1024, really common res too with 17" flatscreens)

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I presume udderdude's comment related to the physical aspect ratio (i.e. get your tape measure out) rather than its resolution ratio in terms of pixels.

Since this has been bumped, I'l just point out that what I said earlier about varying the FOV was nonsense, as this varies it both horizontally and vertically, without changing the aspect ratio. However, my comment did lead to Andrey adding an option in Prboom-plus to adjust the aspect ratio to whatever you want to.

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Graf Zahl said:

Nonsense!

4:3 is the ratio even 320x200 is displayed in.

320:200 = 8:5. What don't you understand?

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fraggle said:
What don't you understand?

Display aspect ratio vs. pixel aspect ratio. Even though 320x200 has a 8:5 pixel AR and 1280x1024 has a 5:4 pixel AR, they'll both appear with a 4:3 display AR when shown on (for example) my 17" CRT monitor.

From what I can tell, though, is that LCD monitors (at least 17" and 19" ones) are showing 1280x1024 with square pixels, so they have a display AR of 5:4 and will distort just about everything else.

There's code in (G)ZDoom in v_video.cpp that handles this -- not only does it assume that 320x200 and 640x400 modes will be shown on a 4:3 display (instead of a 16:10 one), but so will 1280x1024 unless vid_tft is set (in which case it's 5:4).

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