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Quake 2 at 320x200?

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I've got a little netbook and I have installed a bunch of Id games on it. Doom and Quake both run at 320x200 but for the life of me I can't work out how to get Quake 2 to run at the same resolution. The screen is small and so is the processor so it would be great if I could get all the games to run at this lower res while filling the screen.

Thanks for any pointers.

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I was about to ask why you would even want to run it at 320x200, when I suddenly realised that that much irony could destroy the universe and I'd hate for that to happen just before Christmas.

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Frame-rate and screen real estate. It feels pretty cramped with vertical bars on the tiny screen and the more FPS, the better. I really don't mind lo-res and actually quite like Q2 in software mode too!

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I've always thought that Quake 2 looked better in software mode. No texture blurring that way. :P

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You can try various source ports, but I doubt they support software rendering. Half-life & quake 2 in 32-bit software mode was the shit, late 90`s fps`s are way too blurry in opengl.

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Is your netbook made by an obscure Korean company? Did you buy it for $50 at a hardware outlet in Lancaster?

If not, I don't see why it can't run Q2 at full resolution. Today's netbooks have specs that anyone would have killed for in 2004. Mine can run Doom 3 for fuck's sake. What's the problem?

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Well, I like the look of SW mode too. Bilinear/Trilinear OGL is just a blur-fest.

I have a Dell Mini 9 and it can run Q2 at a playable frame-rate at 640x480. I'd just rather run it lower res with more frames per second. Some people are GFX whores, I'm a frame-rate whore!

Also, none of the screenmodes, whether OGL or SW, are 8x5 or widescreen. They're all 4x3 and all therefore have the vertical borders...

I vaguely remember years ago finding some patch that allowed 320x200 but I can't find it... maybe I imagined it.

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Average said:

I have a Dell Mini 9 and it can run Q2 at a playable frame-rate at 640x480.


You realize you're talking about a 14-year old game, that you are running on hardware that is about 10 times more powerful than the best computer money could buy at the time, right?

You must be something fundamentally wrong with the game's setting some other setting in your computer if you find the experience barely "playable". What OS are you using?

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Geez guys, I just asked if anyone knew a way of running it at 320x200! I'm aware that I can play it as is on my netbook (with XP SP3). The frame-rate at resolutions up 800x600 are more than playable. I just wanted to run it the same way as I run Doom and Quake - low res using my fullscreen size and fast as fuck. That's it.

There's no conspiracy, there's nothing that needs fixed to run the game. I just wanted to play at a lower res!!

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Quite honestly, that's not what came through your posts. At least I understood that you had an actual playability problem, and BTW, lowering the resolution won't result in any visually perceptible (or even less, displayable) enhancement: your computer can already render it at a rate of 100+ FPS at high resolutions, and your screen can only render 60 FPS anyway.

If you insist however...I'm not terribly familiar with Quake II's configuration system, but I suppose you could poke around with the .cfg files it writes to disk and/or the console. Also, you could use a source port which allows more selectable screen resolutions.

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Not sure why there is all the hate for accelerated Quake 2. Getting my first accelerated graphics card and playing Quake 2 on it was like I had suddenly discovered a whole new dimension to computer gaming. I thought it was stunning (in a good way). In fact, it may be one of the single biggest "life changing" moments as far as computer gaming goes for me.

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Enjay said:

Not sure why there is all the hate for accelerated Quake 2.

Because blurring is very unappealing to some people. I'm curious though, since I wasn't around in gaming in the late 90's, can you describe what the experience was like using accelerated rendering for the first time? I can imagine the framerates would be far improved, but why did people seem to like the blurring back then? Was it just a thing of the time that people were getting so sick of pixelation that they'd rather just have blurriness?

If I was around back then, I'd hate it just for the fact that it looks muddy, despite overall being smoother. Did anybody else feel that way back then?

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Sodaholic said:

If I was around back then, I'd hate it just for the fact that it looks muddy, despite overall being smoother. Did anybody else feel that way back then?


I just kinda expected it. After all, the state-of-the-art machines at the time (expensive arcade machines with VooDoo 3DFX graphics etc.) all had some form of smoothed/velvety graphics.

Then again, I preferred the crisp look of Daytona USA or Tokyo Wars, and other early (1993-1994) 3D arcade games....now THAT was a game which achieved truly advanced looks for its time, and at a blazing-fast speed. Comparing it with Ridge Racer left me with a "meh" comment. OK, maybe it was all awesome to have all-wet, slick shine everywhere and a soft feel...but it just looked blurred ;-)

Texture filtering is bad when it's used along with low-res textures, in the vain hope that it will make them look "not pixelated". Yeah, it makes them look like shit! Yet, there IS a balance (ahem, Daytona USA....)

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Average said:

Well, I like the look of SW mode too. Bilinear/Trilinear OGL is just a blur-fest.

I have a Dell Mini 9 and it can run Q2 at a playable frame-rate at 640x480. I'd just rather run it lower res with more frames per second. Some people are GFX whores, I'm a frame-rate whore!

Also, none of the screenmodes, whether OGL or SW, are 8x5 or widescreen. They're all 4x3 and all therefore have the vertical borders...

I vaguely remember years ago finding some patch that allowed 320x200 but I can't find it... maybe I imagined it.


320x200 is intended to be displayed as 4x3. It uses non-square pixels. You'd rather have a squashed picture than vertical bars?

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If you want performance without blur:

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST
There. No more blurring, mipmapping or otherwise, and you get your performance and transparency effects.

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The most significant addition to GL mode in Q2 was of course the colored lighting and the transparent surfaces. The blurring was something you expected And in some cases in Q2 i think the blurring helps. And in others it doesn't.

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Are there any quake 2 ports out there? I am so horribly ignorant on the quake side of things. Personally, I would like one that ran in DOS.

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The two I used most when I was messing around with ports were Quake2Max and Quake 2 evolved.

There are more though. But those are two of the ones going for graphics improvement.

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Sodaholic said:

I'm curious though, since I wasn't around in gaming in the late 90's, can you describe what the experience was like using accelerated rendering for the first time? I can imagine the framerates would be far improved, but why did people seem to like the blurring back then? Was it just a thing of the time that people were getting so sick of pixelation that they'd rather just have blurriness?

For me, the real revelation was all the extra colouring (coloured lighting). There were, of course, other things too (eg the improvement in the way dynamic lights behaved). When I first fired up Quake II in hardware accelerated mode (bearing in mind that I had already played the game extensively) it almost felt like a new game and I replayed the whole thing just to see how different various areas in the game looked. I think my main reaction could be summarised by I couldn't believe how much I had been missing by not having an accelerated graphics card. I felt like I was seeing the game properly for the first time. To me it was a massive leap in the visual quality of the game. The before hardware acceleration and after hardware acceleration gaming worlds, for me, were totally different environments. I had a similar but much, much smaller experience when I first used a proper surround-sound system with a game designed for it.

As for the blurring, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. In fact, I prefer it to grainy pixelation. Anyway, it's not the whole thing that is blurred. The edges of structures and models still seem sharp enough. It's the textures and skins that are "blurred" and I find that, in many cases, that the averaging of colours in particular area of a texture/skin makes them look much better than loads of individually identifiable square blocks.

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I would always find a way to turn the filtering off, because it literally made my eyes water. I got used to it later.

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For those complaining about the blurring, are you aware there is a command to get rid of it?

1. Open console
2. Type gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST
3. Exit console

You now have your pixels as well as your colored lighting. Which looks rad.

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Not having every non-straight line look like a fucking set of stairs was something of a revelation back in the day. I dunno why anyone would ever want to go back to that.

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Mr. T said:

Not having every non-straight line look like a fucking set of stairs was something of a revelation back in the day. I dunno why anyone would ever want to go back to that.


3dfx solved this by implementing a "T-buffer" which was hands-down the fastest anti-aliasing ever done. nvidia probably uses the same thing (in fact I'm pretty damn sure they took the process verbatim)

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Cool. Now edge AA is the big thing because it doesn't make consoles shit themselves like real implementations of AA do.

(My post was an answer to Sodaholic's question BTW)

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Mr. T said:

Cool. Now edge AA is the big thing because it doesn't make consoles shit themselves like real implementations of AA do.

(My post was an answer to Sodaholic's question BTW)


It's also more efficient since you can specify what needs it and what doesn't. even the N64 had that.

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Csonicgo said:

3dfx solved this by implementing a "T-buffer" which was hands-down the fastest anti-aliasing ever done. nvidia probably uses the same thing (in fact I'm pretty damn sure they took the process verbatim)

No, not even close. The T-buffer was a simplified accumulation buffer; the way the Voodoo 5 worked is that it would render the scene multiple times and average the result. Each rendering was slightly different from the others (I think they tilted the view point) so that the averaged scene had reduced aliasing. It was much faster than the heavyweight supersampling method (render at a super high resolution internally and then scale down) and it looked better than the other AA approaches at the time, but it was in no way fast and it doesn't work at all for modern GPUs.

Anyway, back on the Q2 topic, seeing Unreal for the first time in hardware accelerated glory made much more of an impact on me than Q2 ever did. The first time you stepped out of that ship... Man. It looks so barren and empty today, but back then the colors were so unique that it glossed over everything else.

With regards to the blurriness of bilinear, keep in mind that the resolutions back then were a lot smaller too. Seeing a 128px texture scaled to fit a 640x480 screen is a lot better than if it's smeared across 1920x1080. I do think bilinear filtering was more of a novelty thing at first. I doubt I can ever force myself to play Quake 2 again for just that reason; just imagining all those boring gray and orange smudges everywhere fills me with boredom.

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I'm sure the first thing anyone thought of when they played an accelerated game was how smooth the action was because the CPU didn't have to manage everything. Quake 2 excelled in that regard.

and yeah, I was half asleep when I wrote that, I meant "the fastest at the time" but my ass did't type that apparently

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