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[JAYNO20]

yeah i've been wondering this myself... the only way i've found to set games to run full screen that normall run widescreen is to change the resolution down from 1280x1024 to 640x480.. that will make them run in full screen, but im not happy with the resolution set down that low... that would be nice if there was another option, but something is telling me there isnt.

[trevor.easton]

Thanks for the 640x480 tip. I'll try it just on the off chance I can get by with the picture quality. So I guess thats all there is to it. Crap. Patch, MS!

[JAYNO20]

problem is for gears... MS already DID patch it, thats what is bringing it into widescreen. They did it because i guess having widescreen like that is the only way to get true HD or something, i dont know exactly what i read, but basically it WAS full screen until MS patched it and now its widescreen at any resolution i've seen above 640x480

[twistedsymphony]

No patch from Microsoft will EVER "fix" this issue...

this is a problem with how the games are designed NOT with how the Xbox 360 works.

From what I know... here is how the system works

- Games must be programmed for specific resolutions, meaning that if they want true 1024x768 support the game must be programmed for that specific resolution.

MS only REQUIRES that developers support 1280x720 (720p) which is obviously a widescreen resolution. everything else is left to the developers discretion.

So if developers only have to support 1 resolution why then can you output at any resolution of your liking?

basically the scaler in the 360 can tweak the resolutions provided by the developer to make other resolutions.

So some developers only support 720p which means that no matter what you set the output to it will always be widescreen or letterboxed, never full screen because the developer never provided a fullscreen resolution.

Most developers provide a 640x480 (480i/p fullscreen) as well as the required 720p. This gives them good compatibility on old tube TVs as well as 720p capable HDTVs as required by MS...

What this means when you try to output to VGA at say 1280x1024... well the developer never programmed the game for that resolution. so the Xbox 360 checks to see what resolutions are available and see that it can either grab a 640x480 image and scale that up or grab a 1280x720 image and letterbox it. Your LCD monitor can scale images too... it has to if it wants to display something other than it's native resolutions. So setting your 360 to output at 640x480 will look pretty much the same with your monitor scaling it than it would if the 360 had scaled it.

obviously scaling up the 640x480 image will produce a very non-HD picture and probably look very pixelated and crappy. a 1280x720 image is much closer to the desired resolution and will simply need black bars amended to either side of the image and it will look just as crisp as the developers intended. The 360 grabs the 720p image because it's much much closer to what you've set to output....

Developers on a whole probably wont ever provide good support for VGA monitor resolutions. Why? Because it's a whole lot more work for a very very small number of people (and remember even among those who use VGA monitors everyone is looking for a different resolution).

So basically your options are
1. Learn to live with Letterboxing and enjoy the fact that the picture is crisp and exactly what the developer intended.
2. set your output resolution to 640x480 and see why MS chose to have the console letterbox 720p instead of stretching out 480p... if you enjoy this you might also enjoy driving your car while looking through cardboard tubes for the real life version of "fullscreen" tunnel vision.
3. buy a damn widescreen display since that's what 100% of Xbox 360 games were designed to run on.

[CerealKiller741]

Yes it would.