Playing ffxi on an HDTV

[Effedup]

So I just got done building my Home Theater PC, got everything all hooked up, but I'm having some problems getting FFXI to display right.

First off, my Specs:

Samsung LN-S3251D
ATI Radeon X800T (AGP 8x)
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
512 PC2100 DDR RAM (slow but all I had not in use)
(if any other specs are needed let me know)

Anyways, my TV supports 1080i, but when I set the resolution to 1920x1080 (30 MHz) the text within windows is garbled to hell, so using the ATI catalyst software, I managed to find a decent resolution that worked within Windows...1200x668. However, when I edited the resolution in the registry to display FFXI at that resolution, the game looks like it's stretching a 4:3 picture to fit in the 16:9 screen. I'm connected DVI-HDMI if that matters.

IF anyone out there that's playing FFXI on an HDTV could tell me what they set their res to to get it to display correctly in widescreen, I'd be much appreciative. It looks ok at this point, but I'm a little underwhelmed.

Thanks! ^^

[Nakti]

I can't speak to the HDTV part, but my husband just got a new widescreen LCD monitor and if you haven't already done it...

Within the FFXI game, there's a ratio setting for the monitor in Config (I think it's in Misc or Misc2). That might fix your 4:3 stretching problem.

[Effedup]

Thank You! For some reason I never thought to look at the in-game config...

Anyone else out there have any input regarding resolutions and setup for an HDTV? Now that I've got it in the correct aspect ratio it looks a lot better, but it still doesn't come close to my standard 19" LCD. I did the registry edit to enable the higher res background textures and all, but it doesn't seem like it worked right...especially compared to some screenshots I've seen on here that are in high-def.

Any thought's?

[Pai Pai Master]

When I had my 23'' Samsung LCD, it displayed at 1360x768.

Make sure you're displaying at your TV's native resolution, then make sure FFXI Config is running it at that resolution.

[Effedup]

Thanks for the advice, Pai. I did finally figure out what was up...
Basically, I figured running DVI-HDMI to my LCD would be the best option...digital output to digital input seemed like the optimal choice, but apparently I was wrong. After I read your post, I went online to Samsung's website, downloaded the user's manual in PDF (because I'm lazy and didn't want to dig my TV box out of storage) and it turns out that 1360x768 is the native resolution of my TV also...but only over the VGA input.

I should have read the manual first (who reads instructions, anyways?), but it says right there in the "Hooking up a PC" section that my model TV does NOT support DVI-HDMI for computer usage (but will do it for cable and DVD players, which is weird, but whatever). Anyways, picked up a Belkin PureAV VGA cable at work today and after some screwing around with the ATI Catalyst software I got it working perfectly. Looks great...logged in to FFXI to do some quick muling, and it was beautiful.

Of course, now I have a DVI-HDMI cable that I have no use for (luckily, I got it at cost...$45 versus $129 retail), but in my experiences, one can never have too many cables ^^

[Pai Pai Master]

Yeah, sorry. I should have mentioned that you would have needed to use VGA. DVI-HDMI doesn't work on these Samsungs for some reason or other.