Recording old games, and dual-monitor setup.

T

TamTroll

New Member
I've been looking for a solution to this problem for quite some time now, and so far i haven't been able to find any, so i was hoping i could get some help here.

in the simplest possible terms, i am trying to record the game "Unreal Gold" using OBS. It's an old game, so it natively looks best at like 800 x 600 resolution at most. There is a patch to make it 1080p, but that just looks awful.

So when i run the game in it's lower resolution, i find myself with two problems.

1. Running the game full-screen on one monitor causes every window (including obs) on my second monitor to shunt over to one side, this is a problem as it makes things difficult to track or look at when they're half-off the screen. And i can not exactly tab out to move them back into place.
Problem 1 image

I've been told i can change the resolution of an individual monitor to fix that, and i haven't tried that just yet, but that's only half the problem.

2. Even if just telling OBS "Record anything that is on monitor A", at best i get the game in only one tiny corner of the resulting video, rather then it being full-screen like i need.
Problem 2 image 1
Problem 2 image 2

I've been told i can change the recorded / output settings in OBS, so i tried that (image taken after i restored them to default)
Settings image 1
But the result was just the same as previous, only a small corner of the resulting video actually had the game in it.
Settings image 2

Is there a step I'm missing? do i need to force my monitor to run at that resolution in order for OBS to realize "oh, this is a full-screen game that is being displayed on the entire screen, i should record it as a full-screen game"? or what?

How do i make OBS output a video that matches what i the player am seeing on my monitor? because nothing i have tried / been told has worked, and i have no ideas.

Log file
 
qhobbes

qhobbes

Active Member
If that is the highest resolution you can run your game at, change the base and output output resolutions to match that of your game.
 
T

TamTroll

New Member
qhobbes said:
If that is the highest resolution you can run your game at, change the base and output output resolutions to match that of your game.
Click to expand...
i already tried that, i still got the tiny image on a big black screen.
TamTroll said:
I've been told i can change the recorded / output settings in OBS, so i tried that (image taken after i restored them to default)
Settings image 1
But the result was just the same as previous, only a small corner of the resulting video actually had the game in it.
Settings image 2
Click to expand...


is the problem that the output was set to still be 1080p? i thought the whole thing was "Base is what it's recording, output is what it's producing". So like it'd reccord my 600p game and then output it as a 1080p video so it was still a fullscreen video with good visual quality.
 
koala

koala

Active Member
TamTroll said:
But the result was just the same as previous, only a small corner of the resulting video actually had the game in it.
Click to expand...
You need to set both the canvas and output resolution to the fullscreen game resolution. The thing(s) OBS will capture are "painted" on the canvas, then the canvas with all sources painted on it is rescaled to the output resolution, then this is being output.

So to make your game occupy the whole canvas, the canvas has to have the same resolution as the game. And exactly this should be output, without rescaling. Rescaling can be done by the media player during playback of the recording, if desired.
 
T

TamTroll

New Member
koala said:
You need to set both the canvas and output resolution to the fullscreen game resolution. The thing(s) OBS will capture are "painted" on the canvas, then the canvas with all sources painted on it is rescaled to the output resolution, then this is being output.

So to make your game occupy the whole canvas, the canvas has to have the same resolution as the game. And exactly this should be output, without rescaling. Rescaling can be done by the media player during playback of the recording, if desired.
Click to expand...


Okay, that's an improvement, but the resulting video still isn't fullscreen like it is on my monitor. instead it's just this square with black borders on the sides, while my monitor depicts it fullscreen.

Recording

Monitor


Is there something else I'm missing here?
 
koala

koala

Active Member
The black bars are because your monitor/the canvas resolution has a different aspect ratio than your game. 800x600 is AR 4:3, while 1920x1080 16:9, which is wider, so there is more space to the left and to the right the game isn't filling, as long as it isn't also rendering with an AR of 16:9. If you don't see any black bars on your monitor if the game runs fullscreen, and it really runs with 800x600, the image is distorted. You should set the scaling options of your monitor to keep the aspect ratio, so it doesn't distort the image.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top