SDTV style HUD?

[nate1232]

So I'm playing FF12 recently, and while it looks great, the HUD is really starting to bug me. It's like this is you play it on an actual PS2 on an HDTV, where the HUD and all the text is absolutely massive. Running on an emulator is the same, and with the character names, HP/MP bars, attack menu and the mini-map you can barely see anything on the screen.

Is there any way to sort of scale it down, emulate how it looks on an older non HD tv? I've tried setting the emulator to run at 4:3 and 16:9 while switching between the same settings in-game but it doesn't do the trick.

[Blyss Sarania]

Try enabling widescreen patches? The in game widescreen is not as good as the patch version.

[nate1232]

I've looked around and can only find one in NTSC-J which won't work (will it?) seeing as I have a NA version of the game as well as PS2. I've also been hearing something about how enemies won't appear until you get close using a widescreen patch in this game - I've been having it happening just with the normal widescreen settings. Anybody know a way around this?

[Devina]

I have a widescreen archive and there's a NA patch in it.

The game has poor draw distance - it's just part of the game itself, and aspect ratio should have no effect on draw distance.

Also, it doesn't look THAT bad.

http://jcwigriff.com/wp-content/uploads/...2chain.jpg

[nate1232]

I'll take a look for it, I'm not sure which thread I was under but the one and only one I did see was under NTSC-J.

You're right, it doesn't look terrible but it does cover twice the space it should The character HP/MP info is almost just in the bottom right corner rather than taking up almost the entire bottom of the screen. I only know this because I'm playing this on an emulator while my roommate plays it on my ps2 on my old tv!

[Blyss Sarania]

The WS patch is included in the main PCSX2 download, as long as you are using 1.2.1 or later. All you gotta do is System->Enable Widescreen patches.

[nate1232]

Oh you're kidding! That makes things so much easier. Does it actually do anything substantial? I enabled it and re-loaded the game and it looks pretty much the same-ish, but I'm not 100% sure without comparing a direct before and after screenshot

[willkuer]

I think there is no ws patch for FFXII or? Since it has this function in-build it is not needed (HUD is correctly transformed to 16:9).
I never had problems with the opacity of the HUD. Have you played with shade boost in gsdx plugin settings? Maybe that will help.

[Blyss Sarania]

I think there is a patch for FFXII because the WS patch guys were not happy with the way widescreen was done with the in game setting. I remember seeing some screenshots in the WS patches thread, but I don't know exactly where. Anyway, I believe the built in WS is vert- instead of hor+, what that means is instead of expanding the view horizontally, it shrinks it vertically to make 16:9. Not optimal.