Search the Community

I have an Nvidia Shield TV that I use to stream BigBox to my Sony Bravia TV from my gaming PC via Nvidia GameStream. It works great with one exception. GameStream defaults to the 2560 x 1080 resolution of my ultra widescreen monitor. This causes unnecessary letterboxing that does not allow BigBox or any emulators that are launched by BigBox to use all of my TV screen real estate. In order to prevent this I had been manually changing the resolution to 1920 x 1080 before running BigBox. This was super annoying, so I contacted Unbroken Software support to find out if BigBox supported automatically changing the display's resolution allowing BigBox to run with a 16:9 aspect ratio on my TV. Unfortunately, the answer was no, but I knew there had to be a better way. Enter Google... I found a great little utility for Windows called QRes. QRes supports changing desktop resolutions from the command line. With this utility and some helpful posts on StackOverflow.com, I managed to write a batch file to accomplish my goal: Minimize the command window Change the resolution to 1920 x 1080 via QRes Launch BigBox Wait for the BigBox process to terminate Change the resolution back to 2560 x 1080 via QRes I have attached my batch file and the QRes utility. Simply unzip both to your LaunchBox root directory. If your ultra widescreen monitor uses a resolution other than 2560 x 1080, edit the last line of the batch file to meet your requirements. Then add BigBox.bat as a GameStream game in Nvidia GeForce Experience. auto_resolution_bigbox.zip QRes.zip

To quickly get to the point: I have an ultrawide monitor. 21:9 aspect ratio, 3440x1440 resolution. It's a great monitor, I love it. But, it's not a very common aspect ratio (certainly not in the emulator world) and thus things get a bit annoying. Launchbox, bigbox, emulators etc. etc. all work fine on this screen (or at the very least a lot better than Hyperspin), that's not the problem. The thing is, pretty much all media files are in a 16:9 format. I see a cool video-collection in the downloads section; arg, 16:9. I see a cool set of backgrounds; arg 16:9. I don't have the skill nor the time to start creating piles upon piles of my own 21:9 media, so I'm wondering if it's possible to force BigBox in a 16:9 aspect ratio (thus with black bars on the sides in my case). I'm not 100% sure if it would look better at 16:9 or not (in my personal opinion of course), but that's what I would like to find out. Forcing bigbox to 16:9 on my 21:9 screen instead of creating 21:9 media would have the added benefit though that if I were to take my launchbox installation (which is on an external hdd) to another pc which has a normal 16:9 monitor it would still look fine instead of having stretched out media. So... Any thoughts on this? Any idea how (or if) I can force bigbox in 16:9? Thanks!