I've recently bought a lovely new Acer Aspire 7720G laptop. It's damn funky, I can tell you. Unfortunately, I seem to have struck upon a fairly annoying problem: 320x240 resolution doesn't seem to actually work. If I set it in VERGE.CFG then the game plays in the top left of the screen and the rest of the screen flickers like crazy. Argh!

Since this is a fairly popular resolution (Amethyst, Sully, and a tonne of others use it for starters) this is a royal pain in the arse for me as I in play games predominantly in fullscreen mode.

Anyone got similar problems? Better, has anyone struck upon a solution? My laptop has an Acer CrystalBright LCD screen (with a native res of 1440x900) and the graphics card is a Geforce 8400m GS, if that's any help.

My desktop PC's monitor is 1440x900 as well (a Samsung SyncMaster 940bw), but it doesn't have these problems surprisingly. It's widescreen so I get a bit of blurry scaling on the non-wide resolutions and especially smaller res, but nothing like flickering or shearing.

Then again, I usually play games in windowed mode. A useful trick you can do (which I discovered from nosing around on something in Epic of Serinor) to doublesize windowed games that include the source is set the xres, yres settings in verge.cfg to be 640x480 and then have a SetResolution(320, 240); call in your code. It'll keep the window size the same, but make the screen handle be 320x240 and scale it up.

I do that and it works well. (set the xres, yres settings in verge.cfg to be 640x480 and then have a SetResolution(320, 240);)

Laptop hardware is just no longer built to handle low resolutions, they figure no one uses it anymore.

You should call Acer support and tell them that 320x240 does not work. Then we they tell you it is not supported you start going about how you spent so much money on the latest Acer laptop and it can't do what computers could do like 10 years ago. Moreover, you compare a laptop not able to handle 320x240 with a laptop with no CD support. Lol. =)

Actually, there are multiple ways to get around this. I dislike automax's shearing issues, so I recently added some config vars to specify the window's exact viewport size.

So:

xres 320
yres 240
window_x_res 640
window_y_res 480

will set the game's resolution to 320x240, but the window's viewport size to 640x480, effectively giving you a windowed experience with perfectly square doubled pixels.

You can plug in 960 and 720 for tripled pixels, 1280 and 960 for quadrupled pixels, and so on. As well as putting in non-perfect ratios if you want to.

I don't know why you'd want to.

But you can.

I think that the best way to solve this is by making an option in the configuration to double any resolution and working the render system that if it is doubled, that it still looks pixilated and would look exactly like it would be even if it wasn't doubled. That way, if you had a 320x240 game, it would actually be rendered in 640x480. Older computers could run the game a bit faster at normal resolution and newer computers would be able to view the games full screen normally without the crazy flying bars.

I think that the low resolution incompatibility has mainly to do with Vista. I've never had that problem with XP before (but even then, when I upgraded my video card do a DX10 compatible one, the card used image filtering on the entire screen taking away from the classic and sharp pixilated look). But I would agree with anyone that the 320x240 is no longer used in any commercial products and that there are alternative means to achieving a 320x240 look using a higher screen resolution.

The current one is one of many halfway solutions to that road. I'd love to have zsnes-like upscale and filtering options available.