I most certainly will and will divulge more of the details when I get back, of course. I’d need a driver to drive me around to have enough time to write everything down. The USA are even more foreign in some ways than I had expected, though in other ways it sometimes feels I’m just a few blocks away from home.

Great to read the news of you timely (but not very law abiding) arrival in Denver. One goal of the trip accomplished! To read your narrative is almost to be there…. keep us posted!

funny thing is my 1st moving violation was for a similiar near stop out of my high school parking lot

Your point is well taken though, widescreen support from an FPS will give you a slight advantage when playing a 4:3 player, unless the game supports setting resolutions manually -or- supports setting the FoV yourself. Some games do, Quake derivatives most notably.

When shopping in the stores, it was infuriating that the sales associates kept trying to push the fact that it was so much bigger when they asked what I was replacing. I had to actually pull out my cell phone’s calculator and do the math in front of them to show how foolish it was to pay $300 for 156000 fewer pixels than I already had. Some of them still didn’t get it.

I finally found something I was happy with in the Dell E248WFP which has a native resolution of 1920×1200, which is 384000 more pixels than my old CRT max resolution. I’m still very happy with the purchase.

There is however one issue concerning gaming that does put any wide aspect ratio at any (reasonable) resolution above a 4:3 resolution. That has to do simply with the way things are rendered. It isn’t true of all games, some older ones for example. But for almost all modern games, especially First Person Shooters, this holds true.

A wide screen aspect ratio gives you peripheral vision. You actually see /more/ than your opponents. This is because the engine won’t chop off the top and bottom of the render to make it fit the screen, it will in fact render more at the sides to make it fit. Again, this isn’t true with all older games, a few of them will in fact chop the top. But if that isn’t happening, then you will have a slight advantage by way of viewable angle over those who don’t have a wide aspect.

Someone out there (not you Grismar, I know you know better;) might say “Well, why not just add more screen along the vertical, and keep the peripheral advantage?” That’s a reasonable question on the face of it, but it has to do with the way the rendering engine works. If you add more screen real estate along the vertical, you’re right back to a 4:3 ratio. The engine isn’t going to just show you more of the world along the top and the bottom. Instead it’s going to go back to rendering for a 4:3 ratio. You’ll have more pixels, and thus more resolution in the render, but not more viewable area within the game environment. Short of hacking your video drivers (which will get you punk-busted most likely), I don’t know of a way to force this.

This is a bit of a drawback, since this means there is no way to subscribe to a feed of a board that requires registration, unless you are logged in at the time. If you do log in, the feed will work fine until you log out again, or your session times out.

I certainly hope so, but if they don’t, it won’t persuade me to switch to 4.0. I guess the best thing to do (if you’re a paying customer at least) is to write the authors of DM Genie and let them know you won’t be using 4th.