The Return to 4:3 (Fullscreen) Goodness

[Manny]

Well...I've done it gents...

Spoiler

Apologies for the dark photo, but it's been a rainy Florida day. That plus work being slow = perfect vibes for booting up some D2 and running some Chaos Sanctuary. I've been thinking about a potential return to 4:3 for several years, but just haven't pulled the trigger till now. These came in yesterday and what a treat. They are matching 21" Eizo monitors, made in Japan, and I got them at a steal. They support 1600x1200 and have a 1:1500 contrast ratio. Believe it or not Eizo still makes these brand new. They are often found in medical offices. The colors are vivid (IPS panels) and there is an sRGB preset that looks great to my eyes. Web browsing seems a lot more natural now, as I suspected: there is less scrolling, as the content is right front and center. And what do you know, no more black bars on beloved games such as Diablo II.

I personally never understood the move to 16:9 for personal computing. I have a 4K TV in the living room for movies...

This weekend I will rotate the one on the right into portrait (thus 3:4) and play some TATE schmups.

Happy gaming!

[hedgesparrow]

Nice! I always invest in decent panels, I have two IPS panels which have great colour either side of a gaming TN panel which supports 144 Hz. Going 120+ fps in a FPS really makes turning much smoother. Of course, I'm playing Diablo II right now so it's stuck at 25 FPS .

I have my left IPS panel rotated potrait for the web browser. Like you say it's often a lot better reading websites, the only problem is most photos are landscape and some websites assume a landscape monitor. Perhaps 3:4 is a good compromise!

[Manny]

Nice! I always invest in decent panels, I have two IPS panels which have great colour either side of a gaming TN panel which supports 144 Hz. Going 120+ fps in a FPS really makes turning much smoother. Of course, I'm playing Diablo II right now so it's stuck at 25 FPS .

I have my left IPS panel rotated potrait for the web browser. Like you say it's often a lot better reading websites, the only problem is most photos are landscape and some websites assume a landscape monitor. Perhaps 3:4 is a good compromise!

Nice man. That sounds like a great set-up. I also briefly considered going to a 38" curved ultrawide with more modern tech (insane refresh rates, etc.), but ultimately felt that two smaller monitors would be more manageable and better suited for my uses. I also noticed a trend, that as I was getting bigger & wider displays, I'd have to keep moving them further back on the desk, meaning more eye-strain (for me). Although I discovered a HiDPI utility for macOS that helped a lot with that. I don't like the way Windows does scaling very much.
Getting old I guess! And the last FPS I actively played was Halo 2 on the original XBOX.

[hedgesparrow]

Consoles? *spit*

Hehe, just kidding but I'm a PC gamer at heart. Been playing FPS games since Doom. Forced myself to use a mouse for Quake and Quake World (online) .

[fearedbliss]

Nice, I like how your monitors are actually 4:3. Last time I had a 4:3 monitor was back when I played D2 on a 1024x768 17" monitor. Haha. When I entered the workforce, I was exposed to dual monitors setups and that was a game changer. These dual monitors were also widescreen so it definitely helped in terms of more horizontal screen space which is good for office work (Not necessarily the best for coding which is probably you see some people rotating the monitor to get that vertical height, I don't like the rotation though). I liked the dual monitors set up enough that eventually I ended up getting dual monitors at home as well. It's been many years but I've changed back to a single monitor set up since I like to have less things on my table and just concentrate on one screen, however the screen is a single, bigger, 27" monitor rather than 2x 24". If I'm playing Diablo, then I always play in cnc-ddraw's window mode with a fixed size of 1024x768 (This happens to be a good size for me given the distance between me and the screen, and the remaining monitor space that I can use for other tasks, although usually it's just the game on this screen and my Framework Laptop on Linux is the other machine I'll have on the side that serves as my "and do everything else on this computer cause I want my privacy" thing lol.

PS: The Framework laptop has a 3:2 display. It essentially feels like a 4:3 and I believe they made it that way for the coders to have better verticality.

[Manny]

Consoles? *spit*

Hehe, just kidding but I'm a PC gamer at heart. Been playing FPS games since Doom. Forced myself to use a mouse for Quake and Quake World (online) .

Bwahahaha. I feel you. PC gaming is definitely where it's at. The only console I own these days is a Wii U. It's the last console (as far as I know) where the physical games are actually full games, and are able to be backed up as such. I'm big on actually owning my media.

If I'm playing Diablo, then I always play in cnc-ddraw's window mode with a fixed size of 1024x768 (This happens to be a good size for me given the distance between me and the screen, and the remaining monitor space that I can use for other tasks, although usually it's just the game on this screen and my Framework Laptop on Linux is the other machine I'll have on the side that serves as my "and do everything else on this computer cause I want my privacy" thing lol.

PS: The Framework laptop has a 3:2 display. It essentially feels like a 4:3 and I believe they made it that way for the coders to have better verticality.

Ahhh, so that's where the mysterious 1024x768 came from in your ddraw.ini.

And what a neat laptop!

[fearedbliss]

@Manny Now you know lol. I think by default it's 0x0 (Default game resolution IIRC which would be small for my screen). The 1024x768 default also helps me with keeping a good and predictable window when doing OBS videos as well. I also have the `resizable` option disabled so that I don't accidentally mess up the recording.

[fearedbliss]

@Manny I opened another post you may be interested in so I don't deviate this thread lol.

[galaxyhaxz]

Your monitors look lovely. I'm using a 5:4 myself as that's what I could find for cheap in the local area.

You will quickly notice after going from obnoxious 16:9 displays how much better browsing the web is, so much less wasted space. I personally find 3:2 and 4:3 to be the ideal ratios. Different ratios are good for different purposes, and 4:3 fits everything but movies and wide-view games.

Aside from the DELL 2007FP and a chinese company rigging old Thinkpads, I don't think you can get them anymore sadly.

To add insult to injury we had 16:10 and 1920x1200 displays briefly before the reduction to 1080p...

[Manny]

@galaxyhaxz

Welcome bro. Glad to see you here. And you are so right. Browsing the web is absolutely more enjoyable now which was one of the intended goals! Fullscreen D2 was another I'm so glad I took the plunge and went 'Back to the Future"...

And for me, I don't really play any modern games anyway, least not on PC. Currently installed on my gaming rig is a little collection of native fullscreen titles:

Diablo II
Garou - Mark of the Wolves (aka Fatal Fury)
Grim Fandango (Remastered version from GOG)
Nox
The Curse of Monkey Island (a very chill point & click adventure game)
The King of Fighters 98' (best of the series IMO)
The Last Blade 2 (my favorite fighting game)
Warcraft III RoC & TFT (i miss classic bnet & DotA)
Ys VI - The Ark of Napishtim

Coming soon will be the original Starcraft & Broodwar. Thanks to fearedbliss, I will have soon have all the patches (downloading as we speak). I wish I could have the Remastered version DRM-free or on physical media, but the only way to play that version is through Blizzard's new launcher which I despise.

The Dell 2007FP is a pretty good monitor IIRC (had one back in the day). I seem to remember some guys buying tons of those for use in custom arcade cabinets. These days it seems eBay is the best place for 4:3 monitors. And I'm not aware of any companies besides Eizo that still produces them new. FYI mine are the Eizo Flexscan S2133, in case you were curious. They are quite pricey, but I got lucky and didn't pay anywhere near MSRP.