A small widescreen hack for Metal Gear Solid in The Master Collection Vol. 1 that received minimal attention.

While we can be happy that Metal Gear Solid is officially available on PC, there was an official PC version around 2000. And nowadays, it would be pretty easy to pick up the original PS1 version of the game, as emulation doesn’t require a lot of resources. If we don’t want to go that route, and maybe want to improve the look of the game, we’d have to put a lot of mods on the official collector’s version.

With MGSResolution, you can also use 4K resolution, and it came out hours after the collection was released! But the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Fix went even further: custom resolutions, analog input, mod support, and with version 2.0 you can play Metal Gear Solid in 16:9 (although it’s a bit tricky as they don’t just stretch Snake out because it would look ugly). You can increase the internal rendering resolution, which gives you a clean, high-resolution look from the PS1-era pixels. And you can fine-tune the widescreen hack. This is done by specifying the number of pixels for the height (1080 in 1920×1080) in the MGSM2Fix.ini file, and the width is set by the in-game display options, so you can easily go from a 4:3 aspect ratio to widescreen while the game runs smoothly.

The gif below shows a comparison. The interface stretches quite a bit, but the game itself doesn’t seem to be affected too much… although Snake’s shoulders are a bit wider, but he still doesn’t look too chubby. Oh, and according to the mod’s creator Nuggslet, we can not only increase the internal rendering resolution, but we CAN DECREASE it if the Bitcrush visuals (everything is pretty pixelated) are to your liking, and he says it took a lot of work to get this far with the mod.

You can download the mod from the second link below, and there you can read about PC installation and how to activate it on Steam Deck.

Source: PCGamer, Github