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This topic has moved here: Subject: Halo: Combat Evolved in widescreen on Xbox 360
  • Subject: Halo: Combat Evolved in widescreen on Xbox 360
Subject: Halo: Combat Evolved in widescreen on Xbox 360

Tick Tick Tick Boom!

Okay so it's been ages since I've played Halo: CE but I've been re-reading the Halo novels and started getting an itch to go back and play. So I started it up on my 360 and it doesn't display in widescreen. My 360 is set at 720p. Halo 2 comes right up without a problem in widescreen. If I switch to 480p widescreen then Halo: CE displays in widescreen. I've been reading on the Bungie site that both Halo's are supposed to be in 720p widescreen. Any clue as to what I might be doing wrong, or what I might need to do differently to get in displaying in 720p widescreen?

  • 09.18.2006 10:22 AM PDT

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i have no idea

  • 09.18.2006 10:17 PM PDT
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Perhaps, depending on when you got your 360, a download is required for the emulator. If you're not connected to the internet that could be a reason.

  • 09.19.2006 5:30 AM PDT

Tick Tick Tick Boom!

I thought that might be it so I connected to Xbox Live and I did get an update, but it still won't display in widescreen when I have my 360 set to 720p. When I switch it to 480p it goes widescreen and fills my entire HDTV but doesn't look as nice as the picture in 720p. Any other thoughts?

  • 09.20.2006 4:40 AM PDT
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Are you getting black bars down the left and right side when viewing in 720p then?

  • 09.20.2006 5:31 AM PDT

Tick Tick Tick Boom!

Yep...black bars down the left and right sides in 720p. It displays in 4:3 mode in 720p and hence the black bars, but in 480p it displays in 16:9 and so no black bars.

Has anyone else been able to play it in 720p and have it display in 16:9?

  • 09.20.2006 11:22 AM PDT

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Halo CE does the same for me. To get it to fill up the whole screen, simply change your picture. I have a Sony HDTV and here's what I do, Menu button, Screen section, change the picture to Wide Zoom. Try something similar to that.

  • 09.20.2006 6:13 PM PDT
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Posted by: Detonator05
Yep...black bars down the left and right sides in 720p. It displays in 4:3 mode in 720p and hence the black bars, but in 480p it displays in 16:9 and so no black bars.

Has anyone else been able to play it in 720p and have it display in 16:9?


That's odd. 720p is supposed to be 16:9 natively - you don't even get the option to set it to 4:3 in the 360 menu. I have no idea what the problem is. But like the other guy says, try changing the aspect on your TV for now until you get to the bottom of it.

  • 09.21.2006 3:45 AM PDT

Tick Tick Tick Boom!

Yes...I can change the aspect on my TV but that really isn't what I should be doing. To hopefully clear up the confusion as to why I'm expecting it to run in widescreen at 720p. Here is the quote from the Bungie article:

But here's another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing.

You can read the entire article here:

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=h2anniversary& amp;p=5312619

So like I said...Halo 2 will display in widescreen at 720p for me but Halo will only display in widescreen at 480p for me. So I'm wondering if 1) Bungie was wrong in this article or 2) if I need to do something differently to get it to truly display in widescreen at 720p?

[Edited on 9/21/2006]

  • 09.21.2006 5:53 AM PDT
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Halo CE never had widescreen support originally. As I understand it, originally it was planned to display Halo CE widescreen when run on the Xbox 360, but they had to remove that because of image problems (ghosting).

As with any other Xbox game on the 360 that displays vertical black bars, you can get rid of them by switching your Xbox 360 to 480p. Most televisions will then automatically stretch the picture to fill the full screen.

  • 09.24.2006 7:03 AM PDT