16x9 Support?

[zahne]

Hey, so I'm first time poster here and am getting a Dreamcast soon. I'm planning on using the Dreamcast with my LCD monitor as I don't have a TV. It's a nice 1080p Acer display with DVI, VGA and HDMI. I was going to get one of those VGA boxes and I had a question about 16x9 support. After YouTubing and googling I have found conflicting answers and I wanted to get some feedback on this directly:

1) There are some games that support 16x9 natively. Correct?

2) I also heard that not all Dreamcast games are VGA compatible. Is this true?

3) Those games that are not 16x9 native can they be stretched to fill the screen if I wanted? I saw a YouTube video where someone did that and I saw others where they were 4x3.

Thanks in advance!

[TuxTheWise]

Hey, so I'm first time poster here and am getting a Dreamcast soon. I'm planning on using the Dreamcast with my LCD monitor as I don't have a TV. It's a nice 1080p Acer display with DVI, VGA and HDMI. I was going to get one of those VGA boxes and I had a question about 16x9 support. After YouTubing and googling I have found conflicting answers and I wanted to get some feedback on this directly:

1) There are some games that support 16x9 natively. Correct?

2) I also heard that not all Dreamcast games are VGA compatible. Is this true?

3) Those games that are not 16x9 native can they be stretched to fill the screen if I wanted? I saw a YouTube video where someone did that and I saw others where they were 4x3.

Thanks in advance!

1) Actually some games have "partial" 16x9 support (Rayman 2, Toy Commander, those are what I can remember so far). Dreamcast doesn't output 16x9, so when you select this mode it will "compress" the 16x9 image in 4x3, so if you stretch the image in 16x9 it will get correct.

But very few games support it (16x9 was not common at 2001~2002), so don't count on it.

2) Yes. But luckly, very few games are not compatible (I can remember of Psychic Force 2012 and Dino Crisis). So a good practice is to keep your Dreamcast hooked up with VGA cable. If you put your hands in a GD without support, try a MIL-CD version since most of non-compatible games are patchable. If you still get no success, then change to A/V cable and be happy.

Nice compatibility list here.

3) Well, actually it depends on your TV. But of course it's never a good thing to stretch 4x3 in 16x9 because the aspect ratio will suck.