Xbox 360 on CRT - how?

glitch

glitch

glitch

Soldato
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8 Nov 2005
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I've persuaded my work colleague to bring his 360 in while we're sat in the office during a very quiet spell, and up until now we've had it hooked up to a projector in one of the boardrooms, which has been a lot of fun as I've never played on a 360 before.

And now I'm hooked. Got to get me one of these. But I've only got a CRT monitor at home that I could use as a display, and a HD TV or a LCD monitor isn't on the shopping list just yet. So to test the theory I've connected this 360 up to the largest CRT we've got in the office (using the 360 VGA cable) but I'm now a bit stuck.

The monitor will go up to 1800 x 1440 and seems to have 1600 x 1200 as its preferred resolution, but no matter what I do in the System Settings Blade I can't get a decent resolution on the screen.

I'm expecting to be able to select 1360 x 768 and have a letterbox appear on screen with black bars at the top and the bottom (and sides?) to fill the extra space. But all I'm getting is the display filling up with the images from the 360 and what looks like a 4:3 resolution, even though I've selected Widescreen in the blade.

What am I doing wrong? How should this work?
 
I'd choose 1280x1024 as the setting. Some games will play as 4:3 to match the aspect ratio, others will play as 1280x720 in 16:9 ratio but then you'll get black bars on the top and bottom.

EDIT: It could also be a setting on your monitor - have you got it to "fill" or something rather than preserve aspect ratio?
 
Just dredging this up as I've taken the plunge and will be the owner of a 360 in the next few days.

I can output a 1280x720 or a 1920x1080 signal from my graphics card to my CRT but the display stretches the signal to fill the screen. There's nothing within my CRTs menu to suggest that this isn't anything other than normal.

Anyone currently using a 360 on a CRT able to confirm/deny the 'black bars' scenario and how you set your Xbox up to allow this?
 
That does work well. I set a 360 to output widescreen 1280x720 then manually adjusted it to the correct proportions on a 4:3 Mitsubishi CRT and it looked great.

360 is pretty miserable with 4:3 displays and I'm almost certain that there's not a system-level 'padding' option. I think that method's the best you'll get.
 
Recently more games have appeared to do 4:3 for me over VGA and the only one there was a noticeable stretch with was PGR3. As I'm on a jumbo CRT it isn't too annoying when it pops into wide screen and I get some back bars at the top and bottom. I would rather that than stretching the image to fill the screen myself though.

Can snap some pics in a bit if you like as an example of when it forces Wide screen and when it stays 4:3.
 
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