No, you know, now that I have read your theory, it sure sounds just so right.

We wouldn't have this problem if the PC master race had kept to it's own specific higher performance monitors like it was in the olden days. All widescreen in games was increasing the FOV then clipping the top and bottom off then acting like this was an advantage.

Me too, but I was taking into account the OP's "allergy". :P

We have a 4:3 monitor on a triple monitor setup that my wife uses for work as another widescreen would not fit on her desk. Look on craigslist, they go for$20.

I actually still haven't bought anything yet and am still contemplating.


Sniped a good deal on a 144 Hz 1080p / FullHD monitor, namely:

Samsung S25HG50FQU
(144Hz, 25", 1920x1080, TN, 1ms, AMD Freesync, 400cd/m2)

for €170.

Also I now plan to buy the cheaper/brighter version of the beamer I mentioned:

BenQ TH671ST


I guess I'll just try it with those, and if the 4:3 ratio games are really gonna be unbearable on them, I'll just get one or two additional used monitors.


By the way, do 144Hz actually make sense for "good old games"? I assume yes?!

Any black that a projector shows will simply have the natural colour of the screen, and thus blend with the surroundings, meaning that a difference in aspect ratio will only be visible if you use a screen with borders.

You could display any shape on a black background, and the background would blend with the screen or wall - because the black simply isn't lit up by the projector, just like the rest of the wall.

Having a screen with borders looks really nice when it's set up correctly, but I regret getting such a screen because the projector is very slightly off-centre, so it can't ever get aligned just right, and the height is always slightly off when I pull it down, so I have to fix that every damned time I'm probably also missing a few pixels in the corners where the picture goes outside the border.

A fully white one would have been a fuckload easier - set it up so it looks good enough, and bam, done. At least if you're content with not necessarily having the picture corners at exactly 90 degrees (you can get close, but you'll never get precisely there).

EDIT: Oh, sorry for the late reply, didn't notice the thread had been resurrected. Oh well, at least it was by the original poster.

I think that depends on the projector technology - I'm pretty sure LCD based ones will struggle to do 'true' black. DLP ones would probably do better.

From the projector's developer site: I honestly don't understand if that now means the steps between, i.e. the old school resolutions, are supported or not.

It's been at least a dozen years since I've seen a 4:3 screen. I'm not even sure they make them anymore.

The projector has a tiny LCD inside it that the light shines through, creating the image on the wall, meaning it has a fixed native resolution, and others will be scaled to that - in this case 1920x1080. They also tend to be rather generous with what resolutions they can take in and scale (whether up or down, my projector claims to the host device that it can support a 1920x1080 signal, so that's frequently what's sent out automatically... and then it scales down to 1280x720 or 1280x800 because that's the resolution of its LCD).

Now, the one you're looking at does mention 640x480 on the lower end, so I obviously can't tell what would happen with a 320x200 image, but chances are you'll likely play such games with DOSbox and scale up to a more modern resolution on the computer first anyway.