Re: now they say the game images are too small!

[Ian Peters <itp helixcode com>]

On Fri, Jun 30, 2000 at 11:07:46AM -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Well, I think I'm making progress in introducing GNU/Linux and gnome
> around my place.  Now the children only complain that the images in the
> game are too small.  With the system running at 1280x1024, the mahjong
> or same-gnome games just use a little piece of the screen.
> 
> I admit, this is a trivial problem and the fact that it comes up at all
> tells me that gnome is working and people are finding their way around.
> 
> Do you have a solution, without changing the X resolution?

Unfortunately, I'm afraid I don't.  I'm the GNOME Games maintainer, so
I know the games pretty well, and very few of them allow you to change
the size of the window and graphics.  As a matter of fact, I'm the
author of gnibbles, and I only just got this feature added in the last
gnome-games release (and only because someone sent me a patch... ;).

Simply resizing the graphics that the games use probably (read: almost
definitely) won't work, as without looking at the source I suspect
most of the games hardcode the size of the images they expect to find.

The GNOME Games will be ported to the new GNOME infrastructure for
GNOME 2.0 and beyond, including a move from gdk_imlib to gdk-pixbuf,
and during that transition I will definitely look at supporting things
like resizing in all of the games (where possible) consistantly, but
I'm afraid there is no short term solution.

I know you mentioned changing the resolution of X as something you've
tried, but are you aware that you can do so on the fly?  For instance,
to play some emulated games, where I'd like the display to take up
more space on my monitor, I drop from 1600x1200 to 320x200.  You do
this by pressing C-A-+ (and C-A--) to switch between modes, assuming
you have the appropriate modes set up in your XF86Config file.  For
instance, I have:

Section "Screen"
   ...
   SubSection "Display"
      Depth 16
      Modes "1600x1200" "320x200"
   EndSubSection
   ...
EndSection

-- 
Ian Peters
itp@helixcode.com