Fallout 1 and 2 Graphics on Modern displays

A

Allen Berge

First time out of the vault
I was watching something about classic gaming on youtube. They said that to really see the graphics as they were designed you should play them on the average display they were designed for. I was thinking back and remembering the machine I played those games on and that was a P1 computer and I used interlaced mode for anything larger than 640x480. I was thinking of dragging out the old p1, that still has Fallout 1, and 2 (along with Autodual and Roadwar 2000), but the display crapped out a long time ago. I have a few xtra Flat screen displays, but no CRT. Would it be worth the bother to hunt one down or does the game look fine on Modern Displays? The people in the video were saying that the colors can look washed out and some detail of sprite animation don't always look very good, for example.
 
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They say flat-screens look best at their native resolution. You could play Fallout in windowed mode at 640x480. If you were planning to play on a bigger screen, it would have bigger pixels when stretched to the bigger screen. Fallout looks fine on a flat-screen. I have about 25 crt monitors, and I've had no impulse to hook one up to play Fallout on ~for the difference it might make.

Fallout has an easter egg that is resolution dependent; it doesn't work well at any setting but 640x480, that's really the only reason that I can think of to demand a CRT.

The real problem is not the monitor, it's the graphics card. Some don't even run at 640x480 anymore. IRRC Windows doesn't even support less than 800x600 anymore.
 
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I am curious about that Easter Eggs.
I don't intend to play it on low resolution.
Before downloading the high-res, short line of sight (even for scenery) was my biggest complain about this game of any other isometric game. If i am playing from above, it is not to see only around my character's feet.
 
naossano said:
I am curious about that Easter Eggs.
I don't intend to play it on low resolution.
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I'm sure that you already know it.

Enter the credits menu in Fallout and type BOOM, to see an overlay of Tim's head & shoulders that inflates and explodes in a gory mess; but if it's not running at 640x480, the effect is warped, and repeated several times across the screen with bad interlacing; not what's intended.
 
Wow, never knew about that. Just check it out. Can't believe of all the research and bullshit I've done over this game, I never knew about that trick.
 
If you want to play Fallout "as intended" you could try to get a 4:3 screen with a native resolution of 1280x960. That's basically 640x2 by 480x2 so every pixel will now be 2x2 pixels big and there won't be any distortion. Any screen with a native resolution of ...:960 should work, actually. If you have an NVIDIA card, you can set the driver to scale the picture at lower resolutions but keep the aspect ratio. (Not sure if it's possible with AMD cards) So it will be scaled to 1280x960 and you'll have black bars on the sides. I'm not sure if such screens are available, though.

If you have a 1920x1080 screen you could set the hi-res patch to 720x540*, set the scale-but-keep-aspect in the driver and you'll also have undistorted graphics at something rather close to the original game resolution.



*Not sure if this is possible but I think custom resolutions are possible. The hi-res patch doesn't scale the picture, it just changes the portion of the map that is visible so the graphics are still pixel-accurate.
 
I've seen people downgrade their graphics card to get better graphics and resolution with Fallout. Sometimes it's necessary to do things like that if you want to play the games you love.

For example, a friend of mine likes to play Minecraft. Eventually after a new update though his screen started flickering. Turns out what he had was download a previous version of his graphics card. He said he felt shitty doing it, I mean because he was "literally" downgrading himself, but in the end Minecraft and several of his older games worked not just fine, but great afterwards.
 
BigBoss said:
I've seen people downgrade their graphics card to get better graphics and resolution with Fallout. Sometimes it's necessary to do things like that if you want to play the games you love.
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It's odd that you mention that... I once manually set FO3 to render at some odd resolution below 640x480; (I don't remember which, not all worked); and the result was very interesting due to the driver then scaling it up again to a minimum. The only way to describe it is that it had an aspect of a very detailed hand drawn cartoon, and I liked it very much. I tried getting screenshots or video of it from the game and with FRAPs, but these seemed to record only the output before scaling, and not the scaled effect onscreen.

*Yes this is true, I'm not kidding about this. If I can get that to work again I will, I think I prefer it to 1920x1080... You can't see the line between one polygon and the next, (but you can see artifacts of missing texture on the chain link fences, where the material alpha is so thin that some of the links seem to float in mid air).
 
So would you say it made Fallout 3 more playable?

I believe graphics really do have an effect on how good a game is. I don't mean like; the better/more realistic the graphics the better the game. I mean some graphics, even if they are what other people call "shitty", seem to fit that game perfectly. Look at Wasteland 1 for example. Yeah, if I could I'd ask them to release a new version with a few things changed. But the graphics for Wasteland 1 fit that game perfectly. I wouldn't mind if they remade it, but I wouldn't want them to change the graphics on the OG version (should they ever remake it). Sometimes, a certain set of graphics just happens to fit that game perfectly. Fallout 1-2 being a prime example. When I saw Van Buren I got a little sketchy, but then I figured "oh well, they had to upgrade some time. Plus I've only seen the demo and some screenshots. Maybe it'll grow on me". I just think that sometimes, not ALL the time, change/supposed upgrades to a system aren't always the best thing for the series. Like the transition of Fallout 1-2 graphics and isometric-ism to Fallout 3's 3D/HD FPV engine. Sure, in general outlook graphics may be better, but... sometimes things just don't fit.

In conclusion; sometimes "downgrading" is the best thing for that game/series. Diablo 1 is another great example. Don't get me wrong, I liked D2, but the first one just really had a dark luminescent feel to it, not that the second one didn't either, but the first one just really sold it.
 
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BigBoss said:
Look at Wasteland 1 for example. Yeah, if I could I'd ask them to release a new version with a few things changed. But the graphics for Wasteland 1 fit that game perfectly. I wouldn't mind if they remade it...
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They did remake it; they did update the graphics too ~but left that optional. 8-)
*Good thing too, for whatever reason, they removed the portrait animation in the updated graphics. I don't play with the enhanced graphics enabled for that reason.

But the remade Wasteland now has ambient music. You can get it on Steam or GoG, or possibly bundled free with WL2.


Fallout 1-2 being a prime example. When I saw Van Buren I got a little sketchy, but then I figured "oh well, they had to upgrade some time. Plus I've only seen the demo and some screenshots. Maybe it'll grow on me". I just think that sometimes, not ALL the time, change/supposed upgrades to a system aren't always the best thing for the series. Like the transition of Fallout 1-2 graphics and isometric-ism to Fallout 3's 3D/HD FPV engine. Sure, in general outlook graphics may be better, but... sometimes things just don't fit.

In conclusion; sometimes "downgrading" is the best thing for that game/series. Diablo 1 is another great example. Don't get me wrong, I liked D2, but the first one just really had a dark luminescent feel to it, not that the second one didn't either, but the first one just really sold it.
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I agree with each example and felt the same way about the Van Buren demo. To this day I'm impressed [on a sliding scale] with Fallout's graphics; what they managed to convey in 229 color 70~ish pixel sprites. Not just an appearance, but a likeness of the stereotype, and a bit of character to boot... That's not easy to do ~let alone do it in less than 256 colors with such low-res sprites.
[Some colors were reserved for palette animation.]
 
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Gizmojunk said:
[They did remake it; they did update the graphics too ~but left that optional. 8-)
*Good thing too, for whatever reason, they removed the portrait animation in the updated graphics. I don't play with the enhanced graphics enabled for that reason.
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That's because the animation system is very complex. Check Vax's page, which implements Kayahr's HTML implementation of the animation engine. You can see that it includes multiple independent animations that play at random. The source code is probably gone, so it can't be recoded.

But the remade Wasteland now has ambient music. You can get it on Steam or GoG, or possibly bundled free with WL2.
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The only good way to experience the original is with 80s music blasting out the speakers!
 
Damn. I haven't heard Kraftwerk in ages. Forgot all about them. Good group, strong anti-nuke and (pro?) technology message. Dude singing on the right looks like your classic stereotypical German though lol (not that that's a bad thing, but anyone could tell where he was from, even if they didn't know Kraftwerk).
 
Not sure if anyone's noticed, but it seems as though Steam has actually implemented an official version of the high-resolution patches available here. When you launch any of the classics from Steam, you get a choice of launching the high-res version or the "classic" version (the one that only runs well on older machines). They did this for ALL the classic Fallouts.
 
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