Topic: Playing SFC1 again.

[TarMinyatur]

Ah, the days of pure wonder...

Surprisingly, the game installed easily with no tinkering on my Windows 7 system, and it runs smoothly. Patching to 1.03 was also easy. I wish it could run letterboxed (like SFC2CE) to prevent horizontal distortion.

I never played the original Dynaverse campaign back in December of 1999. (SFC1 was a memorable Christmas gift!) So I'll take a crack at it. After doing some early Dyna missions and skirmishes, I believe the SFC series' best Artificial Intelligence may have been in SFC1. A few minutes ago, my Gorn CL was destroyed by what could be described as a competently commanded Romulan K7R. Nice.

I don't really mind the lack of: configurable Energy Priorities, shuttle conversion, and tractor rotation. Frodo, aka Hannibal?, once said long ago that the gameplay (with its faults) was better before AMD's came onto the scene. I'm leaning towards agreeing with him.

[Corbomite]

If you turn your monitor to a 4:3 setting it should get rid of the horizontal distortion.

[TarMinyatur]

Corbomite, I've tried setting my desktop resolution to 4:3 (1024x768, 1200x900, 800x600) but it doesn't enforce the letterbox in game. SFC1, EAW and OP always use full screen (1600x900 on my 20" AOC E2070S LED) and get stretched. The games' multi-function UI's do respond to the desired resolution (800x600 or 1024x768) but still get distorted. Only persistent letterboxing would solve the problem, as far as I know.

Adam, the Disruptor graphics in SFC1 are beautiful in my opinion -- light green misty blasts. They look better than the machine gun effect found in EAW and beyond. I've noticed that running Community Edtion in a debugger (like Ollydbg) reduces the frequency of invisible Disruptor bolts. I bet if we set the speed of Disruptors to 700 (instead of 1250) they'd be visible almost all the time, although I could be wrong.

[Corbomite]

Corbomite, I've tried setting my desktop resolution to 4:3 (1024x768, 1200x900, 800x600) but it doesn't enforce the letterbox in game. SFC1, EAW and OP always use full screen (1600x900 on my 20" AOC E2070S LED) and get stretched. The games' multi-function UI's do respond to the desired resolution (800x600 or 1024x768) but still get distorted. Only persistent letterboxing would solve the problem, as far as I know.

Don't do it through your graphics card. Hard set the monitor itself (if it has that capability) to 4:3. This will turn everything on it to that res and you will have to reset it to use the computer in the "virtual" res of your graphics card. I do this with OP all the time, but my monitor has the ability to recognize that I only want that program in 4:3.

[TarMinyatur]

Ah! Thanks for the tip.

My monitor, however, has no buttons on it other than a power off/on button. (I wish I could set it to 4:3 and permanently forget widescreen.) I've tried its "i_Menu" application, but this doesn't affect applications that run in non-windowed mode.

Intel is working on a new driver to solve the problem of 4:3 stuff automatically using full widescreen. An option to "not scale" isn't yet available.

I simply should have purchased a monitor that was 1152 x 864, but nothing available locally was smaller than 1600 x 900. Widescreen or nothing. And I didn't want to spend more than 100 bucks. The good news is that my favorite games, SFC:CE and SMAC, do obey the 4:3 ratio.