Widescreen Gaming on the Larger PBs

[spaceballl]

I am a Mac and PC kind of guy. I have both. On my PC, I have an SGI LCD widescreen with a resolution of 1600x1024. I´m currently abroad in Spain, but when I get back home, I plan on buying a 17" powerbook. When I used to game on my widescreen LCD, I would have two options, finding games with widescreen resolutions or stretching out a resolution like 1024x768 to span the whole screen. Or running 1024x768 with black borders. Neither are really ideal. The stretching of the game would make everything slighlty fatter. Black borders sucked, because with such a nice screen, it´s a shame to not be able to use all of it. The best was finding a game that supported widescreen resolutions (like Max Payne for PC!!), but that was pretty rare.

But that´s the PC market... It´s very broad, and most people don´t have widescreen screens. For the mac market, it´s easier for developers. They know that the person either has an eMac, iMac, PowerMac, PB, or iBook. So I would FIGURE that they would develop games to support the widescreen aspects of the PBs and studio displays. Is this the case or do we need to fiddle with non native resolutions? Either way, I´m gonna buy that 17 inch PB, but i´d sure love it if games could actually enjoy the nice, widescreen resolution.

-Kevin

[Wes]

Games like Medal of Honour (and I presume other Q3-based games) offered the console commands in the manual so the game accepted the widescreen, and you could have a wider perspective of the game.

[Powerbook G5]

Yeah, it's not easy finding games that support widescreen resolutions. I am usually stuck with 1024x768 when I play on my 15". It sucks since I can do 1280, but not the 1028 in 1280x1028.

[spaceballl]

I guess that´s kinda what I figured. I just hoped that since Mac is such a closed platform, developers would figure that a lot of people would be playing on widescreen iMacs, widescreen studio displays, or widescreen PBs... guess not :(

Oh well, I think this is something that will change in the future. Even on PCs, widescreen monitors are becoming much more common. Eventually developers will just throw the option in as I don´t think it takes too much work to do.

-Kev