Wild DC Patch appears!

They said it would never happen, but two new Dreamcast patches are out.

The first patch allows you to see GameCube player names in white, so you can easily tell who's playing PSO GC. Note that offline NPC names also become white, presumably because Ver.2 thinks that GC players are NPCs.

The second patch allows you to play in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen, assuming you can set your HDTV to force the Dreamcast's video signal to display as 16:9. This patch is available for my original PSOv1 US release, as well as my current PSOv2 releases. Keep in mind that while the patch corrects the FOV, the 2D elements, such as the HUD and menus, remain stretched. Thanks go out to megavolt85 and Esppiral for finding the values that needed changing to adjust the game's FOV.

Interesting. I have never minded playing games in 4:3 which are native 4:3. Just as watching movies in letterbox didn't bother me on my old CRT. I prefer to see something the way it was originally formatted.

That being said, I'll probably at least give this a download to check it out. Any weird hickups that happens with shadows or other assets besides the menus/HUD?

Your soul on the burst screen can no longer touch the edges of the screen when you move it around. It seems to me like the camera might be zoomed out slightly, because this patch gives a lot more content on the left and right than the 16:9 patch for PSO GC does. On the other hand, it might have to do with the default camera position being different between versions.

I haven't spent enough time with the patch to notice any other problems, as I also prefer to play the game at its intended aspect ratio, so I don't use widescreen hacks.