Gaming on a widescreen iMac G5... What happens?

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, we're getting a new iMac G5 for the family for X-mas, and my brother and I are semi-heavy gamers. The ones we'll be playing are:

WC3: TFT
MOH - Allied Assault
Rainbow Six 3 - Raven Shield
Neverwinter Nights
Diablo 2
SC

And we're kinda wondering what happens to the screen when you play them... Does it stretch the screen to fit? Does it leave black bars around the screen to make up for the pixels it's not using? Or do extra wide-screen resolutions become an option? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[jimsowden]

It usually can be at full res. If not, its an easy hack.

 

[Littleodie914]

It usually can be at full res. If not, its an easy hack.

When you say full res, you mean they'll usually run at the entire 1440x900? (Sorry, never owned a monitor that was anything but 4:3 )

 

[HiRez]

When you say full res, you mean they'll usually run at the entire 1440x900? (Sorry, never owned a monitor that was anything but 4:3 )

Many games let you set a custom (non-4:3) resolution, but some don't. Pretty sure Starcraft and Diablo2 won't do widescreen, so the sides will be letterboxed. Most games based on the Quake III engine can be customized for any resolution, and that includes Medal of Honor. For these you'll probably have to edit the startup script, which is easy. Look for the keys called something like customwidth and customheight, set those to whatever res, then I think you have to set one to use the custom mode to -1. There's lots of help online for doing this and it'll work the same on a Mac as for the PC. Warcraft III was able to run at the native resolution of my widescreen PowerBook (1280x854), so it'll probably do 1440x900 too. Rainbow 6 I dunno.

 

[Littleodie914]

Alrighty, thanks a bunch guys. Sounds like everything's gonna be just spiffy!