How to get widescreen resolution with Cosmic Break

Hey everyone, first post... I registered just to post this.

I'm totally new to Cosmic Break and was annoyed with the lack of a widescreen option, so I looked around and found this video:

Youtube: /watch?v=5WcMl7IN4qc

So in order to trick the application into going widescreen just follow this procedure. Note that this method DOES NOT preserve the aspect ratio since the application itself does not have any widescreen support; all it does is stretch the picture to fit your machine's resolution.

1. Start up Cosmic Break normally and head to the options screen. Make sure you are in WINDOWED mode. This works in full screen mode too, but it's harder to work with.
   
   
2. On your desktop, go to the part of the Control Panel where you can adjust your screen resolution.
   
   
3. This is the tricky part: in order to get the maximum correct size with the least stretching, we want to choose a resolution that closely matches the highest resolution available in the Cosmic Break options, which for me is 1280 x 1028. Therefore, in my Windows display options, I chose a resolution of 1280 x 720.
   
   
4. After choosing the Windows resolution, click on Apply (not OK), then it will ask you if you want to Revert the changes you just made. Revert the changes, and you will see that Cosmic Break will have stretched to fit the screen, and then click Cancel to exit.
   
   
5. If Cosmic Break did not stretch, it means that the resolution you chose in Windows will not work with the resolution you chose in Cosmic Break. I noticed that 1366 x 768 did not work for me, but do trial and error to see what works for you.
   

Additional notes:
This method was done using Windows 7, so your procedure may vary, but it should still work in Windows XP. I also chose to hide my taskbar so that it doesn't cover part of the bottom of the screen, since if done correctly, the game screen will stretch to fit your entire desktop.

I hope this method was helpful and hasn't been posted before.

Forcing the resolution on your widescreen monitor can potentially damage it if used for long periods of time.

Plus, the stretched graphics look horrible.

LXE wrote:

Forcing the resolution on your widescreen monitor can potentially damage it if used for long periods of time.

Plus, the stretched graphics look horrible.

I'm not all that tech savvy I suppose. I think I've done this, and from what I understand, it's tricking the game into formatting that resolution. The monitor is already capable of running that Res. I simply stopped doing it, bc it made my game run a little laggy.

LXE wrote:

Forcing the resolution on your widescreen monitor can potentially damage it if used for long periods of time.

Forcing an application to use a resolution that isn't available in the game options cannot physically damage a monitor. The monitor itself is still displaying whatever native resolution you set it to; the only thing you are doing tricking the application out of maintaining its normal aspect ratio.

fpk wrote:

LXE wrote:

Forcing the resolution on your widescreen monitor can potentially damage it if used for long periods of time.

Forcing an application to use a resolution that isn't available in the game options cannot physically damage a monitor. The monitor itself is still displaying whatever native resolution you set it to; the only thing you are doing tricking the application out of maintaining its normal aspect ratio.

I thought this was harmless @_@ I'm not totally computer dumb then.

fpk wrote:

Forcing an application to use a resolution that isn't available in the game options cannot physically damage a monitor. The monitor itself is still displaying whatever native resolution you set it to; the only thing you are doing tricking the application out of maintaining its normal aspect ratio.

According to your method. When you're forcing the application to adjust to a certain resolution, you're forcing to monitor to also adjust to that resolution.

If you do that, your game will lag because of more processing is required and the graphics will be stretched. It's better to play in the resolution that was specified for the game even though you might want to play full screen.

Even if it doesn't damage the monitor physically, the reasons not to do it outweigh the reasons to do it because the drawbacks are just too severe.

LXE wrote:

fpk wrote:

Forcing an application to use a resolution that isn't available in the game options cannot physically damage a monitor. The monitor itself is still displaying whatever native resolution you set it to; the only thing you are doing tricking the application out of maintaining its normal aspect ratio.

According to your method. When you're forcing the application to adjust to a certain resolution, you're forcing to monitor to also adjust to that resolution.

If you do that, your game will lag because of more processing is required and the graphics will be stretched. It's better to play in the resolution that was specified for the game even though you might want to play full screen.

Even if it doesn't damage the monitor physically, the reasons not to do it outweigh the reasons to do it because the drawbacks are just too severe.

Not to be confrontational, but you're creating non-existent problems that just don't happen when you change an image's aspect ratio, and you are misunderstanding what this method actually does.

Aspect ratio is simply the ratio between the number of horizontal to vertical pixels. When you force an image into a resolution that is not in the original aspect ratio, the GPU changes the pixels of the image to use rectangular pixels rather than square ones; this is the "stretching" that is apparent and I'm sure that everyone is familiar with. To prove my point, I made some benchmark images of Cosmic Break. The first image is the lowest available resolution in the CB's normal aspect ratio, followed by the highest available resolution. The last image was taken while using my forced aspect ratio method:

Cosmic Break benchmark: imgur.com/a/5gwPQ#0

As you can see, FRAPS reports similar FPS values for the highest resolution using the normal aspect ratio and when the game is forced to use a 16:9 aspect ratio. The FPS in both cases ranged from 26-30. HWMonitor reports similar temperature values both in the CPU and GPU, meaning neither processor is working any harder by doing this.

Not convinced? Here are two screencaps from a movie file that is being processed at 4 Mbps/24 FPS at a native resolution of 16:9 (i.e. it's a rip from a Blu-ray disc). In the second image, I overrode the aspect ratio to be 235:100, stretching it vertically and horizontally like I'm doing with Cosmic Breaker. Surely, if anything would make my CPU and GPU work harder, it would be this.

BD file benchmark: imgur.com/a/hHvvw#0

...Nope.

Conclusion: changing the aspect ratio of an image might cause your CPU and GPU to work harder, but the difference is so small that you would have to be using a computer from 2001 to notice it. Even with my outdated Core 2 Duo processor, the change in aspect ratio in a Blu-ray file barely made one of my cores flinch.

EDIT: The only reason why you wouldn't want to do this is because it makes the game look even uglier. But some people can live with that, seeing as how the graphics look like they're from 1997 anyway.

If your monitor support that resolution then there wouldnt be any damage... only game lag...

but if your monitor doesn't support that resolution and refresh rate (please dont forget the refresh rate!!!) then your monitor will shot bad graphics and can be damage.

So what is the difference between this and fullscreening? Isnt the aspect ratio scaled to fit anyway?

Spectrion wrote:

So what is the difference between this and fullscreening? Isnt the aspect ratio scaled to fit anyway?

If you have a "square" type of monitor, then going fullscreen will fill up the entire screen since the game was designed to be used in that aspect ratio. This workaround is meant for users with widescreen monitors (i.e. monitors with 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio), because AFAIK, if you go fullscreen in a widescreen monitor, the game doesn't fill up the entire space and instead just has empty black space on either side... so for users who don't want that empty space and prefer a stretched image instead, that's where this workaround comes in.