this 86 in LG Ultra stretch is so wide
that it makes so-called Ultra wide monitors look downright Square by
comparison with just 600 vertical pixels
no support for HDR and a pedestrian 60
HZ refresh rate it's meant more for digital signage than for gaming but when
we saw this on Facebook Marketplace we knew we had to try it anyway widescreen
gaming was particularly challenging in the early days but even now some games
struggle beyond the standard widescreen aspect ratio of 16 by9 so you must be
asking yourself how are they going to handle something that is 3.6 times wider
look at that High Fidelity Graphics there wow as you just saw in some cases
disastrously but in other cases surprisingly well and a shocking number
of games even ones that are older than the last 5 10 or even 20 years were able
to handle this aspect ratio with a relatively clear unstretched picture
like this relatively clear and unstretched segue to our sponsor War
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some bonus items too first up I just want to say you guys outdid yourselves
with the setup here we wanted to illustrate just how wide this thing was
and Tanner not only grabbed the widest deskpad available at LTC store.com but
also built a keyboard oh no I didn't build this this was built by uh I forget
the guy's name the company name is piy uh he did a limited run of these and
actually sent us his personal Prototype at a pixel count of 3840 by 600 it's a
little over one quter of a slice of a 4K
display making this a very unusual piece of digital signage but what makes a
display signage instead of a TV or a
monitor well for one thing the price uh in instead of costing in the 30 to 40
cents per square inch range like a basic monitor or a TV this costs over
$3.50 per square inch that's about eight times more so while the actual screen
area of this is less than that of a commodity 55in TV it costs
$4,000 now I could tell you that oh but
that's because they use a special panel technology or exotic screen or something
like that but unfortunately that would be a lie it uses the same fundamental
IPS panel Tech that you've seen from LG display for decades with at most some
more resilient driving Electronics in order to handle a heavier duty cycle and
probably more importantly a warranty that covers commercial use so then why
does it cost so much well there's the warranty support but also a handful of
features that provide meaningful value to businesses but that consumers don't
necessarily need so LG can hold them Ransom if you don't pay the signage tax
like the robust support for picture by picture picture in picture the support
for control over serial control over Network various signage Network
protocols and support for both DisplayPort input and DisplayPort pass through
that last feature pairs really well with simplink which is a protocol for
connecting you directly to the wallet of your audience on
twitch I'm just kidding uh simplink is pretty much CC and allows multiple Daisy
change displays to be controlled with a single remote oh and I would say the
software is another area of improvement
would you look at that the same web OS you know and love except home screen
completely devoid of ads it's got other
cool stuff too like input failover the ability to export and import settings so
that if you need to reset the device you don't have to around and tediously
adjust every setting and every submenu and it can even send you an email if
something goes wrong so if all that sounds great and you really want one of these we're going to have it linked
below like we always do but enough chitchat let's see how it games oh my
God the ergonomics of the setup are not great it's a lot of blank space I went
into the display modes cuz I was noticing there was a lot of motion blur
um and I was thinking oh is there a gaming mode no but if I need
Transportation mode or uh government mode or Mall mode those are conveniently
available for me I like Transportation mode Let's Do It makes it look like
you're on a bus that didn't change much it's a little warmer I got to say this
pixel density not great nope it's not fantastic you can really make out the
individual pixels cuz this would be equivalent to probably what like a 75 86
in TV if it wasn't just all long no no
it no no because 86 in corner to corner 84 time whatever 16 / 9 *
84 a number pixels per inch is 46 so
what's a 27 in 1080P monitor 81 ah and
that's already at the lower end of what I would want to use for desktop use okay
well that explains it that's not even as distorted as I kind of thought it would
be he looks so lonely though there's no
doubt that when you're this close to it and you're focused on what would be the
normal size of a monitor it not only looks fine but it actually
is a little bit more immersive however
when you withdraw a little bit and pay attention to just how distorted things
get toward the edge of the frame look at my buddy here I'm doing battle next to
wide Putin did you see that
scoping like this much actually kind of
immersive hey hey hey hey hey hey get get get out of here
sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sry overall I think the most remarkable
thing about this game is how unremarkable the process was to get it working I launched it and it immediately
worked is it providing a great gaming experience no not really but the
problems that I'm having are mostly related to its mediocre specs I mean 60
HZ slow pixel response times not to mention that uh this menu right now is
about 600 by approximately 1,000 or 1100
pixels you can barely read the text the
widescreen element of it in games has held up pretty well but that wasn't
always the case even though widescreen displays became readily available in the
latter half of the 1990s due to their price they failed to reach any kind of
mainstream acceptance for well quite a few years and game support over those
years has been spotty at best fun trivia fact by the way legendary developer John
karmac is known for using the intergr
interview 28 hd96 a
$110,000 100 lb 16x9 CRT that he
purchased in 1996 to work on Quake 2
which ended up looking pretty decent on our 58 by9 display is it because it was
designed for a widescreen yes but also no it's
definitely stretched but if it were only designed for 4x3 and 16x9 the image
would be far more stret stretched than it is instead the game renders in a
scalable manner so it doesn't really care what resolution you run at and this
approach probably seems like Common Sense today but many older games were
designed with a fixed aspect ratio and
well didn't do so
well damn it I believe I was expected to
notice something yeah you're also expected to get further into the game
hey hey hey hey look look look I oh oh
no way this who what this is a standard ROM it's the
emulator itself that's that's doing things differently it's a a oh okay when
the enemies start just appearing out of nowhere 6 feet in front of you and
you're not expecting it as much okay so it's just caching whatever the last
thing we saw was statically then it's
not actually dynamically updating anything that's going on on the left on
the non-focused parts of the window and you can actually get a good idea of when
the Sprites are are actually being rendered and kind of how everything is
laid out this way and it actually numbers the total what like background
draws or like like scenes or now we've
got the entire level stretched out behind us and this NES emulator shows
the issue of converting 2D tile based Graphics to widescreen the picture is
going to get rendered as a whole picture with the Sprite images being stored
stored in the character memory and the level layout being stored on the program
memory in order to change the size of the view the entire process needs to be
changed to accommodate for this new size and when you've only got 32 kilobytes of
program memory 8 kilobytes of character
memory and just 2 kilobytes of RAM
keeping size down is absolutely critical you can't add in code to make it
widescreen if that would mean removing a level or a feat so the easiest way to
convert a 2d game to run in this super wide aspect ratio is to just fake it
this is not in fact the original Super Mario Brothers but rather a complete
remake that is being rendered in our web browser and doesn't use emulation or
even Sprites instead everything that you're looking at is a scalable Vector
so I'm sorry but you can't just throw any old ROM at this thing and see the
whole level now that doesn't mean that it's impossible to adapt real old 2D
games to widescreen it's just harder anyway there's a rom hack of
Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo made for 16x9 that successfully injects
code for widescreen support but such a change would need to be done for every
game individually or your only option would be to stretch thankfully during
the shift from 2D to 3D scalable rendering like we saw in Quake 2 became
the norm even in places where the resolution was expected to remain
constant take the PSP for example while
later models do have a TV out feature the launch model could only play games
on its own screen so there was technically no need for the developers
of early titles like Ridge Racer to make their Graphics scalable to any aspect
ratio but thanks to the power of emulators we should be able to get it
rendering in 58 by9 anyway so we've got
our PSP emulator open here and I have never used a PSP emulator they they have
some fun features and they can just do full screen like this how do I even line
up which thing I'm changing yard stick
maybe oh oh yeah there you go okay vsync
okay do we want that on and now you'll see that the car looks
correct yeah everything else looks wrong but the car looks correct and that's the
difference between 2D and 3D there so any asset that is just built at a fixed
pixel count is going to look terrible and anything that was built using
scalable Graphics actually is going to look I mean overall it looks sh that
speedometer though overall this is not nearly as horrible as I would have
expected though the bomber man would be amazing
on this I think we are going to cover the history of bomber man and Ultra
widescreen in the Floatplane exclusive lg. g/f flat plane you see we've got a
couple different sheets here we got PSP 16x9 Ultra wide super wide and then I've
added my own stupid wide here yeah we go to actually edit sheet file here yeah we
can see we've got a couple different sheets here now the first part is the
section in memory we want to change so in this case this memory
holds just the aspect ratio oh very cool the second number is a
heximal of the aspect ratio itself so in
our case we've got 6.4 because it's 5 58
divided by 9 y that's basically how this
and a bunch of other consoles just handle aspect ratio it's one spot in
memory it's the result of dividing the big by the little the width by the
height anyway the point is for years the PC side of things was full of similar
half implementations of scalable graphics and while many modern games
have been designed in anticipation of weird resolutions like on a Microsoft
Surface or on a one of
these older titles are full of issues
during the transition years from from Square to wider displays issues that
will obviously be hilariously exaggerated on this
thing oh no it's a good thing the doors
in this Hospital are super wide otherwise I would have no hope of
fitting through them oh my God this
car it looks like six people are sitting a breast here Hitman blood Money
supports widescreen but you would never know it from the ultra cinematic view of
the cutcenes uh nor would you know it from the configuration menu the issue in
this case and in many is that the developer just couldn't be ared to
expose the option to the user so it supports the resolution
but there's actually nowhere to change it in this menu and this isn't because
it was necessarily a ton of extra work to add those options but it's because
any added feature is going to add development and testing time both of
which cost money and money is a thing that the corporate overlords are not
quick to spend unless they absolutely have to so in the early days of
widescreen it basically came down to how many people are going to be using one
like this enough to bother oh well then
forget it I also couldn't help noticing that this particular game appears to be
a vertical minus game rather than a horizontal Plus game even though
everything is rendered proportionally
accurately we can't see for we just have
a slice of about a third to a quarter of
what we should be able to see before you ask by the way yes there is a
configuration menu outside of the game but as you can see that's not going to
help us no to get help we're going to need a site like widescreen gaming Forum
they were an absolute godsend back in the day and while they're kind of dead
now they were an invaluable resource for hack packing your way into widescreen
gaming Bliss sometimes literally Laura
Croft and the Guardian of Light is an excellent example of this a registry
edit might not be a hack in the literal sense but as someone who went through
the frustration of trying to get my beloved older games working on my new
widescreen gaming monitor it definitely feels a little like hacking the Gibson
when you finally see everything load up and you're like a yeah and the same goes
for the classic II edit many games have
a configuration file that tells the game which in-game settings to use by default
for games that had engine level support but just didn't expose the option for a
widescreen resolution in the menu this was often not only the only solution but
also a pretty easy one and fun fact by
the way if you ever accidentally configure your game settings on a modern
game just ignoring the whole widescreen thing to into an unusable State say you
turn on directx12 combined with some other setting that I still haven't
figured out in ano 1800 well you can go into the file and fix it launch the game
again and then go back to your trial and error now not all of these hacks were so
not actually hacky and in fact some games like Laura Croft and the Temple of
Osiris required the user to replace the
executable itself with a modified one
hopefully downloaded from a trusted source course in order to add widescreen
functionality that threshold of trust was up to you to decide and uh I think
2024 me probably would have told 2007 me
to be a bit more prudent I also would
have told myself that sometimes it is just plain not worth it see there are
two possible ways for a game to scale your view when trying to accommodate a
super wide monitor it can extend the horizontal view like we saw with our
racing games and actually it looks like temp of Osiris extends horizontally or
if the engine doesn't support it or the game's own implementation doesn't
support it it can just shrink your vertical view to match your aspect ratio
like we saw in Hitman blood Money oh apparently we get to play another game
like that now oh boy this doesn't seem like the kind of game that should do
that yep that's definitely a problem I
mean obviously there's an argument against just seeing an endless expanse
of water to the side of this island that we're all fighting over but on the other
hand um I can't even see the context of
anything below me I can't zoom out
that's maximum Zoom this isn't only a problem in games either there are folks
out there who have started collecting DVDs again just so they can see visual
gags that were lost when their favorite shows went widescreen for online
streaming like that famous Duff beer gag on The Simpsons I think Seinfeld has
some really bad ones as well here's what I'm talking about the episode called the
pothole you can't see the pothole if you watch Seinfeld on Netflix as bad of an
experience as this is in your TV shows or games though it can be even worse in
a game menu now this is an issue that is
obviously accidental and honestly doesn't come up that often but with this
particular display being only 600 pixels tall the fact that menus have a minimum
height in order to be usable is something not to be overlooked
Borderlands in fact plays just fine once you can get into the game but in order
to do that well you're going to have
to I don't know look at this see I can't
move my mouse above options so I just need to I yes use the keyboard to
navigate and either have a picture for reference or have memorized how many
clicks maybe that one ah
oh no a common but thankfully less
gamebreaking widescreen implementation issue is aspect locked FMV videos these
show up in games where otherwise the support is perfectly fine and the game
is perfectly playable but you reach a point in the story where it's time for a
little bit of exposition or dialogue and all of a sudden either the aspect ratio
shrinks to 16 by9 or heaven forbid 4x3
or worse than that it takes a pre-baked
scene and then just stretches it across your entire screen thankfully all it
really does is break immersion and it's improved a lot in recent years but it
does still show up quite a lot of course just because the game supports any
resolution and avoids the dreaded vert
minus view syndrome doesn't mean that it's going to be without issues
parkitect for example looks great very
playable except oh my goodness my UI is
so far away that I'm having difficulty reading it it's playable it's not the
end of the world but when HUD and UI elements are anchored to the sides of
the screen they can end up so far out of view that in order to see them you have
to completely take your eyes off the action in the middle of the screen and
while it might seem impossible for anyone in their right mind to be using a
58 by9 monitor in fact NVIDIA surround
and ifinity setups using 31 16x9
monitors are pretty common and they form a view that is awfully similar to ours
just with bezels down the middle one ifinity League of Legends mod went so
far as to build a tool that moves the HUD over from the sides of the screen
and then resizes it to the user's liking the tool has been long abandoned but it
was a great idea and a feature that really should be baked into more games
there are a number of hacky tools that Gamers have used over the years to fix
widescreen issues like custom resolution utility but there are too many for us to
demonstrate all of them today fortunately it's far less of a problem
these days and most games won't outright break if you try to launch them on weird
resolution monitors but it's obvious from a game design standpoint that it's
just not possible to offer a perfect experience at every display size and
shape oh here's an example on the first level of this game
you've got the farmer right yeah or the gardener and there's a lot of times
where the camera wants to uh attach to
the gardener and it can actually move the goo go outside of the view of the
camera it doesn't really cause any major issues but you end up moving the goose
around without it being on screen which can become very confusing very quickly
it's clear that there's just games that aren't going to benefit from a super
wide Monitor and are going to look kind of silly if you have one yeah I don't
think I would choose an ultra Ultra Ultra wide monitor to play this game
you're not always given the choice some Modern games don't support Ultra wide
resolutions for gameplay reasons Starcraft 2 isn't the most most recent
example but it's a very famous One of A game that supports various aspect ratios
and resolutions but no wider than 16x9
in order to prevent owners of ultrawide monitors from getting a greater view of
the battlefield giving them a competitive Advantage this has been a
source of considerable frustration for owners who are sick of looking at blank
spaces on the edges of their match especially when other competitive
blizzard games do support the feature so
in summary monitors and TVs they're
probably wide enough at this point and even for digital signage we honestly had
a hard time coming up with any use for this thing we were thinking maybe like a
like a menu at for the concession at the Badminton Center or something but like
it's so skinny and the resolution sucks so um want to buy the widest
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our video on the Samsung Odyssey Arc it is absolutely huge and
maybe somehow less impractical than this
monitor what are we doing with this
thing okay it's for sale