CRT/TFT

[ABABAB]

I have a 19" CRT screen at the moment, if I buy a 19" widescreen TFT screen, will MSTS go widescreen as well or not? Could someone please advise me.

Cheers
ABABAB

[gswindale]

MSTS does not support widescreen screens properly - you may get it to fill the screen, but the pixels will be stretched.

[PaulH2]

MSTS does not support widescreen resolutions at all.

Depending on the monitor, there may be a setting to not stretch the display to full screen, in which case you'll get a normal MSTS display but with black bars at the side, otherwise, the display will be stretched horizontally. MSTS will run perfectly well, but it will look odd. Some people don't mind that, others do.

Your best bet is probably to see if you can download a manual for the monitor you are interested in and see if it has the capability to select whether to stretch the image or not (mine does, but I know many do not and most laptops also do not).

Also, remember that a 19" widescreen monitor will be smaller than a 19" standard monitor as 19" is the diagonal size. If you want the same height display in a widescreen monitor (i.e. you want extra at the sides for widescreen), you'd need to go to a 21".

Oh, I almost forgot, there is one other option with MSTS, and that is to run it in windowed mode. I don't remember the details but you start MSTS with a command line switch in the shortcut. A quick serach on something like "MSTS windowed" should show you how it is done.

Paul

[AdamsRadial]

I run MSTS on my laptop with widescreen. In fullscreen mode it doesn't look right, so I run MSTS in a window, and it looks normal. Also, I can have a wordpad file open alongside with notes on the route or the activity.

The way to get a windowd MSTS is

1) create a shortcut to train.exe by opening Windows Explorer, navigating to the program files\Microsoft games\Train simulator folder and right clicking on the train.exe, then "send to" desktop, create shortcut.

2) On the desktop, right-clock on the shortcut, choose properties, and then in the "General" tab, look for the field named "Target" and add the following to the end of the entry, remembereing to leave a space after the train.exe

-vm:w,1024,768,32

Note the colon after vm and the commas seperating the three parameters.

In this case, I use a window 1024 by 768 with 32 bit colour, and the display option in my MSTS is also set up to 1024,768,32. You could of course have a smaller window, 800 x 600, or if your 19" monitor and graphics card allow it, an even bigger display

[phat2003uk]

Also, remember that if you have an Nvidia graphics card, regardless of your monitor, it has the option to maintain the aspect ratio. My monitor didn't have an option to keep the aspect ratio but I ticked a box in my Nivida control panel and it fixed it.

Richard