Gaming with Netbooks: StarCraft (in 720p widescreen!)

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Published on June 30, 2013 5:57:13 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFwgtNJ2dGA

Game:

StarCraft (1998)

Duration: 6:28

9,454 views

23

To quote IGN, StarCraft "is hands down one of the best, if not the best, real-time strategy games ever created." Without a doubt, StarCraft is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed games of all time, but it does have its weaknesses, few that they are. To quote IGN again, this time on SC's graphics, "the coarse resolution looks horribly dated next to all but the oldest real time strategy games." That was back in 2000, and it's a lot worse compared to today's games. While you can't simply overhaul the graphics engine (or can you?), you can use a hack to make SC look better on screens with non-4:3 aspect ratios. You can find it at https://www.wsgf.org/dr/starcraft. It's far from perfect, as it's still in beta and hasn't been updated for almost 3 years, but it gets the job done most of the time, and allows me to use FRAPS (which is nice, because the built-in video recorder tool doesn't work). There's the occasional crash, color errors even with explorer.exe closed, and animation jerkiness at the beginning of a match, not to mention HUD flickering that FRAPS can't capture. If you can live with that, you'll be able to fill up your screen with unscaled StarCraft goodness. Just don't go on Battle.net with the hack enabled, 'cuz that's an easy way to get banned.

FPS @ 1024x600: 19-26
FPS @ 1024x600 w/ FRAPS recording: ?

My specs:
Intel Atom N2600 @ 1.6 GHz (dual HyperThreaded cores)
2 GB DDR3/1600 CL9 RAM underclocked by CPU to DDR3/800 CL5
Intel GMA 3600 @ 400 MHz (based on PowerVR SGX545)
250 GB 5400 RPM HDD
Windows 7 Starter 32-bit

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