Railroad Tycoon For Windows 10

[Malva Ferster]

Upuntil 2 weeks ago, I ran RRTII on on an my older Windows XP custom-built machine and had no problem expanding it to a (stretched) wide screen display on my new 1920x1080 monitor. Sadly, the hard drive on that machine bit the dust, so I bought a new laptop running Windows 10. I never would have moved to W10 but for that sudden need, but I'm pleasantly surprised by it and like it more than I thought I would. I found it will run many older applications just fine, one of them being RRTII.

The one thing I can't get it to do is display a wide-screen image on my wide-screen monitor. I've tried all of the scaling options and each one results in the same small 1024x768 display in the center of the screen. I realize that the issue could be with the computer's HD graphics and not necessarily W10, but I've tried every option known to me and nothing makes any difference.

A scaling issue is the likeliest culprit as you have already identified, but there are several places where scaling is set other than in the default generic windows settings. I don't run games on the windows 10 machine I have so can't help directly. You may need to search the full manuals for your monitor and laptop for the equivalents of the following.

I use a windows 7 desktop and monitor for games (32 bit) and my monitor has monitor image size settings of Auto or Wide. Auto keeps the aspect ratio the PC tells it to display whereas wide always stretches it. These settings vary from monitor to monitor. From what you say I'm presuming that you are using an external monitor and not the laptop's screen. (If you want to use the laptop screen then there may be a utility on your laptop change these settings for your built in screen or graphics chipset.) One additional thought here is if you use an external monitor then you may need to make sure ONLY this is in use as using the laptop screen and the monitor together may cause problems and show a smaller image on the external screen to match the built in screen for example, and also make sure the laptop detects the monitor's capabilities correctly as it may not know what the external monitor is capable of. There is usually a special set of function keys on laptops to tell it to use the internal screen, external screen or both. Sometimes a monitor may have different settings for different inputs - some monitors have VGA, HDMI, DVI etc inputs so did your XP PC connect to a different input on your monitor from your laptop and could this have affected your settings?

The settings for Nvidia graphics card in the Nvidia control panel for my PC has 3 scaling modes Aspect ratio, full screen or no scaling. It seems as though you are getting the equivalent of no scaling - The windows control panel doesn't show these scaling options in most versions of windows so you need to use the graphics chipset manufacturer's utility, which may not be installed but should be available, or the laptops hardware settings which can be a separate utility provided by the laptop manufacturer. You might just need to increase the amount of memory the laptop allocates to graphics but this is unlikely.

You could also see if the graphics chipset manufacturer for your laptop has a different driver from the one windows 10 is using and change the driver. You could also see if windows has an updated driver but the chipset manufacturers drivers may have more facilities.

Finally I always keep the aspect ratio of the game as this is more to my taste then stretching the image widthways but for old games like this I do scale up the image in proportion to fill the monitor height and leave black bars either side of the image, so I use the setting of "Auto" on the monitor itself and "Aspect Ratio" in the Nvidia control panel which does exactly what I want. This took me some time to work out as the default was to do exactly what I think you want i.e. for the image to fill the monitor in both directions !

Yes, I have connected my 22" Samsung wide screen via HDMI (only option). It has setting options for auto and wide and I've tried both - back and forth, repeatedly. Makes no difference - both result in the same 4:3 image. I have the external monitor set as the only display, but I've looked at all options, combos and they all have the same result.

My laptop has Intel HD Graphics and has 4 scaling options - center image, scale full screen, maintain display scaling, and maintain aspect ratio. I've tried them all....each with the same result. Same 4:3 image.

I had thought of that as well, so yesterday I clicked on the update driver button, it searched for and found a new driver, installed it, then turned my screen black and hung there - still on, but not responding to any inputs of any kind. After 45 minutes, this was clearly a "reset" or power off scenario, but alas....where's the reset button on a laptop? This is my first laptop, by the way. So I pulled the power plug, quickly realizing that that made no difference on a laptop with a fully charged battery. After a few minutes of feeling helpless to do anything but call Lenovo's support line and be at their mercy, something made me try pressing and holding the power button. That did the trick and turned it off....and I breathed a big sigh of relief.

I think what I'm up against is a glitch or limitation in the Intel HD graphics since a Google search on the issue brings a multitude of results with lots of others frustrated with the same problem. It's not really that big of a deal, because the 4:3 image does look better and sharper, with the scale that was intended for the game. But ideally I'd rather not play for hours at a time, as I often do, with those black bars. I know image burning is not the issue it once was with CRTs, but I've read that it is not altogether gone as a concern with LCDs either.

Maybe you need to try the intel website or the lenovo website for later drivers than those from windows update. 15.40.25.4463 may be the latest version from Intel direct and says it fixes some scaling problems.

I've not noticed a burn problem with my screen but I have noticed some persistent image issues on brighter parts of the screen (after I had set the brilliance to 100% and also left the display static for several hours) which I thought were burn in but which faded away to nothing over an hour or so when other applications were used.

Just make sure that you know how to revert to the older driver if the new one doesn't work as (rarely) the newer drivers may not work on your laptop. Getting into windows 10 safe mode is more difficult than it should be as the old methods don't work.

At least the game works on windows 10 which is not bad for an old game. In my experience it is usually oddities in the graphics systems or the installer that cause the majority of issues, especially on 64 bit operating systems. If you could repair your old PC and have a way to reinstall XP then maybe it could be used just for older games - the problem is getting the parts e.g IDE hard disks are getting rare. IDE to SATA converters are available but then costs start to rise.

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