Older PC Games in 1080p

[Robert Maxwell]

Over the weekend I picked up a new monitor--full HD resolution, 1920x1080. Since I'm kinda running a piece of crap laptop with an integrated graphics card, there isn't much made past 2004 that I can actually play.

That brings me to the "challenge" of this thread: what games do you know of from 2004 or earlier that can be played at 1920x1080? I got Morrowind working yesterday. Looks pretty nice at such a high res. Thinking of trying Deus Ex next.

It's fine to include games that require special tweaking/patching, as long as you indicate what must be done to make it work.

Go!!

 

[Hermiod]

With the right settings (which might involve editing some config files manually), anything based on the various iterations of the Quake and Unreal engines from that period will be fine.

Source engine games, specifically Half-Life 2, scale superbly with the right settings.

 

[Further]

One of the nice things about PC gaming is near 100% backwards compatibility. Not only can you play old games perfectly, but you can crank the graphics to what in the past would have been insane settings, and still have the game run smoothly. If only consoles had such capability (especially recent ps3's)

I tried Duex Ex recently on my computer (i7 920 and Radeon 5850), with 16x supersampling anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering, as well as all details at max and a res of 1920x1200, with v-sync turned on, the game never dropped below 60fps.

In some ways, old games that run so smoothly can look better than new games with fancy graphics and unstable framerates.

 

[Hermiod]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

 

[Further]

Okay fine, windows games nearly 100%.

Everything else you can play pretty damn well with DOSBox

 

[clint g]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

Or those of us who bought bought the Fallout Trilogy pack. I'm going to be honest, I don't think PC backwards compatibility is anywhere near 100 percent, unless youre talking about running multiple OSs, in which case I don't think the argument can be made that its truly backwards compatible.

 

[Rii]

As evolving titles, longstanding MMOs can be interesting to look at in this respect. For example, although not reflective of the normal gaming experience, I can contrive to push as many as 300fps and as few as 10fps in WoW. That kind of performance delta is pretty much unheard of outside the genre. With the next expansion bringing further asset and technical updates including a new water engine, I think I might actually have to upgrade my PC - one which is already several times more powerful than anything available in 2004 when the game launched - to keep things running smoothly at high settings.

I tried Duex Ex recently on my computer (i7 920 and Radeon 5850), with 16x supersampling anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering, as well as all details at max and a res of 1920x1200, with v-sync turned on, the game never dropped below 60fps.

And it still looked like shit.

Deus Ex was something of an eyesore even upon release.

 

[Further]

Well near 100% for me at least. I guess I cannot speak for others. PC backwards compatibility is still at least an order of magnitude better than most other systems.

 

[Rii]

^ It's nice to be able to run games from the dawn of time, but given the hassles one often encounters it's definitely a mixed blessing. I don't have a lot of patience with computers these days, if a game gives me any hassles I just don't bother with it.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Deus Ex was something of an eyesore even upon release.

No kidding. I never played it because it looked nice. To be fair, I think the environments were quite well-done, but the character models and skins were pretty crap. Explosions and blood effects also looked atrocious.

 

[Lindley]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

...I'm not sure what you mean, since The First Decade works fine under XP on my MacBook Pro. I have it patched to 1.03, though. (1.03 is an unofficial patch, but it works great. Be warned, the 1.03 will invalidate any Red Alert 1 saved games from 1.02 at the least.)

 

[Yoda]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

...I'm not sure what you mean, since The First Decade works fine under XP on my MacBook Pro. I have it patched to 1.03, though. (1.03 is an unofficial patch, but it works great. Be warned, the 1.03 will invalidate any Red Alert 1 saved games from 1.02 at the least.)

You do realize that Windows XP is two major Windows versions ago, right?

 

[clint g]

Deus Ex was something of an eyesore even upon release.

No kidding. I never played it because it looked nice. To be fair, I think the environments were quite well-done, but the character models and skins were pretty crap. Explosions and blood effects also looked atrocious.

The character models on the PS2 were a step up but yeah, the game still looks like crap. Lets hope Deus Ex: Human Revolution finally gives the franchise some decent graphics

 

[Lindley]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

...I'm not sure what you mean, since The First Decade works fine under XP on my MacBook Pro. I have it patched to 1.03, though. (1.03 is an unofficial patch, but it works great. Be warned, the 1.03 will invalidate any Red Alert 1 saved games from 1.02 at the least.)

You do realize that Windows XP is two major Windows versions ago, right?

I suppose it is. Still very widely used, though.

 

[Hermiod]

^100% ? Tell that to people who bought Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

...I'm not sure what you mean, since The First Decade works fine under XP on my MacBook Pro. I have it patched to 1.03, though. (1.03 is an unofficial patch, but it works great. Be warned, the 1.03 will invalidate any Red Alert 1 saved games from 1.02 at the least.)

There were a lot of problems that didn't get patched for a while.

The biggest one I had was Red Alert 2 crashing every time it tried to play a video in the in game map window.

Then there was the problem where none of the cutscene videos on the Soviet disc in Red Alert 1 would play at all.

Plus, the fact that the earlier games didn't support TCP/IP networking, only IPX which isn't fully supported by Microsoft anymore.

 

[Rincewiend]

Over the weekend I picked up a new monitor--full HD resolution, 1920x1080. Since I'm kinda running a piece of crap laptop with an integrated graphics card, there isn't much made past 2004 that I can actually play.

That brings me to the "challenge" of this thread: what games do you know of from 2004 or earlier that can be played at 1920x1080? I got Morrowind working yesterday. Looks pretty nice at such a high res. Thinking of trying Deus Ex next.

It's fine to include games that require special tweaking/patching, as long as you indicate what must be done to make it work.

Go!!

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http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Oooh, thank you!