Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with fullscreen

forcing resolution change - good/bad/otherwise?

Baby_Balrog — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:23:35 -0800

What kind of "hardware damage" are we talking about? Netbook screen resolution question inside - please help. I'm profoundly frustrated that I can't play Transcendence on my wonderful little Acer AspireOne. The screen res for my netbook is 1024x600 natively (800x600 is also available). This doesn't work for Transcendence. I tried doing it in -dx and /windowed modes, that didn't help.
I posted to their forums and they were almost less than useless.
I read this question and it left me with more questions.
FINALLY, I was messing around with my monitor settings. Under Advanced options in the screen Settings menu, there's a monitor tab. It contains a checkbox that says "hide modes that monitor cannot display." I unchecked it and VOILA all kinds of crazy-ass resolutions suddenly became available to me. I tried going one higher than 1024x600 (1024x768) and it worked.

However. Under the aforementioned checkbox is a dire warning that clearing that box may lead to an unusable screen and/or hardware damage.

I don't care how the screen "looks" - I just wanna play Transcendence, skewed pixels or whatever. Just need to see the buttons on the bottom of the screen.

But what kind of hardware damage are we talking about here? Am I gonna fry my little friend's monitor if I do this?

I've been struggling with this deeply personal issue for nearly four months now and I need some help. Thanks wise mefites!

Does my perfect full screen text editor exist?

Joe Beese — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:55:44 -0800

Does my perfect full screen text editor exist? I've been using Q10 and it's perfect... except for one thing: the blinking cursor, which spoils the otherwise distraction free environment.

If there's some hack to replace it with an underline or solid block, I'd employ it. If not, is there another full-screen text editor that: 1) works on Vista, 2) gives you full control over both text and background color, and 3) doesn't have a blinking cursor?

Imax pan and scan for The Dark Knight

jchgf — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:16:32 -0800

Was the Imax footage from The Dark Knight double-cropped for the full-screen pan and scan DVD? I'm just curious about how WB handled this situation and I can't find this information in any review so far. Since the Imax 1.44 and the fullscreen 4:3 ratios are similar, it could be an opportunity to present the Imax footage almost uncropped from the Imax theatrical presentation in the fullscreen version of the DVD, though I doubt they did, for marketing reasons among others.

It'd be silly if they cropped the footage twice though, once for the 2:35 non-Imax theatrical and DVD version, a second time for the fullscreen pan and scan.

Anybody can put my geek curiosity to rest?

Icewind Dale runs only in a window

invitapriore — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:06:26 -0800

I can't get Icewind Dale to run in full screen on Windows XP (SP2). This is on a Macbook running Parallels. Even when I have windows full-screened, Icewind Dale runs as a window within it. Setting it to 640x480 mode in the shortcut's properties gets me slightly better results, except that the start menu does not disappear.

The only reason this whole thing is a problem is because I can't scroll my view, as scrolling necessitates putting the mouse to the edge of the view, an impossibility when running the game in a window as it merely switches the mouse's potential focus to the desktop. Help!

Making Colonization work in Vista

saladin — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:33:49 -0800

Can't play Colonization in Vista... A have a (ahem) copy of Colonization that I'd been happily playing on my 3 year old XP computer for several years, problem free. I recently bought a new PC with Vista; after copying over all the relevant files, my new machine steadfastly refuses to open Colonization. Instead, I'm given the error message "C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe; This system does not support fullscreen mode." I'm then directed to close the program. I get the same error message when attempting to reinstall.

I'm beginning to worry that I'll never again know the pleasure of paying the Tupi to burn British villages. Help me, AskMetafilter!

Fullscreen youtube to the telly.

pompomtom — Tue, 22 May 2007 06:46:49 -0800

Did youtube change its 'fullscreen' option recently? I have a macbook, which is also connected to my telly through the hdmi->S-video adaptor. I'm sure I used to be able to 'fullscreen' a youtube vid, and chuck it onto the TV by dragging it to the right of the laptop screen. (yes, this all sounds stupid, but I think if you've done this, it will make sense).

Now, if I hit the fullscreen button on a youtube vid, I can only make the vid fullscreen in the macbook's screen... so if I want it on the telly I have to use 'mirroring', which a) mongs up the rez of the laptop screen and b) means I can't post daft questions to askmefi at the same time.

So, is this a new change to youtube over which I have no control, or have I bollocksed something up somewhere?

Why are there so many Full Screen copies of Full Metal Jacket?

The Deej — Sat, 12 May 2007 15:37:01 -0800

IdleCuriosityFilter. I know that Full Metal Jacket is available on DVD in Widescreen. But how come every copy I see at my local retailers' is Full Screen? It's a great movie, and yes, I know I can order it from Amazon, eBay, and countless other places. But often I see it on the shelf and try to impulse-buy it. But it's always Full Screen. I have seen it this way at Best Buy, Borders, Hastings, Wal-Mart, and others, and searching for a Widescreen copy on the shelf is futile. I don't recall seeing any other movie so prevalently available in Full Screen, and so hard to find in Widescreen. Any ideas, speculation, guesses, or inside info from anyone involved in the retail DVD biz?

I hope I don't have to name my cat in the next week, since I am using my question on this trivia!

Getting into 'flow' in Windows?

Happy Dave — Tue, 23 May 2006 06:23:18 -0800

Flow-creating, full-screen, web-killin' creative tools for Windows? After reading this post about a conceptual app called Blockwriter for Macs, I got to thinking. I work in IT consulting, and so spend most of my working days immersed in Powerpoint, which, for better or worse, tends to get used for everything. However, in the evenings, like thousands of others, I do my creative thang by knocking out short stories, blog posts and even a novel. At home, I have a dedicated writing machine, which is a non-networked iMac, running on Linux. No internet, plus the fullscreen setting on OpenOffice means that I can happily type away for hours without getting distracted.
Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time away from home in various hotels. I write on the evenings on my work computer, which unfortunately is web-enabled to the Nth degree, plus has a bunch of other things on it to distract me, not least work stuff which sits there in the background, taunting me. I find it really hard to get into the same 'flow' state as I can at home, and the Blockwriter suggestions above got me thinking - is there something similar for Windows? I currently use a combination of Google Sidebar's Scratch Pad, and Editpad Lite, but they're not covering all the bases here.

Anyone have any ideas? Of course, free would be good, but for something like Ulysses, I might consider creaking open the wallet.

Which Incredibles DVD, fullscreen or widescreen?

soyjoy — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:21:12 -0800

The Incredibles comes out on DVD on Tuesday, and there's nothing that will stop me from rushing out to acquire this jam-packed roller-coaster of a movie. But which version? I'm not much of a DVD connoiseur: Most of the DVD movies I have were gifts, and the rest were impulse buys just to have something to watch on a given night. So this will be the first time I'm making a well-considered choice of a DVD that I want to squeeze every possible amount of enjoyment out of.

My question is this: Given the content of the movie, the way visual jokes are tossed off here and there, but also the delightful overwhelming quality of bigness it had in the theater, would you recommend (and on what basis) I go for the "widescreen" or "fullscreen" format? I do understand the diff. between them; my TV screen is the standard square-ish ratio. A knee-jerk answer would be "widescreen" so I'm sure not to miss anything. But I've heard panning-&-scanning has gotten a lot more sophisticated lately and I'm wondering if, with an animated movie like this, the contingency would have been built into it, so that the nice big fullscreen image would give me the best bang for the buck. Any experts?