Changing the Pocket PC screen resolution
By Radu Motisan Posted on September 11th, 2008 , 615 Views (Rate 0.27)
While there are quite many nice alternatives for doing this and I would mention the RealVGA or the excellent OzVGA , here is another article discussing this subject. The reason for this is that it's always good to know a little insight about the things we use.
To change the Pocket PC screen resolution, you only need a registry editor. If you are comfortable using little tools to do that it's ok, but if you don't have those around, or want to do it yourself with "bare hands", there is an easy solution for this.
For my tests I've used an HTC Universal. Here is the original look of my today screen:
Those of you familiar with screen resolution changes, might know that this is the 192x192 "Logical resolution" or for my device, 640x480 pixels in landscape mode.
To change it, you need to open your registry editor and modify the keys
LogicalPixelsX and
LogicalPixelsY located under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\Display\GPE\You can modify the default values to whatever suits you best. That's right you can enter a wide range of values. After the new values are entered, you need to soft reset the device.
On my device, entering 384 for both LogicalPixelsX and LogicalPixelsY, equals a resolution of 320x240 in landscape mode. Here is a screenshot with my registry editor, and then with the pocket pc new resolution:
I've also tried to make the pixel resolution bigger. Putting 48 for both LogicalPixelsX and LogicalPixelsY, resulted in a lot of screen space, and tiny font / images
48 logical resolution, means 2560 * 1920. Wow, not even my desktop computer has such a huge resolution.
How to calculate this?
It's easy. The original "logical resolution" was 192x192, that is 640x480 pixels.
384x384, is double the original one (192x192), but everything gets bigger. So the actual screen resolution, gets half of 640x480. That would be 640/2=320 x 480/2=240 where 2 = 384/192.
For 48x48, we can follow the same idea.
48 / 192 = 1/4 .
640 / 1/4 = 640 * 4 = 2560 .
480 / 1/4 = 480 * 4 = 1920.
You don't need to enter equal values for LogicalPixelsX and LogicalPixelsY. If these values are not equal, the normal proportion between horizontal and vertical axis will change.
Here's a last sample with 512 for LogicalPixelsX and 128 for LogicalPixelsY. The screen resolution on landscape is 640 / (512 / 192) = 240 , 480 / (128/192) = 720.
Remember to reset your device after changing the registry keys. It might be a good idea to power off the device by pressing the power button before pressing the reset, so the registry would be flushed (saved to storage). Be careful not to press Power button together with reset, as on some devices this can do a hard reset (first press power off, THEN release it, THEN do a reset).