Dungeon Master Forum

I wonder if any of you clever people can help. I'm using a Philips LCD at 1280x1024 native resolution. I have an old nVidia graphics card running reasonably recent nVidia drivers.

My screen is obviously a digital display, connected with DVI connector, but the nVidia control panel lists it as "Proview/EMC/PTS Analog Display". I can't find any drivers for my particular screen online (Shouldn't really need any, I guess).

There is clearly a problem with Windows / nVidia driver not recognising my screen correctly. The system thinks that the screen is analogue, and so I don't get any of the options in my display control panel for managing the scaling of old, fullscreen games. I used to get an option where I could determine how fullscreen games were played, which meant that things like RTC would display at fullscreen even though they are set to 640x480. Now when I play RTC, the image is not stretched correctly and some of it is offscreen and I have no way of changing this. It means RTC and old retro games are now unplayable for me since I hate playing in a window.

Does anyone know how I can force Windows to read my monitor as "digital" rather than analogue? It used to do this with the older nVidia drivers, now it never does. Perhaps I should downgrade to older drivers, though I'd prefer it if there's a solution that will work with my current system.

Any thoughts?

It can get even worse. I've got a veeery wiiiiide screen (digital, DVI connected) a few months ago(*), and since then, my computer tended to turn off when playing RTC in a full screen mode! It just turned off after a few minutes of playing, without any warning, just as if the electricity goes out or something. Firstly, I was worried and I thought the computer is overheating or so, so I opened it and checked cooling, spent a lot of time in BIOS; then I searched for viruses everywhere, then re-installed all the drivers and everything - but slowly I discovered it is really caused by RTC in fullscreen - Windows just turned the computer off when having problems with displaying it on the very wide screen. I couldn't believe it, it sounds totally insane, but it's truth. So I had to start playing RTC in a window - and ta-da!, it's working fine!

(*at work)

Yes, I've had that problem too! It's very very strange!

@Jan : 720x480 for widescreens.
@Gambit : sorry can't help but maybe you can try non official (but recent) nvidia drivers ?

DVI connectors can transport both digital and analog (VGA compatible) signals. So it still possible that your screen and/or graphics card is configured to use analog signals although you use DVI connectors.
Unless something is really broken at a hardware level, I would say that if the graphics card detects an analog screen, maybe it is only analog or configured as such.
Are you sure that your screen can handle a digital signal? Aren't there any settings in your screen menus that you may change to select analog or digital?

No idea what my screen can handle. I thought all LCDs were digital?

The weird thing is I used to have the monitor reported as "Digital" with older drivers... but only sometimes. It seems to depend on if the monitor is turned on before the computer and vice versa, but after testing that a few times, it makes no difference with these newer drivers. It's always shown as "Analogue". There's also nothing in the current nVidia control panel to select a type of monitor.

My computer/graphics card is pretty old to be honest so I guess I'll have to live with it until I can upgrade. Might try downgrading the drivers though just to see if makes a difference.

Weird, I've just noticed that at the last reboot, the monitor is now reported as "Proview/EMC/PTS DIGITAL Display". I have no idea what's going on!

@Linflas: Thanks. But my screen runs on 1920 x 1080 (i.e. ca 1,8 : 1), whereas 720 x 480 gives only 1,5 : 1. Strange...

Curse these things. When I had my old 800XL I was able to fix anything on it, both software and hardware. Even on the 1040ST. Even on the old PCs with DOS. I think we all spent hours rewriting autoexec.bat and config. sys. And now? The computers turn off just because either Windows or graphic card or the driver of the card want so. And you cannot do anything about it. Everything is so complicated that even the designers don't understand it. My laptop loses about 40 MB of HDD capacity every time I turn it on. No viruses, anything, just the Windows and actualisations of actualisations. It spends 50 % of its power to run itself. I had 20 MB HDD for my Atari, and it was the largest HDD in our town in the 1980s, and I even didn't know how to fill it. Curse modern things! Curssse!

*becomes VERY angry*

Jan, yes you are right : actually, i use 848x480x24 on my 16/9 widescreen and so i use 720x480 on my 5/4 wide-less laptop screen.

Woohoo -- I discovered that if I let the computer boot into Windows with the monitor switched off, then switch on, it's ALWAYS reported as a digital display and RTC works fine. A temporary solution, but at least it works consistently!