Good Old Games recently released an updated version of Outcast that works well with modern operating systems, contrary to the old CD version. This old action-adventure game is amongst the very best games I’ve ever played and is worth a go just for the incredibly detailed and engaging world it presents, but it also offers excellent free-roaming gameplay, an epic story and interesting characters to boot.
A great game all around it would seem. However there is one slight issue with the GoG release: it doesn’t play in fullscreen!
Outcast originally supported resolution of up to 512×384, which was already way too much to handle for most PCs of its time. It was the Crysis of 1998, with its voxel engine pushing processors to their limits – and beyond. And the Good Old Games version still runs in that resolution, but doesn’t scale it up to properly fit a modern monitor. The result is a tiny square of game action surrounded by big black borders.
I didn’t much like that, so I set out to find a solution… and uncovered several that work!
The first solution I’ll cover is the one I’m using right now. It’s entirely stable and doesn’t mess anything up, but I only know how to get it working on computers/laptops with Nvidia graphics cards. And even then it doesn’t always work, because it relies on adding a custom resolution to the Nvidia drivers. Not to worry, there’s an – easier – alternative solution in case you can’t get this to work!
- Go to your Outcast installation folder and open OUTCAST.ini with notepad.
- Scroll down to [Display] and change the following
- Videowidth & Screenwidth = 512
- Videoheight & Screenheight = 384
- Save OUTCAST.ini
- Go to properties for OUTCAST.ini and disallow writing on OUTCAST.ini for all users under security settings.
- Go to your Nvidia control panel. (right click desktop – Nvidia control panel)
- Go to Change Resolution and add a resolution.
- Slide down the Timing panel and set it to Manual, ignore the rest under Timing.
- On top set the horizontal pixels to 512 and vertical pixels to 384.
- Test and continue if it works, otherwise go to the alternative below.
- Start Outcast by going to the installation folder and starting loader.exe
- Uncheck Framed on the second page of the Game Settings menu.
- Create a shortcut for loader.exe and put it on your desktop, this is how you’ll be starting Outcast from now on.
- It should now be fullscreen in-game and almost fullscreen in videos.
The Easier Alternative
I haven’t actually tested this alternative, but there is a great deal of positive feedback on it over at the Good Old Games forums and no complaints thus far. It’s a patch made by GoG user _Zenger_ which makes Outcast go fullscreen and pushes the resolution up to 640×480. It even fixes the stability issues with manually setting the game to 640×480, so you might even want to try it instead of the aforementioned manual fix.
You can get this patch from the GoG forum topic it was posted in.
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