Acer's ATI control panel & aspect ratio

I've recently gone back to Vista on my TravelMate 7720 (been running XP so far) and was happily surprised by the performance but sorely let down by the fact that Acer's crippled version of ATI's Catalyst Control Center doesn't allow me to set fixed aspect ratio scaling on the display panel.
Playing games with distorted resolutions really suck, so I need to find a way to enable fixed aspect ratio scaling (meaning the image of most 4:3 games will be pillarboxed but at least look good).

This option is of course not available in the XP version of Acer's CCC, but under XP you can download the official CCC and install it on top of Acer's CCC and get the full CCC interface which has the required option available under Notebook Panel options.

However, under Vista ATI's Install Manager will not allow me to install CCC on top of Acer's version, which means I can't get to the options, the only thing I can do in Acer's crippled CCC is change resolution but not scaling methods.

If anyone has successfully installed the full official CCC under Vista on an Acer notebook with ATI graphics card, or know of a way to fix this in the registry, please advise.

 

why don´t you uninstall the CCC that came from acer ?

after that you can install the CatalystControlCenter without any problems.

 

I think there is some restriction on the acer to stop it from allowing the normal CCC from what he says.

Try Omega drivers, they are also quite often better than the ATI ones anyway

http://omegadrivers.net/ati.php

 

don´t think so !
he just said he installed the "normal" CCC when the acer modified CCC was still installed. Maybe XP let´s you do this, but Vista definitly won´t like it.

Anyway installing a software over a an existing installation is never a good idea. You should always uninstall the old software before. Might happen that you have sometimes luck and it works, but you will corrupt your registry with this kind of procedure.

And thats the reason why it won´t work with vista. It just does not like such an installation behaviour.

 

OK let me clarify this a bit:

I've tried installing ATI's CCC both after uninstalling the crippled CCC that Acer provides, and over Acer's version while still installed. On XP ATI's Install Manager would simply let me upgrade the CCC "in place" or install it "clean". In Vista neither method works. ATI's Install Manager for the CCC package will update the Install Manager itself but won't even offer to install CCC. Reinstalling the Acer branded CCC did give me more shortcuts in the Start menu including "CCC - advanced" but clicking it will not start anything.

Manually trying to start the advanced control panel does not work, "ccc start dashboard" which is the way to start the full control panel, will not work with the Acer branded CCC, it will only give me Guide mode with only one option, that of controlling screen resolution (not scaling) and external screens (which I don't have ATM).

So to sum this up:
On XP, installing ATI's CCC will give you the full control panel (Dashboard) no matter if you're installing it clean alongside Acer's driver or on top of Acer's branded CCC (it will simply upgrade the CCC and leave the driver untouched).

On Vista, you can't install ATI's CCC no matter what, and Acer's crippled CCC won't work with the Dashboard command even though I can clearly see the entire CCC is installed (150 MB, can't be just that pathetically crippled Guide mode).

The Omega drivers don't exist for Vista and it's using AtiToolTray which doesn't support the aspect ratio options (yet) so it's useless in this case (even though I'm sure the drivers are better optimized, without a control panel to fix the aspect ratio problems with 4:3 resolutions, I'm still at square one).

Perhaps someone using the full CCC can monitor it with ProcessMonitor, tick the "maintain aspect ratio" option and let me know which registry key it changes (and to what value)?

 

have you actually used drivers and CCC that were modified with the dh modtool.
if you just download newest catalyst and try to install it it won´t work.

tried modding the driver and installation routine for CCC with dh modtool ?

 

Haven't tried the Modtool under Vista, no. I seem to recall I had some problems with the modded packages under XP though (where the official CCC worked just fine with Acer's drivers, so the Modtool wasn't stricly required there).

I'll try it out and let you know what happens. Thanks for the suggestion.


EDIT: Now I remember why I ditched the modded drivers (and went with WinXP), Vista would not accept the OpenGL drivers from the modded package, so OpenGL apps would not work (Google Earth, amongst others, would complain that there were no OpenGL drivers present on the system even though there was, but Vista would not load them). I hope I will get the option to install only the CCC from the modded package, to avoid OpenGL problems.

 

Actually, for just getting the full control panel, only the official CCC package (NOT the full Catalyst package, just the CCC) is needed under XP. It will install alongside any OEM driver just fine. No modtool needed (and it doesn't affect the CCC package anyway, only the drivers). But under Vista the official CCC panel won't install alongside an OEM driver, it would seem.

Anyway, after a lot of hassle I finally managed to clear every bit of the Acer drivers/CCC off my system and reinstall with a modded driver package. This time around it worked fine, with OpenGL working (granted I only tested Google Earth) and the full CCC available with Notebook panel options (which means I can now scale 4:3 with maintained aspect ratio, yay!).

Thanks for the pointers, they worked great (this time, mind you, last time I tried the modded drivers they were less than satisfactory due to lacking OpenGL support).