Halo: Combat Evolved Forum
This topic has moved here: Subject: Widescreen 720p Halo on the 360?
  • Subject: Widescreen 720p Halo on the 360?
Subject: Widescreen 720p Halo on the 360?
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I don't even know if anyone at Bungie still reads this forum but some clarification would be nice.

Picked up the Xbox version Halo: Combat Evolved again recently as I plan to play through the games again before Halo 3. I remember reading on the Bungie.net site about both Halo and Halo 2 being updated for 720p & widescreen for the 360.

No matter what resolution and widescreen setting I choose, Halo will not run in true widescreen, it's always pillarboxed (black bars on the side). Now it's not that big of a deal to me, because the game was originally 4:3 and not 16:9, and the biggest problem here is that the cinematics/cut scenes end up being "postage stamped" or windowed, as they are still widescreen in the engine. Since the game is displayed pillarboxed 4:3 they don't fill a widescreen display properly.

The actual announcement of these 360 specific updates is very misleading.
Here's an archive.org link since the actual page (http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=h2anniversary &p=5312619) no longer works:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070203025211/http://www.bungie.n et/News/TopStory.aspx?story=h2anniversary&p=5312619

You'll notice it specifically says Halo and Halo2 in wide screen & 720p, and the last screenshot shows Halo in widescreen- though it just looks stretched. If you compare it to a normal screenshot the pistol & hand models look squashed.

So, what happened? Was it working in widescreen at one point then scrapped later for some reason? Or was it just stretched and dropped since it looked wrong / bad? Or did it never work and is that info false? Or........?

I can't find any official word from Bungie about this, and searching the forums* has turned nothing at all. Again, I don't really care that it's restricted to 4:3 since that's the way the game was and it makes sense that you couldn't hack in widescreen years later, but I'd really appreciate it if someone would clear this up for us.



*You guys really need a forum specific search feature :<

[Edited on 07.28.2007 10:42 AM PDT]

  • 07.28.2007 10:33 AM PDT
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we used to play halo on widescreen at my friends house a few years ago, and it was really jagged and crappy in widescreen. Im assuming it can be done on a 360 since we did it on an xbox. I know that component cords wont let you do it, so use the normal cords instead and set the tv settings to widescreen.

  • 07.28.2007 10:55 AM PDT
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I don't want to be mean, but you basically missed the whole point of my post. Halo on the original Xbox does not support widescreen, but Halo 2 does.
Obviously his TV was stretching the nomal picture to fill his widescreen display or something like that, probably why it looked crappy.

Anyway, that is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about Bungie saying the actual game supports 720p widescreen on the 360, which it clearly does not.

  • 07.28.2007 11:45 AM PDT

I like Call of Duty and Gears of War, AND Halo. Why must everyone else like only one or the other?

Well, I remember reading in another thread a while back that the only way to get a game to fill the entire screen of a widscreen tv that doesn't support widscreen like Halo was to go to the settings and select 480p normal. (Not widscreen) Only then would it fill the whole TV but then not only does it look grainy because of it being a 480p signal on a HDTV it then is stretched looking. He then said that the 360 used to automatically stretch non-widscreen games to fill the whole screen while still being set to an HD setting like 720p but one of the updates stopped that. Don't know why though.

  • 07.28.2007 2:43 PM PDT
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Posted by: pyide
I don't want to be mean, but you basically missed the whole point of my post. Halo on the original Xbox does not support widescreen, but Halo 2 does.
Obviously his TV was stretching the nomal picture to fill his widescreen display or something like that, probably why it looked crappy.

Anyway, that is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about Bungie saying the actual game supports 720p widescreen on the 360, which it clearly does not.


Well, bungie are pretty good at deception i guess. They basically tricked everyone into thinking halo 2 would be good, so they may as well trick people into thinking halo can be played in hd. Seriously though, who cares if its in hd or not? It looks fine in letterbox and graphics dont mean much anyway.

  • 07.28.2007 3:41 PM PDT