This will sound like nit-picking but I do not mean it like that - when I said about not thinking it would be BETTER off in 4:3, that is the point. To me, having a bit of white space (or pretty blue in the case of our favourite Func_m) is not an issue when knowing what benefits I can get out of a widescreen. But of course, because I use widescreen 98% of the time, there is no concious thought process going, "but would this look better in 4:3?"

Interestingly, I just quickly accessed of few of my regular sites (I am not a deep-surfin'-dude so there aren't many) and my ISP home page is displaying wall-to-wall in a completely logical way, YouTube has about 1.5" of whitespace either side, and a selection of the photography sites (I said photography!) I visit all do widescreen display or spread text and pictures automatically across the screen to look completely natural.

A key for me, because I am a business user of MS products, is being able to have source material open in one window (which may well be a browser viewing an 800 x 600 website, or a pdf document) next to my Word document in another window. And all being visible in lifesize A4 is an absolute boon. 

i was actually going to bring up word processors as an argument since when you're typing a document on a widescreen, you basically have this thin white page with huge grey margins (or whatever the background colour is in your favourite word processor).
i hadn't thought about having another document open for reference, so yeah, that's definitely a boon there. 

Widescreen is awesome for coding. I use JEdit which allows me to split the window as I like so I usually have two to three files opened at once. Linux' (XFCE) "always on top" window feature also helps pinning more information on the screen.

For spreadsheets the benefit is obvious. Same for anything that uses sidebars or floating windows (drawing software, browsers). 

and all I can say is that it is different.

Has pluses and minuses to 4:3 but nothing that's making me tear my hair out, having made a few adjsutments of course. 

On my (cheap ass) fullhd monitor I like the fact that I don't have to run everything fullscreen to get a useful amount in a window like I do for my laptop's internal display. func_ looks ridiculous when running in a maximizer window, so I don't do that! 

The optimal line length for reading is 8-15 words average. Func has this. Done. 

Reading func posts is similar to reading newspaper columns. Which I feel is a good thing, but to each his own. 

Im used to looking at it on a 24" 16:9 1080p and a 22" 16:10 1050p. It is easy too read. If the width was going to increase, the typeface would have to increase slightly too to compensate. Personally I think it looks good as it is. 

Could be better served as an 8-bit 3D game with posts as blocks that can be put into stacks. Flame posts could burn stacks down to bottom. Idea posts could illuminate the stacks around them. Beer posts could cause temporary FOV issue...

Or, I could get some more sleep ;) 

 

maybe look for another specific stone value..,
or
why should I try to pen aid trade them
or
how come Rune maps look that awfull good?

func.., an oasis in popping up land. 

your posts always make me go o_O 

widescreen is no causing me as many issues as windows fucking 7.

It seems to be a fine operating system, but at least 2 old games (Beyond Good and evil, King Kong) I have tried to install wont because of incompatibility between their protection software and windows 7 (starforce basically). I really liked these games too... 

yeah, beyond good and evil is really good... 

the book is especially great (/ranting asshole mode)

(I find it annoying that games like DEVIL MAY CRY (the lamest gothic console pukeshit) have the nerve to call characters in the game DANTE, and that games and movies now seem happy to rip classic TITLES for the name recognition without even having anything to do with it. B G&E is famous because of a genius, don't rip the title fucktard.) (/ranting asshole mode) 

to install/run older games (microsoft's windows xp mode), it isnt available for download to me because I forked out for Windows 7 Home Premium only and not whatever else was on offer.

Absolute joke. 

You could run XP under virtualisation (VMWare or Parallels or something). Then the only question is what host OS is the best. Win 7 has new games of course.

But I saw OSX running XP via Parallels and it's sooooo gorgeous and seemless. You just need a big piece of RAM to move everything along. I think most VMs have hardware acceleration nowadays too. I've never actually done it though. 

install xp on a separate partition?

i may be biased as i never touched vista or 7. xp does everything i need it to and is running beautifully at the moment after a fresh reinstall - not to mention the horror stories i've heard in getting old games & apps to run in 7... 

I bought Pro specifically for that, but it turned out different from what I expected. It works for older programs and drivers - e.g. I can still use my ancient scanner. However, I think it's useless for games, as its generic drivers don't support 3D hardware, for instance, and it's not even possible to switch to complete fullscreen.

So an alternate XP partition would be the way to go. 

will look into sorting out a dual boot system. 

I'm dual booting XP and Windows 7. The only two situations I still require XP is for Fallout 3 (which runs on 7 but stutters like hell, runs perfectly on XP) and bsp2wad.exe doesn't support 64bit, so I can run that in XP. But I just use TexMex instead :D
XP is a great OS, it's useful to have it on my PC for when I need it. 

is a pretty good virtual machine, and free. It can do Direct3D acceleration in the guest OS... might be worth trying.

Dual-booting XP and Win7 is probably pretty painless, though, compared to Win/Linux or Win/Mac, since they both can read and write NTFS. 

fake screenshots from an isometric quake and quake 2 game:

http://tale-of-tales.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=104552&sid=5b889cefb2cf1c0caf6244c9aaacc71f 

 

Oh yes, very nice ! A shame there are only 2 shots available :(