Playing Older Games on Modern Monitors
When I initially think of the late 90s or early 2000s, I don’t immediately realise they’re that long ago. That’s probably due to my age and being born in 1967. However, when I do the mental arithmetic, the march of time becomes quite apparent. Technology can change quickly and often does. Prior to the mid-2000s, most video games utilised relatively low-resolutions and the default aspect ratio was usually 4:3 due to the CRT monitors that were in common use at the time. If you try to play such vintage games on a modern HD, UHD or Ultra Wide monitor you’re going to end up with an image that is either stretched or with black bars on the sides of the screen. There are also going to be issues resulting from low-resolution graphics and textures as well. However both of these problems can be addressed by freely available internet resources.
When I initially think of the late 90s or early 2000s, I don’t immediately realise they’re that long ago. That’s probably due to my age and being born in 1967. However, when I do the mental arithmetic, the march of time becomes quite apparent. Technology can change quickly and often does. Prior to the mid-2000s, most video games utilised relatively low-resolutions and the default aspect ratio was usually 4:3 due to the CRT monitors that were in common use at the time. If you try to play such vintage games on a modern HD, UHD or Ultra Wide monitor you’re going to end up with an image that is either stretched or with black bars on the sides of the screen. There are also going to be issues resulting from low-resolution graphics and textures as well. However both of these problems can be addressed by freely available internet resources.
Not every game gets a remaster or a full blown remake. Fortunately the PC gaming community, being a resourceful one, fills the gaps with numerous “unofficial” patches created by gifted amateurs. These allow for widescreen aspect ratios and higher resolutions that are not native to the original games to run successfully. After searching for a while online, a single site emerged that appears to have by far the most resources available in one place. The Widescreen Gaming Forum, as the name suggests, is an online community that compiles patches for various games into a browsable database. All patches have comprehensive download and installation instructions along with notes verifying what resolutions they support. The patches are often updated to reflect changes in game build or newer screen resolutions.
16:9
I was looking specifically for a solution for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag which was released in late 2013. Although the game does support my primary monitor’s resolution of 1900 x 1200, which is an aspect ratio of 16:10, it still displays at 16:9 creating black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Apparently Ubisoft is renowned for forcing this aspect ratio in earlier versions of its big releases. Thankfully a solution for this particular problem was quickly found on the forum and a suitable patch applied. The change was successful and now I can play the game at 1900 x 1200 without any masking. It is not what I would call a major change to the game but I found the black bars distracting. I much prefer the entire monitor screen to be filled. I have some older games that have a 4:3 ratio and I‘m very curious to see how well they fare when patched to support a wider format.
16:10
With regard to the other issues surrounding older video games, such as low resolutions graphics, the lack of antialiasing and blurry textures I would recommend using the Nexus Mods website. There are thousands of mods and addons for both contemporary and older video games. This includes a lot of resources that are specifically designed to help older titles run on modern hardware. The Game Pressure website also has some useful files for older titles. And the forums for the online retailer Good Old Games can often point you in the right direction for finding mods and patches to drag old classic titles, kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Not every game can be patched to run on Windows 10 but it is certainly worth investigating, if it affords you the opportunity to return to a my beloved classic. In the meantime at least I don’t have to endure the wrong aspect ratio on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
NB. I previously touched on this subject in a post two years ago, when I installed the original version of Mafia. I wrote a post on the ensuing fine tuning required to run the game “correctly”.
The Perils of Installing Old PC Games
This is a big subject with thousands of PC games from over a decade ago that could be referenced. However, for the sake of brevity, I am just going to mention three in this post. So to begin with let’s just bypass the entire “nostalgia versus current” debate. Simply put, I feel there is value and enjoyment to be found in older PC games. Graphics and game mechanics naturally date, but often the technical limitations that existed at the time made the game developers both innovative and creative. Therefore you will often find that there are older titles that still have merit and something to offer. I recently bought Mafia which is the first instalment of a franchise currently owned by 2K Games. I have only played the latter two iterations of the game, namely Mafia II released 2010 and Mafia III released 2016. I was aware that the original released back in 2002, had a good reputation for its story driven gameplay and that it is still considered both challenging and creative.
This is a big subject with thousands of PC games from over a decade ago that could be referenced. However, for the sake of brevity, I am just going to mention three in this post. So to begin with let’s just bypass the entire “nostalgia versus current” debate. Simply put, I feel there is value and enjoyment to be found in older PC games. Graphics and game mechanics naturally date, but often the technical limitations that existed at the time made the game developers both innovative and creative. Therefore you will often find that there are older titles that still have merit and something to offer. I recently bought Mafia which is the first instalment of a franchise currently owned by 2K Games. I have only played the latter two iterations of the game, namely Mafia II released 2010 and Mafia III released 2016. I was aware that the original released back in 2002, had a good reputation for its story driven gameplay and that it is still considered both challenging and creative.
So I purchased the game from Good Old Games and installed it via their Galaxy gaming client and installer. One of the major selling points of GOG as a game provider is the way they retrofit old titles to run on current operating systems. I could easily have picked up a copy of Mafia on physical media but installing and running the game from such a source is often problematic. Setting aside driver issues, compatibility mode and the like, many installation disks from this era use obsolete copy protection software. SafeDisc being one example. Thus playing Mafia from a CD installation is dependent upon removing a very specific Windows Update that disabled SafeDisc support. If you have a more recent build of Windows 10, you may find that it is integral to your operating system and cannot be uninstalled. I encountered this same issue with Hidden and Dangerous 2 recently which I installed from the original media. Without the necessary copy protection support the game’s main executable would not work.
However, despite GOG doing their best to resolve such technical issues with the older titles that sell, other problems can arise. For example Mafia has a soundtrack consisting of period Jazz music from such artists as The Mills Brothers, Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt. However, due to licensing complications the music is absent in the GOG release. Now some players may not think this relevant to their enjoyment of the game, but I feel that it is integral to the overall game experience. Hence, I spent an hour reading the GOG forums as to how to restore the game score. There is a way to do so and someone has posted a link to the “removed” files which they’ve sourced from the original installation CDs. Needless to say I have followed this process and all has gone well, but it does require you to put your trust in your fellow gamers and that is not something one does lightly.
Another problem arising from installing Mafia is that this is a game that hales from a time when screen resolutions were a lot lower and aspect ratios other than 4:3 were not commonplace. Thus, elements of the onscreen UI are distorted or broken when running the game at 1920 x 1200, which is my default screen setting. Again a search online will yield a list of workarounds and I found a suitable “mod” over at Nexus Mods, along with another to update the draw distance for modern PCs. Nexus Mods is a long-established site whose community ensures that bogus mods are eliminated, making their content more reliable than other third-party sites. Hence, I was finally able to play Mafia with the original score and at a contemporary screen resolution without and distortion. My initial impressions of the game are good. The story is indeed well written and the missions are quite taxing, although the vehicle handling is appalling.
Another favourite game of mine from the late nineties is the real-time tactical fantasy wargame, Warhammer: Dark Omen. This game was released in 1998 and used 3D generated terrains in which 2D sprites subsequently battled. The game was one of the first to include support for the first-generation Voodoo 3dfx 3D accelerator cards. Getting such a game, which was also designed to run on Windows 98 to function on a modern PC is a challenge. Unlike Mafia, if you want to play Warhammer: Dark Omen, then you have to do more than apply a few mods. There is an entire forum dedicated to this game with a very complex set of instructions to get the game working. Going to such lengths to play a game one feels nostalgic about may not viable option for everyone. Therefore, the casual gamer would be wise to bear in mind that purchasing a much beloved title from GOG does not guarantee an exact duplicate experience to what you may have had previously. Nor does trying to install and play a game using the original media. Unless you have access to older hardware with the appropriate operating system of the time, you’ll probably have to do some tweaking to get things running either way. Therefore, caveat emptor.
