Half-Life Tips

These Steam games

  * Half-Life
  * Half-Life: Opposing Force
  * Half-Life: Blue Shift

are are limited to 640x480 when the desktop spans more than one monitor.  In the "Options -> Video dialog", the "Resolution" pulldown in menu in all three games will be empty when this glitch manifests.

Forcing a resolution with a command line switch (like "-w 1024 -gl") usually results in a system crash.  Setting a virtual desktop size through the Wine Configuration panel is also ineffective.

The kludge for this is:

1.  Use the `nvidia-settings` program to set all secondary displays to "Off".  (You can do this without saving to the xorg.conf file.)
2.  Start the game and click "Options -> Video".
3.  Enable the "Run in a window" checkbox.
4.  Click the "Apply" button and wait for the game to restart.
5.  Go back to "Options -> Video".
6.  The "Resolution" pulldown menu should now be populated.  Choose a resolution.
7.  Click the "Apply" button and wait for the game to restart again.
8.  Go back to "Options -> Video".
9.  Disable the "Run in a window" checkbox.
10. Click "Apply".

The game should now run fullscreen.

-D. Horn