PST on Vista 64 bit & a 1440x900 Native Res LCD Monitor

The other day Chezdon asked about setting up PST on a 64 bit version of Vista on Game Banshee's PST forum... I have never actually done this and while others may have, I can't remember having come across such information. (Although it should theoretically work out just fine) I also became intrigued at the notion of moddifying the game to run on different widescreen monitors. Folks have put up guides to such incorporating existing mods but, at least the ones I've read through, take you through it step-by-step on a theoretical basis, not actually by going through it themselves. This is important because many of today's widescreen monitors have different aspect ratios and resolution dimensions than what was out at the time that the above mentioned mods were developed.

I have two main goals: 1) Make sure it runs on 64 bit Vista and 2) See how The Bigg's widescreen mod and the Ghostdog UI mod work on my 1440x900 native resolution lcd monitor.

I am more or less following the "Fully Modded" guide by Johnny Walker found here:

http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html

My point isn't to just copy his guide (why else would I have put it up) but to go more in depth into the aspect of modding the game for current generation widescreen monitors. It is an experiment in testing it out on my specific monitor size and to see how well it performs on 64-bit vista. I do however touch on the topic of a full install which many folks have already gone through in other places. This is so that one could potentially set up the game without having to link out of here.

The computer I'm testing this out on runs on an AMD Phenom x4 9759 Quad Core processor and an ATI Radeon HD 3650 video card.
I am running a 64-bit version of windows vista. (home-premium)
My monitor is an LG 19" widescreen that runs at a native resolution of 1440x900.

I am using the 4 disc original version of the game.

I installed the game... my chosen installation path looks like this: C:\Games\Black Isle\Torment

I then installed the V1.1 Patch because I have the 4 disc version.

Since the installation basically just installs the core components off of the first disc you will be doing a lot of disc swapping so I will now do the "full install".

So I copied the contents of each disc to inside of my Main "Torment" game folder... remember that each disc contains one actual folder and inside of the folder are a bunch of .bif "files".(they are actually archives) DON'T put the .bif files, by themselves, into your Torment folder, rather just copy the folder -- which contains the bifs -- into the Torment folder.
So for example, on the second game disc there is the "cd2" folder and inside that folder there are maybe a 100 .bif files, well just copy the "cd2" folder to your main Torment folder.

Repeat for discs 3 and 4.

Okay, finished that up. Now I need to make it so that the game knows where these folders are when it needs to load from them. To do this I opened up the Torment.ini file which resides in the main Torment folder. In Vista, if the "show file extensions" is off, which it is by default, you won't actually see the .ini part but it is easy to find because on the "file type" column it is listed as "configuration settings". Now just change the file paths for each cd to where it was you put the cd.(this is the very first part of the .ini file) For example, with cd 2, it looked like this CD2:=E:\CD2\ but after changing it, it looks like this CD2:=C:\Games\Black Isle\Torment\CD2\

Also, as per the "Fully Modded" guide, I changed the "cache size" to =1, the path search nodes to =32000 and the "maximum framerate" to =40

I tested the game up to this point to make sure everything is working so far. It does. Also, before getting into the widescreen mod, I took a screenshot of how the game looks played at its native 640x480 resolution when scaled up to my monitor's native resolution. (the link is towards the bottom of this post) Note: The screen capture tool I used actually captures it at its true 640x480 resolution without taking into account the scaling that the graphics card performs. This means that I had to scale the image up manually in my image editing program to 1440x900 but by experimenting with different resampling algorithms, I was able to get it to look nearly identical. All in all, the picture is almost exactly how the it looks while playing the game without any mods. IMO, it's not acceptable.

I installed The Bigg's mod using the following specifications (as per the "Fully Modded" guide): 1280x720. Note: I tried using my native res of 1440x900 even though it is unsupported by ghostdogs mod, and the graphics were very messed up...

I need to make note of the fact that not all "widescreen" monitors have the same aspect ratio which can be problamatic. You see my widescreen doesn't proportionatly scale down to any of the Ghostdog supported resolutions: 1280x800, 1280x720, 1280x768, and 1280x1024... so in a way I'm screwed. I'm not a resolution expert and don't know exactly how The Bigg's mod works so I just tried different ones until I found one that kept everything on the screen. (note, the menus will be top left justified regardless... you actually have to start a game to see) So experimenting around is really the only thing I can recommend... Ideally, my resolution would be set at 1280x740 but The Bigg's widescreen mod doesn't support this, neither does Ghostdog's mod.
The best I could do, ultimately, while still staying "supported" by both The Bigg's and Ghostdog's mods, was 1280x720. This still is unacceptable, however, because it clips off a portion of the screen on the right...

Here's a before pic:

And the after: (Note that you can not see the cut-off on the right side of the screen because my screen capture software captured the full image without taking into consideration the scaling, and subsequent cut-off, that my video card produced.. but trust me, it cuts off about 20 pixels or so)


So there you have it... it works great, but only on SOME widescreen monitors. If your widescreen monitor can scale 1280x800, 1280x720, or 1280x768 properly, i.e. no clipping, then you should be good to go. If not, I'm not sure if there is a solution. If anyone out there knows of a solution PLEASE share. What happened, I think, is that The Bigg's mod was created "back in the day" when there wasn't as much diversity in types of widescreen monitors... but times have changed.

Links and Credits: I didn't create any of the tools I used for my install test and am not implying I did. The download links for the mods (along with credentials) are listed below:

The Bigg's Widescreen mod: http://www.gibberlings3.net/widescreen/

Ghostdog's UI mod: http://www.spellholdstudios.net/ie/ghostdogs-pst-ui