Making Old Games Look Good On Modern LCDs? (Slashdot)

[Drew Wilson]

I'm a fan of several old PC games — the Myst series, StarCraft, Diablo, etc — with 2D graphics that run at a low, fixed resolution. These games all look horrible on modern LCDs. If you run them at their original resolution, they're tiny, and if you upscale them they get all sorts of blurry, pixelly smoothing artifacts. My ideal goal is to run these games at exactly double their original resolution — running 640 x 480 games at 1280 x 960, for example — so that each original pixel takes up exactly a 2 x 2 block of screen pixels, yielding graphics that are perfectly crisp and decently big. I've tried arcane settings in graphics card drivers (new and old), I've tried forcing the OS to run at a given resolution, and I've tried PowerStrip, all to no avail. Short of writing a new, modern engine for my favorite games, is there a reasonable solution to this problem?

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The ensuing conversation might prove interesting.

[w31n3r]

I'm a fan of several old PC games — the Myst series, StarCraft, Diablo, etc

diablo, diablo! i thought it said dildo! i should stop watching so much porn...

[mountain_rage]

Someone would simply have to write a new graphics driver, or some sort of additional driver that overrides the graphic driver to reprocess the graphics before output. Not sure how programming in the GPU works, but I imagine that should be possible.